Tag Archives: Mark Edward Ruff

Conference Report: “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011

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

Conference Report: “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011, Boston, MA.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

Sponsored by the American Catholic Historical Association as a contribution to its annual meeting, the panel, “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” put on display the work of three scholars of German Catholicism who directed their attention to the thirty-year span from 1933 through 1963. Ulrike Ehret of the University of Erlangen in Germany analyzed the attitudes of German Catholics towards the Nazi state. Kevin Spicer of Stonehill College honed in on the small number of German Catholic priests who spoke out on behalf of the beleaguered Jewish population. Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University moved ahead to the postwar period to analyze the efforts of the Berlin Prelate, Walter Adolph, to commemorate the German Catholic martyrs from the Nazi era. Beth Griech-Pollele, professor at Bowling Green State University, chaired the panel.

In her paper, “Negotiating ‘Volksgemeinschaft:’ Roman Catholics and the NS-State.” Ulrike Ehret discussed how the National Socialist ideal of Volksgemeinschaft (national unity) became so persuasive to ordinary Catholics. Ehret argued that ordinary Catholics, like most Germans, nurtured and supported the idea of a revived and strengthened nation, even if it meant establishing a German nation without Jews. Drawing on her examination of government reports on public opinion as well as of petitions and denunciations addressed to the government as well as to the bishops, Ehret suggested that the Catholic bishops and clergy turned the concept of Volksgemeinschaft into a means to protect particular Roman Catholic interests and traditions. To warn their flock about divisive state politics, Catholic leaders frequently revived the memories of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf.  Most of their protests were directed against Nazi religious policies; relatively few focused on Nazi racial policies. Yet most German Catholics, according to Ehret, insisted that the Volksgemeinschaft needed to be properly rooted in religious traditions. In popular opinion, this meant ignoring National Socialist midsummer festivals, attending mass and participating in pilgrimages in growing numbers. One needs to look at what Catholics did rather than at what they said.

Compared to Catholic anti-Semitism during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, Catholic publications rarely reverted to anti-Jewish images. However, Catholic popular defense literature clung to traditional creeds and values of the Catholic Church. It defended biblical Jewry but failed to defend modern Jewry against contemporary anti-Semitic prejudices. Indeed, the Catholic defense was often clad in the language of the time and consequently used images of Jews that strikingly resembled those used in the Nazis’ notorious racial rhetoric. The defense drew on images of Jews as the sources behind Bolshevism, as usurers and as men and women of a different race. These were all images that may have been the essence of how Catholics viewed Jews at the time.

In his paper, “Catholic Clergy and Jews under National Socialism,” Kevin Spicer continued his examination of the relationship of Jews and Catholic priests during the Third Reich.  In particular, he examined the portrayal of Jews in priests’ sermons and public addresses.

Mark Edward Ruff’s paper, “Walter Adolph and the Construction of Catholic Martydom”  analyzed how one leading Catholic chronicler of the past constructed images of Catholic martyrdom. Between 1945 and 1965, Adolph penned more than six books that described Catholic opposition to Nazism and the suffering of Catholic victims of National Socialism, including Bernhard Lichtenberg and Erich Klausener. As the editor of the diocesan newspaper for Berlin, Das Petrusblatt, he composed and put the finishing touches on many additional commemorative articles. In addition, he spearheaded the effort to build a church to memorialize Catholic victims, Maria Regina Martyrum, which was consecrated in 1963.

Yet Adolph’s commemorative efforts were inextricably bound up with the political and ideological battles of the postwar era. His diocese straddled both the Western and Eastern zones of Berlin. From the former, he was confronted by an array of church critics who denounced Catholic resistance during the Third Reich as feeble. From the latter, he was confronted by regular articles in the Communist press that argued that the church had been in league with Fascism. These articles extolled Communist victims of the Third Reich as the sole legitimate martyrs of the past and typically couched their suffering in a quasi-religious language.  To defray the charges of Western church critics like Rolf Hochhuth, he and others claimed that Maria Regina Martyrum was the answer to Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy.

Ruff’s paper argued that Adolph’s created a hermeneutic of martyrdom that was, in fact, a combination plate. It was written in a language equal parts theological, journalistic, and political. But it also necessitated glossing over the less savory aspects of those Catholic victims of National Socialism he placed into the category of martyrs. In his profile of Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action who was murdered on the night of the Röhm purge in 1934, he carefully deleted all of the sentences from the original manuscript that described Klausener’s sympathies in 1933 and 1934 for the National Socialist movement.

The comments were offered by James Bernauer, SJ, professor of philosophy at Boston College, who expounded upon the theme of martyrdom that linked the three papers. At the end of the war, he noted, Pope Pius XII spoke of the “sorrowful passion of the Church” and of the “incessant opposition maintained by the Church” in the Nazi years.  “But did the German Bishops,” he asked, “ever summon Catholics to heroic resistance?  Did the Bishops themselves ever risk real as opposed to symbolic martyrdom?” Pope John Paul II’s numerous apologies, he suggested, might be thought of as a “corrective embrace of reality for Church responsibility in what had happened to Jews, women, Protestant reformers, American Indians, the Eastern Churches and so forth.”

 

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Review of Michael Hirschfeld/Maria Anna Zumholz, eds., Oldenburgs Priester unter NS-Terror, 1932 – 1945. Herrschaftsalltag in Milieu und Diaspora

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

Review of Michael Hirschfeld/Maria Anna Zumholz, eds., Oldenburgs Priester unter NS-Terror, 1932 – 1945. Herrschaftsalltag in Milieu und Diaspora (Münster: Aschendorgg Verlag, 2006), 818 pp. ISBN: 3-402-02492-6.

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 96 No. 1 (January 2010): 160-161, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

This mammoth volume details the persecution of Roman Catholic priests in Oldenburg during the years of National Socialist rule.  Containing nearly 80 separate accounts of individual priests and clergy who ran afoul of the Nazi state, this compilation is a Festschrift for Joachim Kuropka, the historian at the local University in Vechta known for his regional histories of the Oldenburg region in Northwestern Germany and his scholarship on the Cardinal of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen.

This dense volume centers on Oldenburg, a long, slender sliver that technically belonged to the diocese of Münster but was cut off geographically by the diocese of Osnabrück. The northern sections were part of the Catholic diaspora, an almost exclusively Protestant bastion known for his strong support for the Nazis. In contrast, the southern regions, which included the regional centers of Cloppenburg and Vechta, was home to a thriving Catholic milieu.  With than 90 percent of the population consisting of registered Catholics, the Catholic parishes there boasted thriving ancillary organizations and a dynamic parish life.

The editors, Michael Hirschfeld and Maria Anna Zumholz, leave little doubt that the strength of the Catholic milieu in these southern regions contributed to the efficacy of actions that thwarted Nazi efforts to dismantle the building blocks of this Catholic subculture. They argue that the milieu in this region did not erode. The “indicators” of religious strength – the number of priests in a region, Easter attendance, etc. – show that the milieu, in spite of significant persecution, more than held its own. Nor did clergy contribute to an attitude of uncritical obedience to the Nazi state. Instead, they were in the forefront of the resistance to Nazi ideology, seeking to counter the anti-Christian attacks launched by the Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg. As such, these priests earned the special enmity of Nazi enforcers in the Gestapo, who cracked down – sometimes methodically, sometimes sporadically – on Catholic institutions and their associates.

To be sure, this focus on persecution – the arrests, the threats, the disruptions to parish life – is an indispensable part of the story of the Catholic church under Nazi rule. For in fact, as the section on regional Nazi perpetrators in the Gestapo, party and the courts makes clear, hardliners sought to eradicate nearly all traces of religious influence on German public life.

But this is a selective lens with which to view this era, one which is by definition, incomplete. The focus on persecution necessarily precludes an analysis of accommodations to the Nazi state made by other clergy either by choice or out of necessity.  Absent are what might be termed the grey areas in the relationship between the church and National Socialism. To what extent were these priests representative of the clergy as a whole and were there areas in which they granted their approval to the other aspects of the Nazi agenda and state? The editors pay lip service to these questions, but their answers ultimately hearken back to works of earlier eras. The narratives they create are those produced already in the 1940s by chroniclers such as Johannes Neuhäusler : the patterns they use were laid out in the 1980s and 1990s in the voluminous works, Priester unter Hitlers Terror, produced by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn.  This is not to negate their findings but to suggest that this is but one part – and a necessary part – of a larger picture.

 

 

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Conference Report: Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland

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

Conference Report: Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland, March 24-26, 2010, Münster,Germany.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

The most controversial pontiff of the 20th century was the focus of a three-day symposium assembled and hosted by Professor Hubert Wolf and sponsored by the European research network, Pio XI, and the Excellence Cluster, Religion and Politics, at the University of Münster. Bringing together more than thirty researchers between March 26 and 28, this symposium honed in on Eugenio Pacelli’s years as the Nuncius in Germany between 1917 and 1929. Participants came from more than eight nations, including Italy,Germany,Poland, the Czech Republic,Israel, the United States,Austria and Switzerland. All presentations were translated simultaneously into Italian and/or German, the two official conference languages.

Keynote addresses were delivered by Romano Prodi, the former Prime Minister of Italy and current President of the European Commission and Mordechai Lewy, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican. In very general terms, Prodi underscored the significance of the disastrous interwar years for the creation of the European Union and the importance of the European Union for the European future. Lewy, on the other hand, spoke much more critically of the conference subject. While dismissive of the epithet, “Hitler’s Pope,” Lewy spoke sharply of Pacelli’s own lack of interest in the fate of European Jews, particularly in the postwar era. The Vatican, he pointed out, was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel, regarding it as the dangerous creation of Communist and atheist forces. The curia, he added, was a bastion of anti-Semitic attitudes. Pius himself greeted the news of Israel’s creation “with mixed feelings,” and called for a “crusade of prayer” for “the sacred land.”

The centerpiece of the symposium was the formal presentation of a massive critical online edition of the approximately 7000 reports that Pacelli transmitted from Germany to the Vatican during his years as Nuncius from 1917 through 1929. Based on software  developed through the assistance of the German Historical Institutes in Rome and London, this online edition places these reports into an online databank, allowing scholars to search for documents by name, date or keyword. This software – DENQ  (Digitalle Editionen neuzeitlicher Quellen) – will allow scholars to compare drafts of Pacelli’s reports with the final versions he dispatched to Rome through multiple windows and color-coded texts.  Observing often subtle changes provide valuable glimpses into Pacelli’s thought processes. In one such report, Pacelli altered his description of Kaiser Wilhelm II from “nondeltutto equilibrato” to “nondeltutto normale.” By allowing users to open multiple windows, this software also provides user with valuable biographical information, e.g. birth and death dates, about those to whom Pacelli refers in his reports. To make optimal use of these features, users will need to use browsers based on Webkit or Gecko, including Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. While it will ultimately take twelve years to bring this project to fruition, the project directors will not wait until then to open up this edition to scholars. Beginning with the year 1917, Pacelli’s reports will be released in regular intervals.

Following the unveiling of this online edition, three papers subsequently examined aspects of Pacelli’s tenure as nuncius.  The German scholar, Klaus Unterburger, described Pacelli’s skepticism vis-à-vis many German theologians as well as attempts to muzzle potentially critical voices. In describing Pacelli’s love for Germany, Phillip Cheneaux, Professor at the Lateran University, underscored the continuities between Pacelli’s years as Nuncios and his later pontificate. The Italian historian Emma Fattorini emphasized the wartime influence of the German Center Party politician, Matthias Erzberger, on Pacelli’s understanding of German politics. Though chronologically far removed from the interwar years, the scandals put in motion by the German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, in the mid-1960s were at the center of Mark Edward Ruff’s presentation. Ruff focused on the missteps of Catholic defenders of Pacelli and, in particular, of the German Catholic media, whose clumsy counterattacks played into the hands of Hochhuth and his champions.

On the third day of the symposium, a panel of six scholars compared nuncios throughout Europe during the interwar era.  Thomas Brechenmacher, Professor in Potsdam, focused on Alberto Vassallo-Torregrossa (1925-1934) and the better known Cesare Orsenigo (1930-1945).  Rupert Klieber, Gianfranco Armando, Alberto Guasco, Emilia Hrabovec, Stanislaw Wilk provided respective portraits of the nuncios in Vienna, Paris, Rome, Prague and Warsaw. Of these nuncios, the most notable was Achille Ratti, Nuncio in Warsaw between 1919 and 1921 before being anointed Pope in 1922.

A final panel provided an overview of political Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Urs Altermatt, Professor in Fribourg, sketched the history political Catholicism in Switzerland, while Karsten Ruprecht laid out the trajectory of the Roman Catholic Center Party in Germany. Walter Iber summed up the history of the Christian Socialist Party in Austria: Stefano Trinchese provided the same for the Partito Popolari in Italy. Jaroslaw Sebek, finally, described the papal policies towards interwar Bohemia.

The conveners intend to publish the conference proceedings within the next year. More details will provided here at a later date.

 

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Conference Announcement: International Symposium: Pius XII as the Nuncio in Germany

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Conference Announcement: International Symposium: Pius XII as the Nuncio in Germany, March 24-26, 2010, Münster, Germany.

By Mark Edward Ruff

The most controversial pontiff of the 20th century is serving as the subject of an international symposium sponsored by the European research network, “Pio XI” and the Excellence-Cluster, “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster. Featuring nearly thirty speakers from a variety of nations including, Germany, the United States, Switzerland and Italy, the conference is intended to present the findings of researchers analyzing documents from the pontificate of Pius XI that were released in 2003 and 2006. According to the conference convener, Professor Hubert Wolf of the University of Münster, these documents provide a comprehensive picture of the Roman curie between 1922 and 1939 as well as new glimpses into the person and personality of Pacelli, who served as the Papal Nuncio in Germany and the Vatican Secretary of State before his appointment as Pope in 1939.  They provide the basis for a major online edition of more than 6500 documents that will be culled and edited by researchers in Münster over the next twelve years and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

These documents shed new insights into the relations between the Roman curia and Catholic political parties across the European continent. One section of the conference will compare these relations between the Vatican and Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia and Austria. Another will compare Pacelli with other papal nuncios from the day in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France and Austria.

Saul Friedländer, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of a book, Pius XII and the Third Reich from 1965, was to have served as the keynote speaker. Because of his recent illness, however, the keynote roles have been given to Mordechay Lewy, Israeli Ambassador to the Vatican, and Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission and former Prime Minister of Italy.

For more information, contact Mark Ruff at ruff@slu.edu.

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