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Review of Thomas Grossbölting, Der verlorene Himmel. Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Thomas Grossbölting, Der verlorene Himmel. Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), Pp. 320.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This review appeared originally (in German) in Der Taggespiegel (1 July 2013). Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation. The original can be found here: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/land-ohne-himmel/8426976.html

What do Germans today still believe in and how? Can we still talk of this being a “Christian country”?

GrossboeltingVerlorene Thomas Grossbölting, who teaches at the University of Münster, poses these questions and puts them in the context of faith, church and religion after the catastrophe of National Socialism in Germany. This well researched study can be seen as the first up-to-date history of religion in the Federal Republic of Germany. His basic thesis is clear and hardly surprising. Anyone examining how and what Germans have believed in the past fifty years has to take note of a striking decline in the significance of religious consciousness. Although, in recent years, some observers have claimed that there has been a so-called religious revival, in fact anyone taking a longer view over the past five or six decades must conclude that a far-reaching secularization has taken place. The very idea of Heaven has been lost. As the author crucially points out in his introduction: “A Christian Germany no longer exists”. On the other hand, the elements of faith, church and religion have not disappeared from daily life in Germany. Rather they have been thinned out, pushed to the edge of society, and in many people’s lives they are completely or largely absent.

Grossbölting describes this transformation in religious life as taking place in three stages, to each of which he devotes an appropriate chapter. Firstly, there were the immediate post-war years, the so-called Adenauer era, when the old established Christian world still seemed to be at least partially in order, but which now looks really archaic. There followed the Swinging Sixties when the younger generation with their Beatles, their mini-skirts, their love of Karl Marx, and their rebellious behaviour in 1968, constituted a revolutionary change in life-styles. This was a turbulent period which saw a striking abandonment of religious customs and traditions. Finally, in the most recent decades, we have seen a further lessening of the ecclesiastical structures in both the major churches which used to possess a religious monopoly. Today the country is increasingly taking on the character of a multi-religious society. Amongst the most notable features in the religious statistics of this latest phase are the unstoppable growth of “non-confessionalists’, as well as the increase in the portion of the population which adheres to Islam, and the numerous colourful but often short-lived new religious movements. “From Church to Choice” may be an appropriate slogan for these dramatic changes, whereby individuals move from inherited church-going patterns to personal choices of faith and denomination.

The reader will surely be able to evaluate the main lines of this well-researched and convincingly argued study. But the author’s Catholic perspective should not be forgotten, which leads him to overlook certain scandalous aspects in the Catholic milieu. It is hardly justifiable that such a notable critic as Rolf Hochhuth, whose drama “The Deputy” aroused such a stir in the 1960s, should be ignored. And in fact this study concentrates primarily on West Germany, so that the religious developments in East Germany are cursorily treated at the end of the volume. Furthermore, the author’s treatment of the long shadow of National Socialism and the churches’ problematic responses during the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945 is too abridged. This experience was a fateful epoch whose repercussions in the post-war world were, and to some extent still are, a dire legacy. But, at the same time, this attempt to give us a religious history of Germany since 1945 can be seen as a successful and well-informed survey.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

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

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of the Internet website “Evangelischer Widerstand”

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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

EvangelischerWiderstand01 The 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.

This 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.

EvangelischerWiderstand06 In 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.

A 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.

EvangelischerWiderstand03 Because 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.

Crosses and Swastikas

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Crosses and Swastikas

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

The following article was written to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power. It was published in Der Tagesspiegel on February 2, 2013. The original can be viewed at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/kreuze-und-hakenkreuze/7722926.html. Translation from German by John S. Conway.

Nazi flags on the altars, Nazi songs in the pews, Nazi greetings at the church doors—this was the scene in “German Christian” churches in 1933. Eighty years later, the Church is still shying away from facing up to this fateful and heretical perversion.

Many churchmen were only too glad to see a “national Saviour” rise to power. They encouraged and applauded this belief, wherever it might lead. This was not just a handful of misguided bigots, but churchmen of all shades, men of faith and pillars of the Church.

One of them was Pastor Bruno Marquardt, pastor in the Friedenau parish of Berlin. For him, 1933 was the “year of greatness” when Adolf Hitler came to power and changed the country into a dictatorship. For him, it was a year when Germany regained its lost heroic qualities. Instead of being discriminated against as a downtrodden nation, Germany was once again able to hold its head high. “The proud heroism of these men—from the Führer to the least SA-man—who have campaigned for the soul of the people during the years of degradation and shame, who have committed every ounce of their life and blood for a new Germany, this proud heroism has finally won in the ‘victory for faith.’” Despite all the malignancy and devilry of the years before 1933, so the Pastor thought, “this new national revival has shown that the German soul has not been broken, but is now embarking on a new intensification of faith.”

Many other pastors thought the same during the exciting events during this “turning point of history.” And so naturally did a great many of their parishioners. In Berlin, the nation’s capital, the Protestant churches were overwhelmed by a newly established movement, calling itself “The Faith Movement of German Christians.” For instance, four days after Hitler came to power, a special service of celebration and thanksgiving was held in the packed church of St Mary, one of Berlin’s most historic sanctuaries in the city centre. Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder of Christ Church, Kreuzberg, the leader of these “German Christians,” preached on 1 Corinthians 15: 57: “Thanks be to God, who has given us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He praised President Hindenburg for choosing the best possible person to lead the country and its new government. Hossenfelder even went so far as to characterize the new Chancellor, who was by birth a Roman Catholic, as “one of a kind, forged from purity, piety, energy and strength of character—our Adolf Hitler.”

Only a few days later, on 5 February, the “German Christians” were given permission to hold a funeral service in the Berlin Cathedral. This was to say farewell to a murdered SA-leader Hans-Eberhard Maikowski, one of the notorious gang of SA rowdies in the Berlin back streets. Together with a policeman, he had been shot during a SA demonstration on 30 January in Charlottenburg. For this funeral requiem not only did Adolf Hitler himself appear, but also Marshal Hermann Goering, numerous SA and SS leaders, as well as the Crown Prince of the exiled Hohenzollern family, and many German Christian pastors in full ceremonial vestments. Once again Pastor Hossenfelder preached. He spoke of the “great grey army” in the beyond who were, ”maintaining a watchful guard in heaven.” Standing by the coffin placed in front of the altar, he proclaimed: “You were one of the best. Your coffin is draped with the swastika flag, and in the first row sits our supreme leader, Adolf Hitler. So to say goodbye, we sing the beloved old military song: ‘When the seed is so fine, then the harvest will be abundant and golden.’”

In the course of the year 1933, hardly any of Berlin’s Protestant churches remained free from such Memorial, Thanksgiving or Jubilee celebrations. There were indeed plenty of opportunities. In March, Remembrance Services were held for the fallen, in April the Führer’s birthday was celebrated, on 2 July, special Thanksgiving services were organized for the “National Revival,” in October Harvest Festivals were turned into celebrations of “Blood and Earth,” and in November the same themes were noted to mark Martin Luther’s 450th birthday. The spill-over from such ceremonies was all too frequently reflected in the Sunday worship services.

In the short week between the Nazi-organized boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April and the passage of the new law banning Jews from the civil service on 7 April, the “German Christians” held their first national assembly in the Prussian House of Lords. Pastor Siegfried Nobiling of Friedenau gave the key-note address on the topic of “Church Leadership,” and pleaded for the creation of a new generation of theologians who would be fully committed to the values of “family, clan, race and nation.” Anyone who did not recognize these categories as God’s holy creation should not be admitted to the ordained clergy ranks. No “Jew or part-Jew” should be allowed to hold the honorable office of pastor or leader in the congregation. Pastor Karl Themel of the Luisenstadt Parish called for the “annihilation of the atheist movement.” All Christians should welcome the clean-up measures taken by the state. And he saw the “German Christian” parishes as “healthy cells in the sick body of the German people.”

These sentiments were to be long-lasting. Even though the “German Christian Movement” fell apart into separate rival factions after 1936-7 and disappeared almost without trace after 1945, yet the Berlin Churches in the post-war world, despite all the damage they had suffered, and the years they had been caught up in a Cold War situation, still now decades later have shown little willingness to come to terms with this Nazi legacy.

It was only very late, namely in the era when Wolfgang Huber was Bishop, that the process of re-examining the past begin. But even now, in most recent times, one frequently meets the sentiment in church circles: “Enough is enough!” So, for example, the now richly established Theological Faculty at the Humboldt University in the twenty years since the overthrow of the Communist regime has done almost nothing to deal with the record of the Berlin churches’ Nazi past, or with its own appalling theologies of that era. It is also notable that the Berlin Protestant Academy, one of the notable public affairs institutions, does not include any such topic as the performance of Berlin churches during the Nazi period in its 2013 programme. One would think that 80 years after 1933 would be a highly suitable time to take stock, and particularly to ask: how could the Christian churches have been so blind, or allowed such blatant Nazi propaganda to be proclaimed from their pulpits?

In 1933 the churches were often fuller than ever before. The services often became spectacular ceremonies. For example, on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April, one local Nazi Party group and two SA formations marched to the Stephen Church in the Wedding district. Pastor Walter Aner preached on 1 John 5:4: “His is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” At the end of the service, many of the congregation were deeply stirred when prayers of remembrance were made for those who “following in the ranks of the Führer had died for the rebirth of our nation and people,” while in the background the organ quietly played Nazi “hymns.” In this parish no fewer than 17 of the Church Elders, all four pastors, and most of the church officials, the parish nurses and care-givers, all joined the “German Christian Movement.”

The question has to be asked: was this astonishing perversion shared by all Protestants in 1933? The answer is: not all, but very many. On 23 July, new elections were decreed for the representative church bodies which had been dissolved by command of the fanatical Nazi Commissar August Jäger. Only two lists of candidates were put up, one for the “German Christians” and one for the “Gospel and Church” party. This latter group was made up of the various rather weak and dubious opposition elements. In Berlin it was particularly notable that a large number of parishes (43%) adopted a unity list, whereby the “German Christians” were assured of between 75 and 100% of the available places. The result was that about half of the parishes were taken by storm by the “German Christians” without any struggle at all. In those 75 parishes where elections were held, the “German Christians” achieved on average two thirds of the votes. This electoral triumph was due to the fact that many of the pastors and church members clearly supported such a result, and because the opposing forces were appallingly weak.

At the beginning of September, as a result of these elections, a new Synod for the Prussian Church was convened, usually called the “brown synod” because of the dominance of Nazi Party members. Because of their two-thirds majority, the “German Christians” enacted their desired plan to exclude “non-Aryan Christians” from holding clerical offices.

It was only at this point that the church opposition which had been so lacking in foresight became alarmed. A few days later a core group led by Pastor Martin Niemöller, Gerhard Jacobi and Martin Albertz founded the Pastors Emergency League to mobilize support for those pastors who wanted to unite in opposition against the perverted plans of the “German Christians.”

A few months later, the “German Christians” planned to hold a giant rally in the Berlin Sports Palace. It was to include a mass march which would be both a demonstration of their strength and a victory parade. On the evening of 13 November, the Sports Palace was filled to the roof with over 20,000 participants. A large number of prominent “German Christian” pastors from all over Berlin took their places on the platform. The main speaker was Reinhold Krause, who called on the Church to undertake the “completion of the German Reformation in the Third Reich.” In this new “German Church” the same rules for life should apply as in the new state, namely “heroic piety” and “nationally-appropriate Christianity.” Most important of all was to get rid of all un-German aspects in the worship services, such as the use of the Old Testament with its “Jewish morality.” So too St Paul’s deplorable theology of scapegoats and inferiority complexes must be removed. What was needed was to preach a manly picture of Jesus which would be in line with the concepts of National Socialism. When he had finished the speaker received numerous rounds of applause from the thrilled audience. But at the same time this speech aroused considerable irritation among some of the “German Christians,” and even some resignations, which could only be of help to swell the ranks of the still incipient church opposition.

By the end of 1933 the “German Christians” had conquered a significant portion of the Berlin churches, but not all. Indeed there soon developed a fierce competition between the opposing factions which led to Berlin’s churches being caught in a deadly fight for supremacy. This “Church Struggle” was to continue to dominate the church scene for years. At first the Berlin “German Christian” pastors were in the majority, since more than 40% of the parish pastors belonged in this group (at least temporarily). A good 20% of all Berlin pastors joined the Nazi Party. It would have been more except that the Party refused to take any more applications from clergy in order to prevent denominational divisions within its ranks.

In those parishes where the “German Christians” held sway, new forms of liturgies soon appeared. First, the service began with a parade of Nazi flags entering the church, followed by the dedication of these flags on the altar, and the singing of the Nazis’ anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. In their sermons, these “German Christian” pastors painted a picture of the “heroic figure of Jesus” as a model for today’s Christians. Anything Jewish or seemingly Jewish had to be eliminated from the church or the worship services. Hence the words “Zion” or “Hosanna” were to be cut out and not again heard in German churches. Parish educational activities were expressly encouraged to organize indoctrination sessions at which these new ideas for a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity could be propagated. Such special topics as “Luther and the Jews,” “The Struggle for the German Soul” or “Christianity and the Nordic Faith” were widely promoted. So too portraits of Hitler or other Nazi symbols were given prominent places in the church rooms, and the Hitler greeting was appended to all correspondence without fail.

If one looks at the total record of the Protestant Church in Berlin, or indeed for the whole of Germany, during the Nazi era, one has to paint a very dark picture. Of course there were a few bright spots. The Berlin parish of Dahlem where Martin Niemöller officiated was one of them; or one could mention the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was unable to find any parish in Berlin to serve; or there was the formidable Superintendent in Spandau, Martin Albertz, whose remarkably consistent Christian witness needs to be remembered; or the still largely unrecognized historian Elisabeth Schmitz who wrote a very courageous memorandum against the persecution of the Jews in 1935-6; and surely there were many other individuals of like mind.

The Nazi era left a legacy which will not go away, and which the Church today still has to reckon with. Even now, 80 years later, much remains to be done on this historical building project.

Review of Hildegard Frisius et al., eds., Evangelisch getauft – als Juden verfolgt. Spurensuche Berliner Kirchengemeinden

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Hildegard Frisius, Marianne Kälberer, Wolfgang G. Krogel, Gerlind Lachenicht, Frauke Lemmel, eds., Evangelisch getauft – als Juden verfolgt. Spurensuche Berliner Kirchengemeinden (Berlin: Wichern–Verlag, 2008), 452 Pp.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

On November 20th 2002, a day of Prayer and Repentance, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, who was the Chairman of the Council of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) from 2003 to 2009, held a remarkably self-critical sermon in St. Paul’s Church, Berlin-Zehlendorf, commemorating the fate of the non-aryan Christians during Third Reich. Rarely if ever had a leading representative of Germany’s Protestant churches spoken out so clearly about what happened to the Christians of Jewish origin, or confessed the guilt of the churches and their fellow Christians. After this sermon, various groups in some 16 Berlin parishes started investigations to discover the identities of these former “baptized Jews”, and formed a “working group” to discuss research problems and present their findings. Altogether, after a long-lasting and pain-staking research process, they identified some 300 former “non-aryan Christians” from their own Berlin parishes i.e. persons, who had been deported to the East during the Second World War. Only eight of them survived.

This book describes how this research was undertaken, for instance the hard work of looking through thousands of pages of dusty old “Taufbücher” (baptism registers), and the results of this laudable research initiative from below. It is not an academic or scientific book in the strict sense. However, the initiative in itself and many of the results are more than respectable. Some of the researchers were able to reconstruct biographies about “non-aryan Christians” at full length – biographies that were often completely unknown and forgotten up to the present day. In some parishes, the identification of their deported former fellow Christians was the first step to the installation of commemorative plaques in the entrance halls of churches, or for the installation of the so called “Stolpersteine” (small metallic plaques in the pavement with biographical data) in front of their houses. In a lengthy article, Wolfgang G. Krogel repeats the earlier findings about the “Sippenforschungen” of the Berlin Nazi parson Karl Themel (“Kirchenbuchstelle Alt-Berlin – ein Hilfsorgan des NS-Staates”, pp. 297-361). The book also contains a list of 35 deported women and 53 deported men belonging to Protestant parishes in Berlin, as derived from the “Fremdstämmigen-Kartei” (Aliens’ Card-Index) produced by Themel in his “Kirchenbuchstelle Alt-Berlin” (pp. 366-373). In it, the information under the rubric “date and place of deportation” reads like this: Theresienstadt, Riga, Minsk, suicide Berlin, Auschwitz, Treblinka. Finally, the book reprints three outstanding documents: parts of the famous and courageous sermon by Helmut Gollwitzer, given on the day of Prayer and Repentance on November 16th 1938 in Berlin-Dahlem; the sermon of Johannes Hildebrandt in commemoration of the November 1938 pogrom, given at the Sophiengemeinde (then in East Berlin) in 1978; and, as already mentioned, the 2002 sermon by Wolfgang Huber in Berlin-Zehlendorf.

To sum up, this is a remarkable book, which grew out of an initiative of engaged Berlin Protestants who are more or less hobby or half-professional historians, in order to give remembrance to their former non-aryan fellow Christians. However, the book is not yet the professional scholarly study on this issue that is so badly needed for the whole Berlin area. One has to remember the fact that Berlin housed not only the largest Jewish community in Germany during the 1930s, but was also the home of some 20-30 000 baptized Jews belonging to the Protestant churches, which to a large extent were governed at that time by the strongly antisemitic German Christians who betrayed and expelled their non-aryan fellow Christians. So, much more remains to be done, to bring to the present day and age this awful story so full of guilt and shame.

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, February 19, 2012

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

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, February 19, 2012.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität, Berlin

Seventy-five years ago, in February 1937, Freidrich Weissler died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a result of mistreatment by the prison guards. He is widely regarded as the first Confessing Church member to be murdered as a victim of the Nazi persecution of the churches. Recently, at a commemorative ceremony held in the camp, Professor Manfred Gailus of Berlin’s Technical University honoured him with a fine tribute, which is here translated in abbreviated form by John S. Conway.

Friedrich Weissler came of a Jewish family, but, as a child, was baptized into the Protestant Church. He completed his studies in law just before the outbreak of war in 1914, when he served his country loyally and with true German patriotism. In the 1920s he resumed his legal career and by 1932 had been appointed a judge in Magdeburg. However, the rise of the National Socialists to power rapidly brought his career to an end. Already in April 1933 he was one of the 600 so-called “non-aryan” judges suspended from office, and in July he was dismissed. Despite his war service and distinguished record, the Nazis regarded him as “politically unreliable”. Thereafter there was little or no likelihood of his being employed in any branch of the public service.

Later he moved to Berlin and began to look for work in the private sphere. Due to his connections with the Protestant Church, he obtained a post as legal advisor to the incipient Confessing Church, first under Bishop Marahrens of Hannover, but subsequently with the more uncompromising wing led by Martin Niemöller and Martin Albertz. These men gave a strong lead to the Confessing Church’s rebuttal of the so-called “German Christians” efforts to infiltrate Nazi ideologies and practices into church life But there were also divisions in the Confessing Church’s ranks. The more moderate members were prepared to compromise on some issues, while the more radical wing, led by Niemöller, refused any such accommodations. They courageously adhered to the views outlined in the 1934 Barmen Declaration and resisted all attempts to limit or weaken the Church’s autonomy. Weissler joined this latter was a dangerous step, all the more because he had been branded since 1933 as a “non-aryan”. But he maintained his beliefs and served as a legal advisor for this wing of the Confessing Church.

In 1936, the increasing harassment of individual Confessing Church pastors and laity led this group’s leaders to draw up a petition calling for an end to such stressful persecution by the Gestapo or local Nazi agencies. Politely but unflinchingly the memorandum opposed the regime’s on-going attempts to “de-Christianize” Germany. The Nazi interpretation of “positive Christianity” was criticized. The document also called for an end to the measures limiting the church’s outreach in the schools, the press or public media. Finally the church leaders roundly declared their opposition to the Nazi antisemitic campaign, since such an ideology was against the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour. Weissler was closely associated in drawing up this document to ensure that it was fully in compliance with the existing law. This forceful protest was to be presented in June 1936 to Hitler personally and in private, in the hope that he would then issue restraining orders to his underlings. But it was a sign of the Confessing Church’s political naivety that they entirely miscalculated the Nazis’ response. The scandal was made worse by the fact that somehow or other a copy was made available to the foreign press, where it was hailed as a significant challenge to Hitler’s regime. (Later researches have never been able to discover exactly how this happened.) The Gestapo immediately launched investigations into this act of national treason, and suspicion fell on Weissler – as a “Jew” – as well on two young curates, Werner Koch and Ernst Tillich. The Confessing Church leaders hastily sought to dissociate themselves from any accusation of political treachery and left Weissler to his fate. In October 1936 he was arrested and in February 1937 taken off to Sachsenhausen. Within a few days he was brutally done to death. The fact that Weissler was left in the lurch by his former employers and by the anti-Nazi champions in the Confessing Church was long suppressed. Only recently have attempts been made for some form of appropriate recognition. In Magdeburg a street has been named after him, and since 2008 one of the law courts bears his name. In 2005 the then chairman of the Evangelical Church’s Governing Council, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, said this: “We in the Evangelical Church have to acknowledge our guilt in not standing up for our co-worker Friedrich Weissler. Our history is not always one of heroic resistance to tyranny.” It is to be hoped that in the near future a suitable church building in Berlin will carry his name, as a token of remembrance of this intrepid Confessing Church member during those dark times.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Armin Nolzen, eds., Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2012

Review of Manfred Gailus and Armin Nolzen, eds., Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011).

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

“Woran glaubten die Menschen im ‘Dritten Reich?’” Gailus and Nolzen open their book with this question, arguing that it has received surprisingly little attention within the massive historiography devoted to the Nazi period. This work represents an attempt to evaluate the state of current research on Protestants and Catholics in Nazi Germany. It also includes a chapter by Merit Petersen on two smaller groups, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses; a chapter by Horst Junginger on German paganism (the German Faith Movement); and a chapter by Beth Griech-Polelle on National Socialism as a “political religion.” Two themes emerge in this volume. One is a refutation of the postwar charge that the Nazi era represented a period of intense secularization. In fact, Gailus and Nolzen argue, the Nazi period was intensely religious. Along with the early postwar era, it marked a break in the twentieth-century secularization that preceded and followed this middle period of nearly three decades. Secondly, the editors argue for increased attention to religion under the Nazis, especially by scholars not defending a piece of the religious turf. Such work should acknowledge regional differences as well as the complex and overlapping varieties of religious faith to be found.

Olaf Blaschke’s contribution picks up on an issue highlighted in Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), i.e., the importance of gender in understanding the pro-Nazi “German Christians.” Blaschke begins with the nineteenth century, arguing that Protestants in Bismarck’s Germany, epitomized by Heinrich von Treitschke, considered themselves the masculine Christians, with an emphasis on courage, strength, and the use of reason. Catholics were thought to be feminine, with more emotion, more sensitivity, and more resort to the superstitious side of religious belief (38). Protestants too, however, could be considered feminized, given the “soft” side of Christian beliefs and the percentage of women in the pews. By World War I, both religious faiths worked to “masculinize” their image and their message. Bergen points out the hyper-masculine nature of “German Christian” identity. Blaschke then describes “remasculination” efforts among Catholic theologians, including their hope to save piety from its soft, feminine image and remake it into an image of courage and strength. Blaschke argues throughout that these gender issues, largely ignored by historians, should have a significant place in our understanding of religion in the modern world, especially in the hyper-masculine world espoused by Nazi ideology.

Manfred Gailus offers a chapter on Protestants in which the title, “Keine gute Performance,” quite clearly indicates the message to be found. Noting that it took several decades for a critical and honest postwar assessment to develop, he describes the first generation to write the history with these words, “Die Erlebnisgeneration selbst erinnerte sich. Und natürlich legitimierte sie sich durch die Art ihrer Erinnerung” (98). Now we know better, in Gailus’s view. “Gegen langlebige Widerstands- und Kirchenkampflegenden ist zu betonen: Es bedurfte 1933 überhaupt keines Zwangs, keines gewaltsamen Angriffs von aussen—der Protestantismus öffnete dem anschwellenden Nationalsozialismus bereitwillig, vielfach fasziniert seine Türen, um die ‘Ideen von 1933’ einströmen zu lassen” (102). As for the question of Christians and Jews, “Protestanten haben im Kontext der so genannten Judenfrage nicht nur nicht genug für die Verfolgten getan, sondern zu nicht geringen Teilen haben sie selbst aktiv verachtet, ausgegrenzt, denunziert, verfolgt. Protestantismugeschichte ist an dieser Stelle zu erheblichen Anteilen auch Täter- und Mittätergeschichte” (111). Gailus acknowledges many differences to be found throughout the regional churches in Germany. He encourages historians to fill in these regional gaps, and also to write biographies of the broad range of church figures still without serious historical treatment. He also notes that some of the intensified religious commitment in the period turned toward the political religion of Nazism, with its opposition to the Enlightenment, to the “ideas of 1789,” and to the liberalism and democracy to be found in the West. He sees the Nazi period as intensely religious, but now with a three-part competition between Protestants, Catholics, and those who made a religion of National Socialism.

The second editor of this book, Armin Nolzen, attempts in his chapter the sort of statistical analysis rarely undertaken. What percentage of Nazi leaders, functionaries, and party members belonged to the Protestant or Catholic Church? He notes the difficulty of finding statistics. For example, according to the “positive Christianity” espoused in the Party Program in 1920, no one would be expected to have a particular faith. Thus no questions about one’s religious faith appeared on the membership application. A statistical record created in 1939, however, allowed party members to check a box for religion. This shows that 70 to 75 percent of party members checked either Protestant or Catholic, with 20-25 percent checking “gottglaubig.” Protestants were over-represented in comparison to their numbers in a given region, Catholics were under-represented, and “gottgläubig” were over-represented by a factor of four to five (158-59). The latter figure reflects the attempt within the Nazi Party to discourage church membership, as well as to separate church and state. Despite this, however, up to three-quarters of party members retained contact with their church. Even in the Allgemeine SS, reputedly the most anti-Christian organization in Nazi Germany, of nearly 250,000 members in December 1938, 51 percent were Protestant and 23 percent were Catholic (171). These figures match other indicators to suggest that three of four people inside the Nazi movement resisted pressure to leave their church. Furthermore, during World War II the number of party members laid to rest in church burials increased (170). At the same time, the total number of party members incorporated more and more of the German population, increasing from 4.8 million in 1938 to over 9 million by May 1945 (156). Finally, as Nolzen argues, an enormous number of Germans belonged to one of the many supporting organizations of the Nazi Party, if not to the Party itself. That figure was two-thirds of all Germans in May 1939, and Nolzen claims that it grew continually during six years of war (171). This leads to his conclusion: “Die meisten Deutschen konnten jedenfalls beides mit ihrem Gewissen vereinbaren: Ihren Glauben an den ‘Führer’ und den Nationalsozialismus sowie ihren Glauben an Gott und die Zugehörigket zu einer christlichen Kirche” (172).

This book includes much more of interest, including Kevin Spicer’s assessment of the Catholic Church under Nazism and Matthew Hockenos’s description of the churches after 1945. Many readers of this journal will be familiar with their books on these subjects. Beth Griech-Polelle gives a very useful overview and analysis of “political religion” and its place in the Nazi state. Dietmar Süss writes about religion on the home front during World War II, especially as the air war brought terror to those far behind the front lines. Dagmar Pöpping writes about the role of military chaplains, especially on the brutal eastern front from 1941-45. As a whole, the book highlights our present understanding of the role of religion in Nazi Germany and it calls upon scholars to work toward filling the gaps that remain. Gailus and Nolzen show that many varying claims were made upon “Volksgemeinschaft” in Nazi Germany. That complex story continues to unfold.

Review of Martin Greschat, Protestantismus im Kalten Krieg. Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im geteilten Deutschland 1945-1963

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2012

Review of Martin Greschat, Protestantismus im Kalten Krieg. Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im geteilten Deutschland 1945-1963 (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2010), 450 Pp., ISBN 978-3-506-76806-3.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität, Berlin

This review was first published in theologie.geschichte – Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kulturgeschichte (Universität Saarbrücken) Band 6 (2011). Translation courtesy of John S. Conway.

This book is the first overview of the history of German Protestantism in the early post-1945 period up to the year 1963. (Why the author chose to end there is not explained). His study begins with a broad survey of international relations and personalities, such as the Great Power rivalries between the USA and the USSR, the Korean War, Stalin and his diplomacy, Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht. This makes for an extremely lengthy introduction of nearly two hundred pages before the main topic is reached. But the author sees these events, as described in his Chapter 1, as important historical preconditions for the division of Germany The second chapter describes the establishment of the two German states. On the one hand, West Germany adopted a course of integration with the West and of rearmament, despite much internal opposition. On the other hand, the German Democratic Republic under Ulbricht underwent a similar process of integration into the Soviet sphere of influence. The third chapter briefly describes the turbulent years of the 1950s with the Geneva Conference of 1955, the uprisings in the Soviet bloc in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Communists in 1956, Khruschchev’s ultimatum over Berlin, and the Cuban crisis. Finally, in chapter 4, Greschat arrives at his main theme, namely the developments in the Protestant churches. He deals first with the situation in the German Democratic Republic, in a far too detailed and hence rather wearying fashion, in my view. He then turns to West Germany. Despite the fact that both Protestant communities were decisively in favour of upholding the notion of German national unity, they slowly drifted apart from one another. In the following chapter 5, developments in the life and witness of the Protestant churches in the 1950s are analyzed These years saw the erosion of the traditional pietistic forms of worship, heated theological debates over Rudolf Bultmann’s “demythologizing” contentions, institutional innovations such as the Church Rallies, and the notable establishment of the Evangelical Academies, which did so much to foster the Protestant churches’ life and their involvement in the wider international and ecumenical discourse of the World Council of Churches and similar bodies.

This is indeed a vast undertaking. The reader will undoubtedly gain much on these various topics. But there are problems. For one thing, the author gives us several chronological accounts, first for the international scene, then for the national political level, and thirdly for the churches’ own historical developments—and in this case, twice over, one for the west, one for the east. This leads to numerous repetitions, to frequent recapitulations of items already covered (“as already mentioned”), or to redundant digressions.

Furthermore, the author does not tackle the problematical issue of how best such a history of recent German Protestantism should be written. Since 1945, despite the strong fixation on tradition, the evident trend has been to create a constellation of about two dozen separate provincial churches, each with its own theological, ecclesial and church-political character. Greschat’s concentration on the top-level deliberations of the Evangelical Church leadership, and on the significant political disputes of two divergent groups, one around Ehlers, Dibelius and Lilje and the other around Niemoller, Heinemann and Gollwitzer, hardly does justice to the diversity of the situation. Another more serious defect is the astonishing decision to omit any discussion of Germany’s recent past, which the historian Friedrich Meinecke so rightly called “The German Catastrophe”. In fact, this was also the catastrophe of German Protestants who constituted a two-thirds majority in the “Third Reich”. Greschat’s discussion of the internal and highly divisive disputes in the post-war period are really inexplicable without reference to the Nazi period, or to the Church Struggle against Nazism. In this regard Matthew Hockenos’ A Church Divided. German Protestants confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) is a model study. Unfortunately Greschat doesn’t even mention it.

Many sections of German Protestantism incurred a heavy burden of guilt for their highly regrettable behaviour during the Nazi period. But their stance is hardly mentioned in Greschat’s 450 pages. Likewise, no attention is given to the process of de-nazification, or what in the church was the wholly inadequate process of “self-cleansing”. Christian anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism or the Holocaust as such are not mentioned. And even the timorous Protestant attempts to begin to come to terms with a scholarly examination of the recent past, as in the Evangelical Association of Contemporary Church History after 1955, are not thoroughly discussed. The book by Bjorn Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach and Norbert Reck, Mit Blick auf die Täter. Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945 (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), with its pertinent and often biting criticisms is not taken into account.

The outbreak of the Korean War, or more widely the Cold War, appears to have engrossed the attitudes of most contemporary Germans, and thus covered over that unspeakable darkness which burdened them, and in some cases still does. And so, one might suggest, it was highly convenient that the Cold War diverted attention away from those other more fateful events, about which they were unwilling to speak. But are these considerations still valid for scholarly accounts today? It is incomprehensible why this book omits mentioning the widespread silence, or more particularly the active evasiveness, the frequently well-rehearsed tissue of lies or alibis, or the habit of sweeping such unwelcome matters under the carpet, as engaged in by many Protestants.

Of course there may have been numerous understandable reasons why contemporaries in the 1950s wanted to suppress their personal pasts. But to continue suppressing such lamentable episodes in the Protestant collective past seems wholly reprehensible. Any history of German Protestantism in the 1950s needs to be written, not from the perspective of “Korea”, but from the viewpoint of the participants themselves. Herein lies what would appear to be an inexplicable omission in an otherwise significant study. As a first attempt to provide an overall account of post-war German Protestantism, this study needs to be substantially enhanced and improved.

Review of Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Review of Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), ISBN: 978-3525550083.

By Victoria Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The individuals in Nazi Germany who acted with moral clarity, simple decency, and straightforward courage are in such short supply that they are worthy not only of honor but of serious study. As we know all too well, between 1933 and 1945 the vast majority of German citizens lived their lives in the grey zones of compromise, silence, and complicity. Those who resisted were outsiders in virtually every respect, and they remained so after 1945, when most Germans were quite uncomfortable with those in their midst who had opposed and resisted Nazism or been its victims. And by the time people became eager to uncover these stories, many of the traces had become buried.

Elisabeth Schmitz is a poignant and powerful example of one such individual. In 1999 a short study by one of her students, Dietgard Meyer, appeared as an appendix in Katharina Staritz, 1903-1953. Mit einem Exkurs Elisabeth Schmitz (Neukirchener, 1999). The 1999 essay included the startling discovery that Schmitz (not the Berlin social worker Marga Meusel) was the author of the 23-page memorandum, “Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier,” submitted to the September 1935 Prussian Confessing Church synod in Berlin-Steglitz. Meyer’s portrait of Schmitz proved that she had been one of the rare Germans who had consistently and at great personal cost chosen to stand by their Jewish neighbors.

As Gailus notes in this new biography, several historians were already looking more closely at the history of the memorandum; the historian Hartmut Ludwig had already confirmed that Schmitz was indeed the author. It was Gailus, however, who began to compile and document a much more comprehensive picture of Schmitz’s activities during the Third Reich and the subsequent historiography that had omitted her. The author of several fine studies on the Kirchenkampf, Gailus organized a 2007 conference in Berlin on Schmitz’s life and work; papers from this conference were published as Elisabeth Schmitz und ihre Denkschrift gegen die Judenverfolgung. Konturen einer vergessenen Biografie (1893-1977). Gailus also served as the key consultant for the film Elisabeth of Berlin produced by U. S. filmmaker Steve Martin, who produced the documentary several years ago on Robert Ericksen’s work Theologians under Hitler; both films are available from Vital Visions (www.vitalvisions.org).

Gailus has now written a biography of Schmitz that does justice both to her courage and to the troubling questions that her story raises about how historical narratives are created. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this biography is its dual narrative, which combines the story of a remarkably courageous and self-effacing woman with what Gailus calls the “Erinnerungskultur”—the culture in which the narratives of memory in postwar Germany distorted the truth and obscured those individuals who had actually spoken it during the Nazi era.

As Gailus shows us, Schmitz was an Aussenseiterin in a number of ways, both before and after 1945. She was a trained historian (she did her doctoral work under Friedrich Meinecke), Confessing Church member, and teacher at a girls’ Lyceum. Her 1935 memorandum, written shortly before the passage of the Nuremberg laws, was a painfully detailed account of what everyday life for German Jews had become and a devastating indictment of what had happened to German society. But it was directed particularly at Confessing Church leaders. “The Germans have a new god,” she wrote, “which is race.” Schmitz wrote of her hope that the Confessing Church at the Steglitz synod would speak out, “late, much too late, but nonetheless better too late than not at all … Because for the church this does not concern a tragedy that is unfolding but a sin of our people, and because we are members of this people and responsible before God for this our people, it is our sin.” She subsequently added a postscript to the memorandum after the passage of the Nuremberg laws. In addition to sending it to the synod, Schmitz personally made about 200 copies of the memorandum and circulated them among friends and people whom she hoped would have influence.

For years the author of this memorandum was believed to be Marga Meusel, a Berlin church social worker who had written another memorandum about the Confessing Church’s responsibility for its “non-Aryan” members that was submitted to the Augsburg Confessing synod in October 1934. It was, I think, an honest mistake for many of us. Copies of both documents were in the same file folder in the Günther Harder collection of Kirchenkampf documents in the Berlin Evangelische Zentralarchiv, and because Meusel’s name was written on the one memorandum (and there was no name on the other) most historians concluded that Meusel was also the author of “Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier” – even though a February 1947 affidavit signed by Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling had actually confirmed Schmitz as the author (a copy of the affidavit was published in Meyer’s 1999 essay). But that affidavit wasn’t in an archive, but in Schmitz’s private papers—and Schmitz, as Manfred Gailus shows, was not a self-promoter. In 1948 Wilhelm Niemoeller attributed the Steglitz memorandum to Meusel, and in the years to follow the error was repeated wherever the memo was discussed (I repeated the error in my discussion of the memorandum in For the Soul of the People).

But the story is more complicated, because as Mir aber zerriss es das Herz shows, Schmitz did far more than write the one memorandum. From the beginning to the end, she tried to help Jewish friends and colleagues and convince her church to speak out in protest. In the summer of 1933 she wrote and then met with Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, hoping to move him to speak out about the persecution of the Jews. (Her summary of his reply in an Aktennotiz in the Bethel archives begins: “For the time being, only work in silence possible.”) In the years that followed she sought out and wrote many of the leading figures in the Confessing Church—all with the hope that she could convince the Confessing Church to take a clear stand. After the November 1938 pogroms, she wrote an impassioned letter to Helmut Gollwitzer, Martin Niemoeller’s successor at the Annenkirche in Dahlem, urging him to preach openly about what had happened and to include the German Jews in the prayers of the congregation. As Wolfgang Gerlach noted in And the Witnesses were Silent, Gollwitzer’s sermon was one of the few in the aftermath of November 9, 1938, that can be considered a protest.

Then, in a remarkable act of integrity and courage, Schmitz drew the consequence that so few within the Confessing Church (or anywhere) were willing to take: she resigned her position as Studienrätin on December 31, 1938, requesting an immediate leave of absence and early retirement. “I decided to give up school service and no longer be a civil servant of a government that permitted the synagogues to be set afire,” she later wrote. In her letter to the director of the Berlin schools she told him exactly why she was doing it: “It has become increasingly doubtful to me whether I can offer instruction … in the way that the National Socialist state expects and requires of me …. I have finally come to the conviction that this is not the case.” She then quietly did volunteer work for the Confessing Church until the 1943 bombing of Berlin compelled her to return to Hanau, where she had grown up. In 1946 she returned to teaching, at a Gymnasium in Hanau.

Gailus includes several documents that give the closest glimpse of Schmitz. In addition to the text of her 1935 memorandum and the 1938 letter to Gollwitzer he has included a speech that Schmitz delivered in Hanau on September 7, 1950, at a ceremony commemorating “the victims of fascism and the war.” By 1950 German speeches on such occasions could easily slide into rationalization and alibis. Not surprisingly, Schmitz’s words summoned her audience to the responsibility of remembering and remembering accurately, not just for political reasons, but because, in her words, “otherwise we would be defrauding ourselves of our human dignity.” She concluded her remarks with references to Jochen Klepper, Hildegard Schaeder, Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—and yet said not a word about her own acts of courage and integrity.

Outside of a very small circle of acquaintances—including several Jewish colleagues whom Schmitz had helped and who wrote affidavits for her after 1945—Schmitz remained unknown and unrecognized. One reason that emerges very clearly in this biography was her modesty. The memorandum was unsigned and, with Niemoeller’s early attribution of it to Meusel, the historical record seemed to have been established. But Schmitz lived long enough that she could have corrected it (Meusel was in ill health after the war and died in 1953). And as Meyer’s 1999 essay showed, Schmitz did assemble documentation after 1945—affidavits from people she had helped as well as the affidavit from Wibbeling. She had clarified the record, at least for herself—but in the decades that followed she didn’t tell her story. Even Dietgard Meyer later told Gailus that she had never learned about the memorandum directly from Schmitz.

And no one asked her. For a very long time the women of the church struggle and resistance circles were forgotten and on the margins of the historiography. Extensive documentation emerged from the work during the 1980s of Göttingen systematic theology professor Hannelore Erhart and a group of former Confessing Church Theologinnen and doctoral students, leading to several volumes, including the 1999 one with the essay on Schmitz. My own work (For the Soul of the People, 1992) included a study of the role of women in the Confessing Church based upon of my oral histories with about 25 of the Theologinnen and women who had been in the resistance. More recently, biographies of women like Schmitz and Gertrud Staewen (Marlies Flesch-Thebesius, Zu den Aussenseitern gestellt: Die Geschichte der Gertrud Staewen, 1894-1987, 2004) have appeared.

Yet another question arises, and Gailus addresses it bluntly in this volume: why didn’t any of those who had known her and worked with her during the Nazi era come forward in the postwar era to acknowledge her courage and the role she had played? Why is it that the leading figures in the Kirchenkampf who had known her during the 1930s (Gollwitzer, Niesel, and Barth, among others)—and who eventually wrote and spoke so extensively about the events of the church struggle—failed to tell the story of Elisabeth Schmitz? The portrait of her in this biography shows a woman driven by outrage at the Nazi persecution of the Jews, someone who was active in the most prominent Confessing Church circles Berlin: in the Gossen Mission, in Dahlem, in Charlottenburg, at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. As yet, as Gailus notes, when Schmitz died in 1977 only seven people attended her funeral.

In any case, we now have this fine biography of Schmitz. It is among the recent German books that I wish could be published in English; it would be a strong addition to any course on the Third Reich. Her story is so compelling that I think it would find wider interest, and the chapters on Erinnerungskultur and the emergence of the historiography of the Kirchenkampf—and the emergence of her own story and the correction of the historical record—could stand alone as studies in the creation of historical narrative.

April 2009 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

April 2009 — Vol. XV, no. 4

Dear Friends,

O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid!
Ist das nicht zu beklagen
Gott des Vaters einigs Kind
Wird ins Grab getragen

O grosse Not!
Gotts Sohn liegt tot
Am Kreuz ist er gestorben
Hat dadurch das Himmelreich
Uns aus Lieb erworben

O Jesu, du
Mein Hilf und Ruh
Ich bitte dich mit Tränen:
Hilf, dass ich mich bis ins Grab
Nach dir möge sehnen.
Johann Rist, 1607-1667

At this Eastertide, we rejoice in the hope given to us in the Resurrection of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, but also we recall His sufferings on the Cross, and those of His Church during its long and troubled history. The Lutheran hymn above, written four centuries ago, surely attests to these two realities, as do the books reviewed below.

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Gailus, Kirchliche Amtshilfe
b) Vromen, Hidden children of the Holocaust in Belgium
c) Heschel, The Aryan Jesus
d) Wickeri, Reconstructing China – K.H.Ting
e) Clark, Allies for Armageddon

2) Journal issue, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Contemoporary Church History, 2008, no. 2

1a) ed. Manfred Gailus, Kirchliche Amtshilfe. Die Kirche und die Judenverfolgung im “Dritten Reich”. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008. 223 Pp. ISBN 978-3-525–55340-4.

One of the earliest discriminatory measures taken by the Nazis against German Jews was the passing in April 1933 of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. This prohibited anyone having Jewish ancestors from holding positions in the state civil service. including the judiciary, the universities, schools and hospitals. Hundreds of thousands were affected. Many of them were church-goers, who now found it necessary to seek clarification as to whether they had any Jewish forebears. The only way this could be done was by consulting the parish registers, which by long standing decrees of the Prussian monarchy, had been carefully maintained for several hundred years. Births, marriages, deaths and particularly baptisms were all recorded. So in 1933, the local parishes were inundated with requests to examine these registers, since anyone seeking a job in the public service needed to provide proof that he was of “pure” German origin. At the same time, there were various zealots among the parish clergy who wholeheartedly welcomed the Nazi attempt to “purify” German society by discovering the extent to which their congregations had become “polluted” by intermarriage with, or baptism of, “foreign elements”, particularly Jews. These pastors readily gave support to the idea that the “pure” German community of blood “should safeguard Germany’s eternal future”, or alternatively that “mixed” marriages, even in the distant past, had been a disastrous development which should now be rectified.

In the mood of 1933, when the vast majority of pastors and their congregations welcomed Adolf Hitler as Germany’s saviour from national humiliation and/or the danger of racial contamination, the search for alleged Jewish miscegenation was seen as a national duty. No pastor objected. Soon enough, the genealogical zealots, all confessing their devotion to the Nazi cause, took over the organization of this nation-wide investigation. Thousands of parish records were gathered together in centralized regional offices, where huge card indexes were prepared, carefully listing the names and dates when “alien elements’ had crept into the church. In the view of some of these fanatical pastors, this process had been part of a deliberate Jewish plot to undermine the “pure German” character of the church. Their duty was to oppose this subtle and dangerous process. As one bigoted pastor from Schleswig-Holstein declared: “it was the duty of the priest to record with diligence this past pollution of our nation’s purity, and to ensure that it never happens again.”
In most cases, pastors receiving requests to search their registers obediently complied, since they were officially the keepers of the state’s records and statistics. It was their patriotic duty to obey the law, which they then conscientiously carried out. Of course, in 1933, no one could have known what such discriminatory measures would later lead to. But none could have failed to realize the portentous effect of this kind of discrimination and exclusion from the majority in the church. It was all willingly enough undertaken.

Those who collaborated in these endeavours, which were often to have such fatal consequences for those affected, had no regrets at the time. Nor any since. After 1945, these activities were all covered over with a blanket of amnesia and the bureaucratic paper trail was carefully buried.

This is a story without any redeeming features, all the more since the majority of the pastors involved returned, after 1945, to regular parish work. Their pro-Nazi participation and/or sympathy, even if investigated, was largely brushed under the carpet. Some were even complemented on their “diligent and energetic genealogical researches”.

We therefore owe Professor Manfred Gailus and his team of authors a debt of gratitude for writing up so competently this disgraceful story, and for describing the stages by which church officials assisted the Nazi racial campaign of persecution at one of its most intrusive points. As they note, the only opposition to this Nazi-induced enterprise came from the reluctance of several pastors, especially in the rural areas, to be parted from their parish registers; alternatively some argued that they could not spare the time to undertake the necessary researches, or that they lacked the financial resources to employ people with sufficient skills in the use of dusty and long-forgotten records. In some parts of Germany, this desire to co-ordinate and centralize the discovery of Jewish forebears amongst the parishioners had only meagre results. Nevertheless the attempt remains a sad stain upon the church’s history. We can surely be grateful to Professor Gailus for his continuing efforts to undertake the task of coming to terms with this and other portions of the German Evangelical Church’s problematic past.
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1b) Suzanne Vromen, Hidden Children of the Holocaust. Belgian Nuns and their daring rescue of young Jews from the Nazis. Oxford University press, 2008. 178 Pp. ISBN 078-0-29.318128-9

The saga of the Jewish children saved from the Nazis’ persecution during the Holocaust is always heart-wrenching. In Belgium, which figures only occasionally in holocaust historiography, little is known about the rescue work undertaken mainly by nuns, who hid the children in numerous convents across the land. Suzanne Vromen’ s account breaks new ground and is therefore valuable in filling this gap.

Compiled principally from the survivors’ testimonies, Vromen has interviewed many of these, both boys and girls, whose names were later recorded. She has produced a systematic and comparative evaluation of their treatment and eventual rescue, and does so with a sympathetic stance, since she herself only narrowly escaped the same experience. She pays particular tribute to the courage and foresight of the Mothers Superior of the convents, and their readiness to extend help to these children, despite their knowledge of the risks they ran. At the same time, this was all the more unexpected, since these convents were among the most traditional institutions in a strongly Catholic country. Pre-Vatican II attitudes were widespread. Anti-semitic stereotypes were commonly expressed, but aversion to the German occupation and its repressive policies prevailed. At the same time, Vromen takes care to refute the accusations that these nuns were motivated either by the desire for financial gain, or by proselytizing motives. Certainly, as she notes, many of these hidden children were baptized so that they could more fully participate in the numerous daily Catholic rituals. But, in Vromen’s estimation this was primarily in order to make them inconspicuous, and succeeded in this attempt.

The testimonies she gathered show a wide spectrum amongst the children from those who gladly adopted a new Catholic identity to those who resisted any loss of their Jewishness. After the war very considerable efforts were made to reconnect the children with their parents. If the parents had not survived, the children were given to a Jewish agency, necessarily impersonal and eager only to preserve them as a precious remnant. Undoubtedly many of the nuns were reluctant to see their charges depart to such an uncertain future. But Vromen gives the benefit of doubt about their intentions.

The convents varied greatly in size and character. But all shared in a very traditional institutional style, laced with Catholic piety, which imposed on all inmates an often rigid conformity. Vromen estimates that approximately two hundred such institutions were involved in this rescue work. She provides an excellent account of the daily lives in war-time. Like all such schools and homes, the children and their caretakers were obliged to suffer the rigours of war-time conditions, with the oppression of the foreign occupation forces, the dangers of bombing raids, the scarcity of food, the cold of winters and the absence of recreation. For the Jewish children there were the added dangers of detection and the lack of knowledge about their parents’ fate. At the same time, accepting these children demanded special qualities and competence from the convents and their staffs. Particularly the role of the Mother Superior was crucial. The burden placed on these women for the success of their rescue missions here receives due acknowledgment.

The fact that, in later years, many of these nuns were awarded the title of “Righteous Gentiles” speaks favourably about how their loving care was remembered by their charges. Vromen was fortunate in being able to interview many of these nuns, whose memories were still sharp, despite their advanced ages, fifty or more years after the events recalled. Necessarily, since no records were kept at the time, these recollections are now indispensable. Vromen’s research therefore helps to break the silence which so long veiled the story of these hidden children and pays tribute to the courageous and steadfast nuns who sheltered and cared for them . The regrettable fact is that these women have only received belated recognition in recent years in post-war Belgium, in contrast to the men who participated in the more dramatic armed resistance. It is also regrettable that the Belgian Catholic Church has not seen fit to make any institutional commemoration of their humanitarian endeavours. Vromen’s tribute is therefore both timely and appropriate.
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1c) Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton Univ. Press. 384p $29.95

(This review appeared in America Magazine, February 16, 2009, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author)

Founded in 1939 against the background of Nazi dominance by a group of German Protestant theologians, pastors and churchgoers, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life sought to redefine Christianity as a Germanic religion whose founder, Jesus, was not a Jew but rather an opponent of Judaism who fought valiantly to destroy Judaism but fell victim in that struggle.

This volume presents the history of that institute: how it came into being and won approval and financing from church leaders, the nature of the “dejudaized” New Testament and hymnal that it published, the many conferences and lectures that it organized, and those who joined and became active members especially from the academic world and in particular its academic director, Walter Grundmann (1906-74).

Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, is the daughter of the famous Jewish scholar and religious activist, Abraham Heschel. She grew up hearing from her father and his friends about the German academic scene in the 1920s and 1930s. Her interest in Grundmann’s institute was piqued in the late 1980s, and she has worked on this project for many years, especially since the pertinent archives became accessible. She has an interesting and important story to tell about the political corruption of academic Christian theological scholarship, and she tells it very well. She offers abundant quotations from the publications and correspondence of the major figures. Just when the reader feels the need for more background information about a particular person or topic, Heschel supplies it. She retains the objectivity appropriate to a historian without glossing over the horror of her topic and the scoundrels who perpetrated it.

One of the institute’s preoccupations was to dejudaize Jesus. Along with some other distinguished German biblical scholars of the time, Grundmann and his colleagues contended that Jesus descended from the non-Jewish population of Galilee, that he struggled heroically against Judaism, and finally fell into the hands of the Judean officials who had him put to death. For Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s who were struggling against what they were told was an international Jewish conspiracy, the “Aryan Jesus” was proposed as a symbol of their own struggle. Their task was to complete successfully the struggle that the Aryan Jesus had begun. As a means toward that end, some “German Christians” saw the need to divest Christianity of its Jewish elements and to produce a purified Christianity fit for the future thousand-year Reich.

The impetus for this project came first of all from the long German tradition of theological anti-Judaism. Added to that tradition were the “race” theories that had emerged more recently and the rise to political power of Hitler and the Nazi party. Moreover, there had developed within German Protestantism a split between the “German Christians” and the “Confessing Church.” The “German Christians” took more eagerly to the task of ridding Christianity of its Jewish elements and developing a new kind of Christianity supposedly more consistent with the Nazi ideology that they saw coming to power before their eyes. One of the strongholds of the German Christian movement was the region of Thuringia, and the institute dedicated to eradication of Jewish influence on the German church had its home in Jena. While not officially sponsored by the University of Jena, Grundmann and several of his co-workers were faculty members there.

Grundmann became the institute’s academic director and driving force. In his mid-30s he had been lecturing and writing about “Jesus the Galilean” and drawing parallels between Jesus’ alleged struggle against Judaism and the contemporary German situation. He was a popular teacher and lecturer, and had many contacts in the German academic world. His own teachers included Adolf Schlatter and Gerhard Kittel, very distinguished scholars whose writings were often tinged with anti-Judaism. In his work for the institute Grundmann organized conferences that attracted other scholars, and so widened the institute’s influence. Even when paper was scarce, Grundmann managed to get published his own writings and those of scholars sympathetic to the institute’s goals.

One of the institute’s first projects was the production of a dejudaized translation of the New Testament. This involved purging the Synoptic Gospels of positive references to Judaism, eliminating the biographical and autobiographical notices about Paul’s Jewishness and highlighting the negative comments about “the Jews” in John’s Gospel. Another project was a dejudaized hymnbook, in which Jewish language and concepts were eliminated and replaced by songs about war and the “fatherland.” A dejudaized catechism presented Jesus as a Galilean whose message and conduct stood in opposition to Judaism. These publications were widely circulated and had great influence.

Two issues central to the Christian Bible presented problems for Grundmann and his colleagues: the Old Testament and Paul. While many in the German Christian movement wanted to jettison the Old Testament, some (mainly professors of Old Testament) wanted to retain it as evidence of Jewish perfidy and degeneracy, often using the ancient Israelite prophets’ denunciations against the Jewish people of the present. Since Paul had been the theological hero in Luther’s Protestant Reformation, he could not be so easily purged. The solution was to use Paul’s general ideas and play down or omit what seemed too “Jewish” about his person and theology.

The Nazis’ reception of Grundmann’s institute was mixed. Some officials welcomed the support of the German Christians and of the institute in particular. However, other highly placed Nazis did not want to encourage a renewed German Christianity that might rival their own plans for a Nordic paganism entirely without Christian elements. For members of the Confessing Church and the Catholic Church (despite their own forms of anti-Judaism), the goals and projects of the institute and the German Christians seemed too radical. While this mixed reception was a great disappointment to Grundmann and his colleagues, it became their salvation after the defeat of the Nazis.

In the superficial “denazification” process after the war, Grundmann and his colleagues portrayed themselves as scholars of Judaism, victims of Nazi persecution and heroes responsible for the church’s survival. They wrote recommendations for one another, attested to one another’s integrity and took up former or new positions in the church and the university. Grundmann continued to publish books and articles without apology, and even turned up as an informant for the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Heschel has a remarkable story to tell. Her reliance on primary sources and her objectivity are impressive. One comes away from her account wondering how such apparently intelligent and learned Christian scholars could have been so foolish and craven. While there were several causes, Heschel’s narrative demonstrates once more the noxious power of Christian theological anti-Judaism, especially among those who should have known better.

Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., is professor of New Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry and editor of New Testament Abstracts.

1d) Philip Wickeri, Reconstructing Christianity in China – K. H. Ting and the Chinese Church, Maryknoll NY, Orbis Books, 2007, 516 pp., US$ 50.00, American Society of Missiology Studies, no. 41.

(This review appeared first in the International Review of Missions, September 2008)

This is a most remarkable book, about a remarkable Christian man and leader, living through some of the most remarkable upheavals, threats and in the end resurrection developments of the Christian Church in China. It is also written by a remarkable disciple, the only foreigner to date to be ordained in China to the Christian ministry within the Chinese Protestant Church. Like many earlier studies in this North American Series, it is not quick, still less easy reading, but will deserve to be read and studied for many years.

Wickeri first met Bishop Ting in 1979, when he was invited to serve ‘as an interpreter for the Chinese inter-religious delegation at the Third World Conference on Religion and Peace’ (p.4) which took place at Princeton Theological Seminary where Wickeri was a doctoral student. The thesis he wrote became in 1988 the comparably full and important study Seeking the Common Ground – Protestant Christianity, the Three-Self Movement and China’s United Front (Maryknoll, Orbis Books) which remains a key study of the more general inter-action between Chinese Communist rule and the faith and practice of Chinese Protestant Christians over the 40 years following the Communist taking of power in 1949. The new book is all the more interesting both for covering the same history through the faith and thinking of a particular person and leader, while also continuing the story into the present when Bishop Ting, now 92 and restricted to a wheelchair, is still taking a lively interest in all that is happening in and around the Church he has served so well.

The book is a biography of a particular person, yet also takes the reader through a richly documented story of what was happening at each stage both to China as a nation and to the total Protestant community within which K. H. Ting grew up and of which he became a major leader as it was allowed to rediscover itself and its vocation under the government led by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. He was born in Shanghai, into a family attached to St Peter’s Church, a congregation of the then Anglican Church in that city’s International Settlement, where his maternal grandfather had been a deacon and priest in the early part of the century. His university studies were in the Anglican foundation, St John’s University, Shanghai, where after one year in engineering he transferred to theology, almost all of his studies being taken in the English language which he has spoken and written perfectly ever since.

The three main sections of the book take the reader through the three very different periods of Bishop Ting’s long life: that of the Japanese occupation, the Second World War, and his five years of international service in Canada, New York and Geneva during the civil war in China and the war in Korea; then the years of ‘Deconstructing Christianity in China’ while settling into living under Communist rule and the upheavals that the chaotic ‘cultural revolution’ of 1966-76 consisted of and was followed by; and then the restoration, indeed rebirth, of Christianity since the late 1970s until today. In each period we are taken deeply into Bishop Ting’s own experience and handling of all the uncertainties and tensions, thanks in particular to recorded interviews that he gave Wickeri in the early 1990s when the latter was serving in the Hong Kong office of the Amity Foundation that has proved to be one of Bishop Ting’s most creative initiatives. Wickeri insists in his Introduction that the book is ‘not an approved or authorized biography’, though Bishop Ting ‘has cooperated with me at different stages in the process of writing and research’ (p. 9), and that he takes responsibility himself for his interpretation and evaluation of major themes within it all – with 64 crowded pages of Notes and a Bibliography of 43 pages indicating just how much care he has taken !

Space forbids any attempt to enter into the fascinating detail of this whole story, for instance the crucial role in Ting’s career played more than once, above all during the ‘cultural revolution’, by Chairman Mao’s second-in-command, Zhou Enlai, whom Ting may have met in his boyhood, and whose secretary in the 1940s was a schoolmate of his wife’s (p.53) ! Or into Ting’s relationship with the Buddhist leader Zhao Puchu, a close companion in membership of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference from 1959 onwards, and whose commitment to Ting is movingly reflected in an Ode (a Ci in Mandarin) the monk wrote for him, probably at a particularly low moment in 1973, which, in English, is printed – and ‘translated’ in the appended footnote – on p. 197f.

Yet of course it is Bishop Ting’s ever-growing responsibilities in and for the Christian (which is how Protestants are identified, in distinction from Catholics, in Mandarin) Church(es) in China, which provide the bulk of the material of this rich book, from Ting’s early, short pastorate after graduation from St John’s in a wartime and occupied Shanghai, all the way through an extraordinarily demanding life, to his efforts after ‘retirement’ to re-shape the theological outlook of the Church by a long series of articles, addresses and other writings devoted to ‘Theological Reconstruction’ (see pp. 346ff.). By this, which has not been always popular among Ting’s many colleagues around the country, he means above all looking out more widely, more lovingly and more exploringly, on to the total human scene in and beyond the People’s Republic.

Throughout, the book is centrally interested in the development of Ting’s theological understanding and the practical principles and decisions to which that has led, not least in the endless weighing during most of the story of what can and cannot be openly said or done in the light of the political leadership and its sensitivities at each different stage. One would like to think that the weight of care Ting has shown throughout his life in this field could be softening in these latest years. Yet what has been happening around Taiwan, Tibet and the Olympic games in 2008 surely indicates that the Christian leaders of today and tomorrow are likely to find themselves facing a no less care-filled and sensitive set of roles to play than those faced by Bishop K.H. Ting over the 60 and more years so fully documented here.

Dr Martin Conway, Oxford, chairman of the Friends of the Church in China from 1994 – 2000.

1e) Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon. The Rise of Christian Zionism. New Haven an London: Yale University Press. 2007. 331 Pp. ISBN 978-0-300-11698-4

Victoria Clark is a British writer, who earlier gave us an insightful study of the Christian churches in the Balkans in the aftermath of Communist rule. She now turns to a more lurid subject, the often spectacular witness of the so-called Christian Zionists, who form part of the contemporary American Religious Right. This community with its extreme views, both theological and political, is best known for its successful mobilization of assistance for the State of Israel, and the remarkable amount of financial support it has garnered for Israel’s cause. This significant minority among American Protestant fundamentalists derives its beliefs from certain early Puritans with their addiction to taking biblical prophecies literally, if selectively. These included an unshakable eschatological belief in the immanence of Jesus’ Second Coming, along the lines fervently preached by the early nineteenth century British evangelist, John Nelson Darby. His advocacy was based on a time frame which included the restoration of all Jews to their promised biblical homeland, the rise of the Anti-Christ, the seven years of Tribulation, the devastating Battle of Armageddon, the Rapture of the saved Christians into heaven, followed by the Last Days and then the End of the World. It was all part of God’s prophetic and immutable plan.

The first part of Clark’s book is devoted to a well-researched study of the origins and development of these beliefs, and their impact on Christian society, especially in Britain and America. Even before the rise of the modern secular Zionist movement, this Protestant faction under such leaders as the Earl of Shaftesbury had fostered the idea of restoring Europe’s Jews to their ancient territories. Such concepts undoubtedly played a significant part in the British Government’s issuing of the 1917 Balfour declaration in support of a Jewish national home in Palestine, and later led to President Truman’s immediate recognition of the newly-established State of Israel in 1948. Such steps were all interpreted by this sect as proof of their correct discernment of the signs of the pre-millennial age.

The second half of the book describes Clark’s personal interviews with a number of American Christian Zionist leaders. She becomes increasingly dismayed by the rigidity and dogmatism of their biblically-based eschatology, even if the leaders are coy about the exact methods or timing when their predictions will take place. But all can agree on the American Christians’ duty to aid and abet the Jewish state, even suggesting the desirability of using nuclear strikes to attack such implacable enemies of Israel as Muslim fundamentalists or the Iranian nation. They have no sympathy at all for the Christian Arabs of the Middle East, whose plight is ignored even while huge Christian resources are deployed to sponsor new Jewish settlements in the West Bank territories, as well as to assist in the return of more Jews from exile elsewhere. Any talk of compromise with Israel’s opponents, or any suggestion that a two-state solution on the soil of Palestine would be preferable, is regarded as a sign of weakness, comparable to the appeasement of Nazism practised by the ill-fated British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. It must be resolutely and utterly condemned.

Clark also devotes considerable space in describing the highly organized tactics of this group on the American political scene. A plethora of lobbying organizations in Washington and elsewhere has developed a significant political impact, assisted by the sympathetic hearings they received from President George W. Bush. Such agencies are backed by the effective rallying of support at the local parish level, especially in such hard-line areas as Texas and Colorado. Clark’s forays to meet such crusading pastors on their home ground only revealed the chasm in understanding between her liberal and balanced agnosticism and the dogmatic bible-based certitudes of her hosts. She rightly wonders how such flamboyant displays of religious nationalism can be described as Christian, and makes clear her increasing distaste of such apocalyptic aggressiveness. Even if the most recent political developments in the United States have seen a decline in the fortunes of these militant and dedicated campaigners, nevertheless the pressures to maintain the flow of vast American resources, both private and public, to Israel will almost certainly continue. Since the Democratic Party also gains much of its support from American Jews, no reversal of such a policy is to be expected. As Clark concludes: “If the influence of Christian Zionism on western policy continues to exert the hold it does today {2007} there is a chance that we will all become allies for Armageddon” (p. 289).
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2) Journal issue: The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, Volume 21, no. 2, 2008 is devoted to the Church of England Bishop George Bell. Fifty years after his death in 1958, a commemorative conference was held in his diocesan city, Chichester, organized by the Director of the George Bell Institute, Andrew Chandler, who is also a co-editor of this journal. The papers read at this international and bilingual conference are now printed, and provide a valuable survey of Bell’s career, with particular emphasis on his international and ecumenical witness. At the same time, these scholars have been able to use a larger and more up-to-date range of sources than was possible for Bell’s official biographer, Canon Jasper, forty years ago. Charlotte Methuen (Oxford) begins by describing Bell’s early entry into the ecumenical arena in the aftermath of the first world war. Like many others, he was appalled by the disastrous consequences for Christian witness caused by the violent hatreds of the war, and drew the conclusion that all the churches should now unite in combating the evil forces which had led to this slaughter and destruction. They should also combine in binding up the wounds of war rather than keep on stressing their doctrinal differences. Such ideas led him to become involved with other leading European Protestant churchmen, such as the Swedish Archbishop, Nathan Söderblom, who was the key figure in promoting the Stockholm conference in 1925, out of which grew the Life and Work movement of the ecumenical church. Bell was to play a leading role in guiding its destinies. At the same time, he recognized that more was needed in tackling the harmful effects of unbridled nationalism, particularly in Germany. He organized a series of theological conversations between German and British theologians, which in fact only showed how far apart their theologies still were. But Bell’s liberal nature led him to hope that, with good will and the abandonment of war-time hostility, the British public could be persuaded that there was another Germany, apart from the militaristic and aggressive forces so often portrayed in British propaganda Naturally he was an ardent champion of all peace endeavours seeking to reconcile the two sides, and warmly supported Prime Minister Chamberlain throughout the Munich crisis in 1938. He had for example, made strenuous efforts to help those Germans persecuted by the Nazis, especially “non-Aryans”, and Quakers, He offered hospitality in Britain to some twenty German Protestant pastors and their families turned out by Nazi pressures, as described by James Radcliffe. When war was declared, he took a leading role in caring for the refugees, many of whom in 1940 were interned on the Isle of Man, even though they had fled from Hitler’s prisons to the supposed safety of Britain. Bell’s advocacy and personal involvement on their behalf are well described by Charmain Brinson (London). Even more notable were his public stances during the war against the Royal Air Force’s unlimited bombing campaigns and the unwarranted vilification of the enemy which he rightly feared would repeat the mistakes of the first world war, and make impossible the kind of rebuilding of a new Europe based on a new era of reconciliation and peace. Philip Coupland’s essay on Bell’s vision of post-war Europe shows both his far-sighted and idealistic stance, as well as the opposition he had to face. It was this belief that, despite all, the “better” Germans should be allowed to play their part in the reconstruction of the continent which made him argue against vindictive policies even for convicted German war criminals. In Tom Lawson’s view, this was too generous, and showed that Bell was not sympathetic enough to the victims, especially Jewish victims, and their desire for restitution and justice. In these efforts, Bell was to work closely with the General Secretary of the new World Council of Churches, the Dutchman, Visser ‘t Hooft, as described in an excellent portrait by Gerhard Besier. Both collaborated in recognizing the danger of Soviet communism. Dianne Kirby gives a clear evaluation of Bell’s stance during the Cold War, when he played a prominent part in outlining the clash between democracy and dictatorship, and identifying the Christian churches with those seeking to find a new path of mutual understanding without compromising their detestation of totalitarian regimes. As the editors suggest, Bell’s witness can be described as “Bridge building in desperate times”. JSC

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John Conway

November 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

November 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 11

Dear Friends,

This month marks the seventieth anniversary of the scandalous Nazi atrocity against the Jewish people, commonly known as the Crystal Night pogrom, during which the churches‚ failure to stand by the persecuted victims was notable, and is today seen as a symptom of their larger failure to oppose the whole Nazi system of ideological fanaticism and political oppression. But a few lone voices did protest. It is therefore perhaps fitting that this month’s reviews should be about the few courageous individuals who stood against the main stream, such as Elisabeth Schmitz, Eberhard Arnold and Pastor Paul Schneider.. Also that we should draw your attention to a new book about the striking movement in the German Evangelical Church after the war, which explicitly saw its Christian mission to bring reconciliation and repentance from Germany to the victims.

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) ed. M. Gailus, Elisabeth Schmitz
b) H. Brinkmann, God’s Ambassador. The Bruderhof in Nazi Germany
c) R. Wentorf, Paul Schneider
d) G. Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen. Friedensdienst

2) Memorial Tribute to Bishop Bell by Bishop Huber of Berlin

3) Book notes,

a) Blues Music and the Gospel Proclamation
b) Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Romania

4) Journal issue: Religion, State and Society

1a) Ed. M .Gailus, Elisabeth Schmitz und ihre Denkschrift gegen die Judenverfolgung. Konturen einer vergessenen Biographie (1893-1977). Berlin: Wichern Verlag 2008 ISBN 978-3-88981-213-8. 230 Pp.

Heroines are seldom found in the story of the Protestant Church Struggle against National Socialism. Very probably, this is because the history was written entirely by men. But now, recognition is being given to one woman, Dr Elisabeth Schmitz, for a small but striking contribution, which was alas! ignored at the time and forgotten ever since. In 1935 she had the courage to challenge the members of her Confessing Church, led by such men as Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth, to face up the Nazis‚ increasingly violent persecution of Germany’s Jews. The Memorandum she produced for the 1935 Synod was a model of clarity and foresight, which accurately predicted the likely fate of the Jewish minority in Germany. At the same time, she called on the Church to stand by its responsibility to defend the most threatened members of society, and to protest against the criminal discrimination being practised by the Nazi government.

Such a stance was highly unpopular. Only a few colleagues in the Confessing Church shared Dr Schmitz’s views. The fact that the Memorandum was put forward by a lay woman, who held no office in the Church, cannot have enhanced her cause. It was a sign of how far Nazi propaganda had already affected church ministers that, even in 1935, the majority of the responsible pastors were averse to giving any support to Jews, or at least reluctant to show any hostility to the now increasingly popular Nazi government.

Who was Elisabeth Schmitz? These essays, written for a 2007 conference, (briefly described in a German report in our Newsletter for September 2007) provide a succinct account of her career as a school mistress, trained under such distinguished scholars as Adolf von Harnack and Friedrich Meinecke. Since women were not allowed to be ordained at that time in the Evangelical Church, she went on to teach both religion and history to senior girls in high school. Her disposition was reserved, conscientious and highly upright in the German Protestant tradition. When convinced of the correctness of her views, she could be inflexible and determined. She refused to allow her independence of mind to be compromised for the sake of personal or political advantage. With such high intellectual and moral standards, she was naturally appalled by the fanatical tone of the Nazis‚ anti-Semitic tirades, as displayed in the press, the radio and party rallies. These contradicted her sense of order, truthfulness and human compassion. These propaganda attacks and attendant violence were totally antithetical to the values she tried to teach her students. She was inspired to make her early protest particularly by the fact that a close friend of Jewish origins had been dismissed from her medical practice. Elisabeth Schmitz offered her help and hospitality, and was subsequently denounced to the Gestapo for sharing her living quarters with as member of the despised race. This accumulated poisonous atmosphere, culminating in the Crystal Night pogrom of November 1938, led to Elisabeth Schmitz’s determination to give up her teaching position, since she could no longer in conscience teach as the Nazis ordered. Fortunately she was allowed to take early retirement, and returned to teaching after the war was over.

At the time she prepared her Memorandum on behalf of the Jews in the summer of 1935, the situation of the Protestant churches, and the Confessing Church in particular, was acutely critical. The Nazis had just appointed a new Minister for Church Affairs, and threatened to seize control of church administrations. Invective and propaganda attacks against the churches, as agents of World Jewry, were increasingly common and virulent, especially in the pages of Der Stürmer, the radical newspaper distributed nation-wide by the Nazi party agencies.

Most of the conservative clergy, especially the church leaders, while deploring the extremism of Der Stürmer, sought to prove their national loyalty. None wanted an open conflict with the state, particularly not on such a unpopular and touchy subject as the treatment of the Jews. It was therefore hardly surprising that Elisabeth Schmitz’s Memorandum was not debated at the 1935 Synod meeting. Only a half-hearted resolution was passed, affirming the universal duty of the Church to offer baptism to all, regardless of race. By ignoring the wider issue of the human rights of the Jews in Germany, the Confessing Church was able to avoid the possibility of being suppressed by the Gestapo. It was a Pyrrhic victory.

Three years later, at the time of the November 1938 pogrom, Schmitz repeated her challenge. She wrote a strong letter to Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer, who was in charge of Berlin’s most prominent church in Dahlem, after the arrest and imprisonment of Pastor Martin Niemöller. In this letter she called for the mobilization of church opinion to protest against the wanton violence against the Jews, suggested that church space be made available for the orphaned or burnt-out Jewish congregations, and urged that monetary collections be taken up to alleviate Jewish suffering. None of this happened.

The text of Schmitz’s Memorandum is here printed in full, along with a postscript written some months later. Since most of the information came from the public press, it does not reveal anything new about the Nazis‚ anti-Semitic campaign. Rather, its value today consists in showing how much an engaged witness could know about the extent of the violence, hatred, intimidation and discrimination practised against the Jewish minority, and about the dire consequences being felt by these victims. It is imbued with a strong sense of indignation at the injustices being inflicted, and an equal sense of frustration that the churches failed to take timely action to put a spoke in the wheel of such outrageous activities.

This collection of essays, ably edited by Professor Manfred Gailus, is a heart-warming, if belated, tribute. But it hardly explains why Schmitz’s contribution was for so long forgotten, or even incorrectly attributed to others. Gailus suggests some of the relevant factors, but the mystery remains. It is possibly all part of that painful and reluctant process of coming to terms with the past on the part of the German Protestant Church. It is also part of the process of trying to forge a new and better relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. It is therefore good that we can now hear the pioneering but lonely voice of this courageous lay woman, Elisabeth Schmitz.

It is equally welcome news that an American filmmaker, Steven Martin, has now compiled a documentary DVD film, entitled Elisabeth of Berlin, which will shortly become available for distribution. This 60-minute English-language documentary, fills in the background of Schmitz‚ protests. Archival footage of the Crystal Night is linked to the feelings of outrage shared by such people as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmut Gollwitzer. The English commentary is excellently supplied by Professor David Gushee, Martin Greschat and Andreas Pangritz. An eye-witness from those days, Rudolf Weckerling, now in his 90s, makes forthrightly apt comments, and the documentary is knit together by Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin. Steve Martin tells me that he is now available to show this film to interested groups or churches. Contact Vital Visions, 171a Mitchell Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830, USA.

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1b) Hugo Brinkmann, God’s Ambassadors. The Bruderhof in Nazi Germany. Farmington, Pennsylvania, Robertsbridge, Sussex, England: Plough Publishing House. 2001.

Five hundred years ago, Jakob Hutter, a German Anabaptist, called on his disciples to follow the pattern of communal life described in the Acts of the Apostles, renouncing both violence and private property. These Hutterites were persecuted for their pious nonconformity and exiled. Eventually and much later, a few managed to establish colonies in remote rural areas of the United States and Canada, where they still survive.

In Germany, after the disastrous defeats of 1918, a lone but courageous and charismatic preacher, Eberhard Arnold, decided to revitalize Hutter’s ideas. He managed to establish a community, or Bruderhof, on a piece of run-down farmland in the hilly area of central Germany, near Fulda. His inspiring evangelical leadership attracted young idealists, longing to escape from the sinful world of war and capitalism, and including a number of young pacifists from Switzerland, Holland and Sweden. They eked out a living by looking after children in need, referred to them by the local authorities, or by peddling their handicrafts.

Arnold was well aware that such a ministry was both daunting and even dangerous. As he said: “To be an ambassador is something tremendous. It seems that we are nothing at all except what the King of God’s Kingdom would have us do. When we take this service upon us, we enter into mortal danger”.

This prediction was soon enough fulfilled after the Nazis took power in 1933. The Bruderhof aroused suspicion that it was a communist cell, and its declared pacifism antagonised its neighbours. Arnold’s open refusal to support the Nazis’ rearmament programme, and his declared opposition to the hate-filled antisemitism of the new regime, only led to open hostility. In November 1933, when he refused to endorse the national plebiscite requiring undying loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the result was predictable. A gang of Nazi thugs descended on the Bruderhof, searching everywhere for seditious literature or hidden armaments. By 1934 their school was forcibly closed, the foster-children’s support was cut off, their charitable status was revoked, and their assistance to homeless vagrants declared to be a menace to public order. Their economy was throttled. They were forced to evacuate their children to an Alpine refuge in Lichtenstein lest they be forcibly placed in a Nazified school.

Arnold’s apocalyptic theology had always led him to expect persecution, although he maintained a loyal attitude towards the state and its rulers. But he and his followers would not compromise on their basic beliefs. So inevitably tension rose steadily. Luckily he managed to preserve many of his sermons, addresses and letters to his supporters. These form the basis of this account, written by Hugo Brinkmann, of the Bruderhof’s sufferings at the hands of the Nazis. They have been excellently translated and published in a very small edition for an English audience by his American followers, Art and Mary Wiser, of Ulster Park, New York.

As the Nazis’ pressure on the churches to conform increased, the pastors and congregations were more and more caught in a clash of loyalties between their faith and their nation. For his part, Arnold fully shared Luther’s view of the two kingdoms: the state existed to control evil, if necessary by force; but the Church is within the sphere of absolute love. It must proclaim the spirit of unity and purity, but could have no truck with heathen Nazism.

This incompatibility became even clearer in March 1935 when Adolf Hitler reintroduced compulsory military service for all young men. In the Bruderhof, the memory of the earlier Hutterites’ sufferings for the cause of peace was evoked vividly. All the affected youth left at once for Lichtenstein, and were replaced by foreign nationals. But the Bruderhof’s prophetic witness to the power of Christian love and the need for non-violence and social justice was overwhelmed by the Nazis’ militaristic propaganda and preparations for a future war. The subsequent proclamation of the Nuremberg racial laws only increased Arnold’s sense of impending doom and disaster. And the community’s future was also imperilled by the lack of funds, the blatant hostility of the local authorities and its neighbours, and even by the failure of some of its members to live up to Arnold’s spiritual expectations.

In November 1935, Eberhard Arnold died in hospital after a botched operation to mend a broken legbone. A few months later Arnold’s successors decided to move the Bruderhof from both Germany and Lichtenstein to England. Although penniless, they were able to rent a farm property in the Cotswolds, and start all over again. Luckily the British authorities granted them refugee status and the Quakers came to their financial rescue. However, even in England, resentment and hostility against this tiny band of God’s ambassadors was evident. As the threatening clouds of war gathered, this group of Germans, pacifists and exiles was often isolated or at least cold-shouldered.

In Germany, in April 1937, by order of the Gestapo, the Bruderhof’s farm was compulsorily confiscated and the community dissolved. The few remaining members were expelled under guard, apart from three men detained in prison for alleged fraud. They were finally, after several months, released and packed off to Britain. The story of their escape to freedom makes a fitting close to this lively account of Hutterite obedience to the faith they had received and the sufferings they endured as a consequence.

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1c) Rudolf Wentorf, Paul Schneider, Witness of Buchenwald, translated by Daniel Bloesch. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing 2008. 401 Pp. ISBN 978-1-57383-417-9.

Pastor Paul Schneider was murdered by the guards in Buchenwald concentration camp in July 1939. Subsequently he became commemorated as the first martyr of the German Evangelical Church to die at the hands of the Nazis. After the war his widow published a moving and widely read memoir, Der Prediger von Buchenwald, translated into English in an abbreviated version by Edwin Robertson in 1956. Luckily a much fuller biography was later published in Germany by Rudolf Wentorf, which included an almost day-to -day account of Schneider’s valiant and persistent defiance of the Gestapo and other Nazi agencies. Thanks to his assiduous research in police, state and church archives, Wentorf is able to reproduce contemporary documents which outline the Nazi tactics to get rid of this unwanted challenger to their supremacy. Schneider was a simple Rhineland pastor, who early on raised the flag of alarm at the readiness of his colleagues and parishioners to compromise with the ideological heresies of Nazism. From 1933 onwards Schneider’s steadfastness in defence of the Gospel, and his refusal to accept any deviance, was taken as a dangerous political protest by the local Nazi authorities. In fact, Schneider belonged to the wing of the Confessing Church which was largely apolitical, but staunchly dedicated to the truth upheld in the Church’s tradition. By 1937 his controversial stance, and the denunciation of some of his parishioners, had led the Gestapo to order his eviction from his parish. But he refused to leave, and, even when expelled forcibly, returned to his pastoral charge in order to fulfil his God-given responsibilities. The result was that in November 1937 he was sent to Buchenwald and placed in solitary confinement. But he there maintained his faithful witness by shouting out his prayers and sermons to any who could hear, and thus earned the description of the Pastor of Buchenwald.

It is therefore very welcome that Wentorf’s biography has now been republished for the first time in English by Regent College Publications, Vancouver, in an excellent translation by Daniel Bloesch. This makes available to a wider audience the story of Schneider’s resistance to the subtle and relentless pressure to conform imposed by the Nazis, as well as the horrendous stages of persecution which eventually led to his death. Though not as well known as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Schneider’s faithfulness will remain highly significant for all those who seek to learn from the lessons of Nazi Germany for the life and witness of the Church.

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1d) Gabriele Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen. Friedensdienst. Aber man kann es einfach machen. Göttingen: Lamuv Verlag 2008. 371 Pp. ISBN 978-3-88977-684-6

In 1945 only a handful of Germans was prepared to come to terms with the atrocities, violence and mass murders committed by their Nazi rulers in the preceding years, or to face up to their own collaboration and complicity. One of them was Pastor Martin Niemöller, newly released from eight years in concentration camps, who called his colleagues and parishioners to a mission of repentance. He became highly unpopular. And the 1945 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, of which he was a principal author, likewise aroused negative feelings among many churchmen. The vast majority of Germans took refuge in a blanket amnesia, looked for convenient alibis, and concealed their own participation in Nazi crimes.

It was therefore many years before the full extent of the German criminal activities, especially in Eastern Europe, became known, or the consequences recognized. Only then could more positive measures begin, seeking to restore Germany’s moral reputation. One of those most actively involved was Lothar Kreyssig, whose Christian motivation led him to seek reparation for the victims of German warfare and bloodshed. He was a Saxon provincial judge, and very active in church work. By the 1950s he had been elected as President of the German Evangelical Church’s National Synod, and was thus an influential member of the church hierarchy.

In 1958 he introduced a resolution calling on the Synod to support a programme whereby young Germans would spend a year in restoration work on behalf of the Nazis‚ victims, especially in Poland, the Soviet Union and the newly-established State of Israel. For Kreyssig, this was far more than a gesture of humanitarian goodwill. Rather it was to be a dedicated mission of reparation and reconciliation by which at least some practical measures of Christian solidarity could be expressed, especially across international borders. Too often after 1945 Germans had focussed attention on their own sufferings, and had ignored those they had inflicted on foreigners. Kreyssig was determined to put this right. He was particularly concerned to attack the self-righteousness of many Germans who had turned a blind eye to the Nazis‚ crimes. Even those who now claimed they had opposed Nazism all along should remember that they had not done enough to prevent these disasters in the first place.

This moral urge for reconciliation led Kreyssig to launch his idealistic scheme and to recruit a small band of self-conscious Christians to undertake works of practical service for the survivors in the victims‚ homelands. Only such concrete activist experiences could carry credibility, and also avoid any pretence at self-congratulation. Only thus could Germany’s moral reputation be restored, and the past crimes finally be atoned for.

Naturally such an endeavour met with bureaucratic difficulties, particularly from the communist countries, including Kreyssig’s own East German authorities, who suspected the intentions of such an explicitly Christian group. A more favourable response came from ecumenical partners in both Holland and Norway. The first group of volunteers went in August 1959 to northern Norway to construct a home for the mentally and physically handicapped. These first ventures were spontaneous but ill-prepared. Not enough care had been taken to ensure that the projects were feasible, or could be executed by well-meaning but ill-trained German youth. Too little contact had been established with the local authorities, both secular and church. There were the usual language difficulties, and personality clashes. But above all, these young people only partially caught on to Kreyssig’s vision of making them ambassadors of expiation, bearing the burden of Germany’s guilt. Many of these young people were not too enamoured of the explicit piety, with morning devotions, bible study, and evening worship, which were built into the programme. And as the years went by, it was increasingly difficult for these youngsters to feel a sense of remorse for crimes committed before they were born, and for which they felt no responsibility. Many, in fact, would cheerfully have undertaken the same kind of relief work if under secular auspices. In the long run Kreyssig’s hopes for a reinvigoration of dedicated churchmanship had to be laid aside. As Ms Kammerer notes, this German venture came to resemble other similar youth programmes such as the American Peace Corps or the British Voluntary Service Overseas, whereby the motive of reparation was replaced by reconstruction.

Inevitably Aktion Sühnezeichen was caught up in the polemics and politics of the Cold War. Kreyssig’s aim was to have his young helpers, recruited from both east and west, make a common witness for peace and reconciliation across the Iron Curtain. This hope was thwarted by the politicians. The East German teams were refused exit visas even to neighbouring Poland. Likewise the deep-rooted antagonisms between Germans and Poles, even in the churches, were not easily surmounted. The first Sühnezeichen group to undertake work in Auschwitz had to travel there individually and unobtrusively by bicycle. Their work of reconciliation in this camp was a small contribution towards changing the poisoned atmosphere in both church and politics. But it was still many years before similar resentments at home in Germany were overcome. Too often these small acts of Christian witness were attacked as “befouling their own nest” or “capitulating to the communists”. And the fact that Kreyssig and his staff were based in East Berlin, and hence, after 1961, unable to visit the projects undertaken by his West German supporters, only made for unavoidable tensions. In 1968 the first work-camp in the notorious Czech fortress of Theresientstadt was cut short by the invading Soviet troops. The message of reconciliation and peace seemed threatened by overwhelming political forces, even though now more than ever necessary.

The 1970s were a period of sobering reassessment. In East Germany Aktion Sühnezeichen was hobbled by the communist authorities, and its activities increasingly watched by the Stasi. Emphasis was placed on local work on behalf of the mentally or physically handicapped, on repair of Jewish cemeteries, or on pilgrimages to former concentration camps. In the western half of the country, greater freedom existed to promote the Aktion’s peace work. But it still aroused opposition from conservative circles. Only in the 1980s did the international consensus move towards support for peace through disarmament. But criticism also came from the Aktion’s own participants. Why did so many of these social action projects seemingly prop up the status quo, instead of radically altering the corrupting social structure? Why were the founder’s pious ideals not turned into prophetic political witness? Too often, it seemed Realpolitik guided the organization.

But the call of peace through reconciliation was too important to be abandoned. And in the 1980s new horizons opened up. In West Germany, Aktion joined with other peace groups to oppose NATO’s military policies; in East Germany, many Aktion participants were to be found in the peace groups which sprang up in local Protestant churches, and which eventually grew to be a significant political force. The overthrow of the communist regime in 1989 broke all previous patterns. After the 1990 reunification of the whole country, Aktion’s call for reconciliation was much needed, especially in the controversial union of the agency’s east and west branches. Its overseas projects were to be expanded into thirteen different countries, usually with the support of local governments and churches. But Christian solidarity with the victims of war and violence is still the group’s hallmark.

Gabriele Kammerer’s well-researched and incisively written account of the organization’s fifty years is amplified by a number of well-chosen photographs, identifying the individuals and projects involved. It is much to be hoped that an English translation could be produced, since the story of this courageous German agency for reconciliation and peace deserves to be widely known as an example for others.

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2) Memorial Tribute to Bishop Bell

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bishop George Bell of Chichester, the following tribute was written by the German Evangelical Church’s Presiding Bishop, Wolfgang Huber of Berlin:

“Your work will never be forgotten in the history of the German Church”. This was the view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing to his friend George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester in England in 1937. He had good reasons for such praise. No other foreign church leader had shown such a friendly and intensive, yet at times critical interest in the fate of the churches and of the Christians in Germany as had George Bell. He was a valiant campaigner for peace and truth, and did not hesitate to lend the authority of his office and personality to his convictions, including matters in the political sphere. He died on October 3rd fifty years ago – a very proper cause for remembrance.

George K.A. Bell was born on February 4th 1883, the son of a clergyman. After studying theology, he served for three years as a curate in the slums of Leeds. Then came several years as Chaplain and Tutor in Oxford until 1914 when he became the private secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was given the special responsibility for international and inter-church relations. During the first world war he was much engaged in interdenominational action on behalf of the war orphans, and then – together with Archbishop Nathan Soderblom of Uppsala, Sweden – was active in organising the exchange of prisoners-of-war. These experiences led Bell, after the war, to become a champion of collaboration with the Lutheran churches, a strong advocate of the nascent ecumenical movement, and an organiser of international theological exchanges. In 1929 he was appointed Bishop of Chichester, and also from 1932 to 1934 he was President of “Life and Work”, one of the main branches of the new ecumenical movement.

The Bishop of Chichester took an active interest in the German Church Struggle from the beginning. In April 1933 he expressed publicly the ecumenical movement’s concern about the early stages of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany. In September he circulated a strong resolution against the introduction of the so-called Aryan Paragraph, discriminating against Jews, and its adoption by sections of the German Evangelical Church. He first met Dietrich Bonhoeffer at a conference in 1931, and when Bonhoeffer became Pastor for the German Churches in London in 1933, the two men developed a strong and trusting relationship. Bonhoeffer was in fact Bell’s principal source of information about events developing in Germany. For his part, Bell was assiduous in bringing this information to a wider British public, particularly through his frequent letters to the main newspaper The Times. In contrast to some sections of British public opinion and also some leading members of the Church of England, Bell took a strong stand from 1933 onwards in support of the Confessing Church in its struggle, and against all forms of fascism.

Early on, he began to organize measures to assist refugees from Germany. After he became a member of the House of Lords in 1937, he continually urged the British Government to give increased support for such persecuted people. It is possible to suppose that his timely reporting to the British public about the arrest and trial of Martin Niemöller prevented the latter’s murder in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

When the second world war broke out, Bell threw himself into activities designed to help the refugees fleeing the continent, and also the resident Germans interned in England, as well as for British conscientious objectors. Bell was no pacifist, but he decisively and publicly repudiated the tactic of area bombing of German towns, through his passionate speeches in the House of Lords. These speeches were a direct challenge to the British Government and to large sections of public opinion. It was a sign of Bell’s courage and moral determination that he was not deterred to state his opinions and take such an unpopular stand.

George Bell was one of the decisive figures in the post-1945 world who enabled the German churches to return to the ecumenical family. He was one of the first to go back to Germany in 1945 to show his friendship for those “true” Germans who had survived. He gave a most moving sermon in a church service in the heavily bombed Marienkirche in Berlin, and was clearly deeply moved to see the conditions of the refugees crowding the platforms of the Lehrter Station in Berlin. Only two months after the war’s end, he organized a Thanksgiving Service in memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Holy Trinity Church, London. On this occasion he recounted to the congregation Bonhoeffer’s last message to his English friend: “Tell the Bishop that this is for me the end, but also the beginning of a new life. I believe with him in our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests”.

3a) Book note

Dick Pierard draws attention to a new book which he, together with Edwin Arnold at Clemson University, South Carolina, has translated and edited: Theo Lehmann, Blues Music and Gospel Proclamation. The Extraordinary Life of a Courageous East German Pastor, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2008. Born in 1934 and son of a distinguished German missiologist, Lehmann studied theology, was ordained and served as a pastor in a congregation in Chemnitz (then Karl-Marx-Stadt) of the Landeskirche of Saxony. An unabashed confessionalist, he also became a youth evangelist and incurred the constant wrath and surveillance of the State. Since reunification, he continues to work as an evangelist throughout Germany. His great interest in life is actually American black music – Negro spirituals, blues and jazz, and he published several things in the GDR on this topic, including a doctoral dissertation at Halle, “Negro Spirituals: Geschichte und Theologie,” which was then reprinted after reunification. His memoir, Freiheit wird dann sein: Aus meinem Leben, has sold widely in Germany. He is not shy of controversy and may not suit all opinions. But well worth reading.

CharRichP@aol.com

3b) L Stan and L.Turcescu, Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Romania, Oxford 2007. This husband and wife team of Romanian scholars, now both teaching in Canada, provides a useful survey of events in the religious sphere in Romania since the fall of its despotic, manic dictatorship in 1989. Romanians have been obliged to rethink and reshape all their public institutions so the churches have been engaged in what has proved to be a difficult struggle for self-identification and definition. The plurality of church life has been a barrier in the way of the Romanian Orthodox Church’s attempt to reclaim its position as the “national” or established church, and the legacy of its former subservience to the Communist regime still poisons relationships. Disputes over the property of other church bodies such as the long-forbidden Greek Catholics, have only made Romanian church life more complex and unsettled. Doubts remain about the Orthodox Church’s support for a democratic political society, as with its strong opposition to Romania’s joining the European Union, and its tactics in matters of education and morality give rise for concern.

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4) Journal Issue: Religion, State and Society, Vol. 36, no. 3, September 2008 is devoted to six articles on the relations between religion and law in various settings, viz. The European Court of Human Rights, Bulgaria, Post-Communist Russia and Hungary, Spain, Australia and the Middle East. These papers deal with the constitutional and legal problems arising between various denominations as factors in the secular states in which they interact. The authors describe a range of models from strict separation to the established and historic church-state relationship still existing in certain countries.

With every best wish to you all,
John S.Conway