Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2026)

Review of Marlene Pape, August Marahrens: Der erste Bischof der Landeskirche Hannovers (Vandenhoecht & Ruprecht, 2025).

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin, as originally published in Zeitzeichen (January 2026). Translated from the German by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL.

Finally, it’s here: the thoroughly clarifying, scholarly biography of August Marahrens, the first bishop of the Hanover Regional Church. We’ve had to wait long enough for it. After 1945, Bishop Marahrens was controversial in Hanover for a long time. Now, hopefully, he is no longer so.

This church history dissertation, now available and supervised by Thomas Kaufmann in Göttingen, is a 500-page book that provides sufficient clarity. Marahrens, whose tenure as bishop largely coincided with the Hitler era, was an avowed Lutheran and, at the same time, a staunch National Socialist who revered and admired Hitler. He could be called a doubly-professed National Socialist Christian. Many contemporaries today believe that such a mental balancing act simply does not add up. The Hanoverian church leader Marahrens and many other renowned Protestant theologians of the Third Reich show that such dual faith was indeed possible and can even be considered a specific characteristic of the Nazi era.

Marlene Pape’s biography is the first to examine Marahrens in his entirety, including his family background, upbringing, education, and early career steps leading up to his election as bishop in 1925. The bishop painted a bleak picture of the Weimar Republic and longed for a new beginning. He saw this in the National Socialist movement, from which he hoped would bring about an end to the allegedly unbridled modernity, a return to Christianity, and a new cultural conservatism amongst Germans. Continue reading →