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Conference Report: Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories, Professional Interpretations

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

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

By Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, 2012

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, Emden, Germany, November 8-10, 2012

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On November 8-10, 2012, a conference took place under the title, “‘Befreier der Deutschen Seele:’ Politische Inszenierung und Instrumentalisierung von Reformationsjubiläen im 20. Jahrhundert.” Several preliminaries are important. First of all, this conference served as the annual meeting of the journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, and the papers will be published next year in the journal. Andrea Strübind, a Protestant professor of church history at Oldenburg, served as a prime organizer and will edit the subsequent volume. Johanna Rahner, a professor at the Institute for Catholic Theology at the University of Kassel, co-hosted this event, bringing a strong Catholic presence to this very Protestant topic of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Finally, this conference took place in a delightful setting of historical significance. Emden, a medieval town in the northwest corner of Germany, was home to a significant Reformed presence in the 16th century. Thus we were able to meet in the Johannes a Lasco Library, an institution of 160,000 volumes, including many books from Erasmus’s library, a Bible signed by Martin Luther as a gift to one of his sons, and a letter from Jean Calvin to the congregation in Emden.

The conference itself focused on celebrations of Martin Luther’s birthday and/or the Reformation. Three speakers looked back to the 19th century. Ralf Hennings and Hans-Georg Ulrichs compared anniversaries of the Reformation celebrated in 1817 and 1917, in Oldenburg and Heideberg respectively. Frederic Hartweg spoke on the 200th anniversary of the Edict of Nantes in 1885. It was celebrated quietly in France by small groups of Huguenots, frightened by the possibility of Catholic backlash, even though Michelet, for example, called Huguenots “the best French citizens.” Bismarck also praised Huguenots and Berlin celebrated the Edict of Nantes openly in 1885. By then a mythology of Huguenots gloriously escaping France to become good Prussians had veiled a harsher history of refugee status in previous times.

The rest of the conference focused on the 20th century, plus the 500th anniversary of the Reformation forthcoming in 2017. One theme emerged in the opening lecture, given by Professor Wolfgang Thönissen of Paderborn (just before he had to leave for Rome to fulfill his role as an ex officio member of the Vatican Council). Thönissen argued that Catholics in the twentieth century have begun to see the work of Martin Luther much less in terms of a “split” in the church and much more in terms of “reform.” Vatican II, for example, looked to Luther as it worked toward reforms of its own. John Paul II and Benedict XVI both studied Luther. Catholics began to focus on things like the Augsburg Confession and the doctrine of justification by faith. Thönissen argued that Catholics and Protestants can and should celebrate the “catholicity” they hold in common: 1) Salvation by faith, 2) a church standing under the Word of God, and 3) a church requiring a certain “Ordnung.” With these things in common, both Catholics and Protestants can celebrate Luther in 2017.

Additional Catholic speakers all followed variations on this theme. For example, Professor Barbara Henze from Freiburg spoke on “Die Katholische Entdeckung Luthers im Kontext des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils.” After Vatican II, in 1967, Freiburg hosted a conference on Luther. Speakers at this conference compared what Luther wanted with what Vatican II wanted. One participant even suggested that Luther finally achieved his goals at Vatican II, both in taking Scripture seriously and making the church accessible, as well as in certain reforms of monastic orders. Professor Johanna Rahner continued this theme, describing developments among Catholic theologians since Vatican II. In particular, she noted the Augsburg Confession as a statement now widely accepted among Catholics, and she pointed toward an increasingly ecumenical rather than a confessional hermeneutic of the Reformation. This approach stresses complementary rather than contradictory elements in the Catholic-Protestant relationship and it accepts a plural rather than a narrowly confessional ecclesiology.

This optimistic presentation on Catholics and the Reformation raised several questions during discussion. For example, each of the Catholic presenters mentioned the work of Joseph Lortz and his twentieth-century reassessment of Luther, though mostly in passing and without going into his Nazi enthusiasm. It was then acknowledged that his appreciation of Luther might have been rooted at least somewhat in his out-sized enthusiasm for the German Volk movement. One speaker also acknowledged that she does not assign Lortz, but has her students read Protestant studies of the Reformer instead. Another issue involved the present place of Vatican II and its advocates in today’s Catholic church. The optimistically ecumenical views presented here do come up against a conservative backlash against Vatican II, in Germany as elsewhere, so that the issues are not entirely decided. However, a broad stream of appreciation for Martin Luther certainly marked the Catholic Church in the twentieth century.

A second major theme at this conference involved attention paid to Luther celebrations outside Germany. Keith Robbins, speaking on British reactions to the Reformation Jubilee of 1917, noted that a warm and collegial reaction to German celebrations could hardly be expected in that fourth year of The Great War. In that sense, his assigned topic provided almost no content. He did describe, however, close ties and cordial relations in the decade preceding World War I. A delegation of 120 Germans visited England in 1908, for example. In 1909, a British group–funded by Quakers–visited Germany and was received by the Kaiser in Berlin. In June 1914, Oxford awarded seven honorary degrees, five of them to Germans. At that time, it would not have been difficult to imagine British participation in a great Reformation Jubilee in 1917. At the outbreak of war in August, however, theologians and historians began to sharpen their sense of difference rather than commonality. Soon they were making their own hard-edged contributions to the national sense of what was wrong with the other side.

Anders Jarlert also noted, as had Keith Robbins, that his look at Reformation jubilees in Sweden during the twentieth century produced little of note. Swedes simply did not celebrate anniversaries of 1483 or 1517, as did Germans. Rather, Jarlert described a “Swedish Sonderweg.” During the 19th century, religious celebrations became bound up with Swedish nationalism. By the 20th century, this meant, for example, a 1941 celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first Swedish Bible, or a 1943 celebration of the Uppsala Synod of 1543. In the overall cause of national unity, a presence of Baptists and of Catholics in Sweden also complicated matters, so that the Lutheran presence became downplayed and compartmentalized.

My responsibility at this conference was to report on American reactions to the German celebration of Luther’s 450th birthday in November 1933. I too discovered very little to report, although Lutherans in the United States organized celebrations of their own, in some cases with thousands of participants. I broadened my approach by analyzing the response of half a dozen church newspapers to events in Germany throughout 1933. Most Lutheran weeklies, whether German, Norwegian, or Swedish in their ethnic background, indicated some attraction to Adolf Hitler and support for the changes he introduced in Germany. They liked Hitler’s attack on Bolsheviks and his campaign against vice. They often criticized the “secular press” in the United States, for its alleged exaggeration of the harshness of Nazi mistreatment of Jews. One column in the Lutheran Herald of the Norwegian Lutheran Church even exhibited its antisemitism, trying to explain the difference between “Kikes,” which it described as undesirable East-European Jews likely to be Bolsheviks, and “white Jews,” seen as more acceptable. (This did draw some critical reader response.) All of these papers, however (with the frequent exception of the Lutheran Witness of the Missouri Synod), expressed concern about political interference in the churches and criticized the excesses of the Deutsche Christen. I also read the more center-left Christian Century. In this publication, skepticism and criticism were handed out in larger portions. For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, reporting in August 1933 on his recent visit to Germany, wrote, “Evidences multiply that the German nazi effort to extirpate the Jews in Germany is proceeding with unexampled and primitive ferocity” (see “The Germans Must Be Told,” Christian Century, 9 Aug. 1933, 1014-15). He then described in detail the mistreatment of Jews, including arrests, torture, and beatings to death, asserting that only a “national neurosis” in Germany could cause Germans to complain that such reports were merely Jewish “atrocity propaganda.”

A final theme at this conference dealt with anticipation of the forthcoming 500th anniversary of the Reformation to be celebrated in 2017. Gerhard Besier placed this in the larger context of the instrumentalization of Luther. This mythology involved both nationalism and anti-Catholicism in some of its nineteenth-century manifestations, a fierce nationalism during World War I, and then a search for a new Luther myth after 1989. Besier suggested that the 2017 celebration could allow for a significant reworking and search into this tradition. Instead, however, he noted that the “Luther Decade” is now treated in FAZ on the business page. It seems to be a time for the selling of souvenirs and the sort of economic opportunities associated with hosting the Olympic Games or a World Cup. He also noted that Luther statues now available in souvenir shops have printed on the bottom, “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.” This is both an accurate physical statement for the object in question and. presumably, more of an ironic joke than a serious reflection on the Luther quotation.

Hartmut Lehmann also placed the present “Luther Decade” in historical context. He began by noting controversy over whether Luther actually nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, or whether he merely sent them around to a few friends. We have the former story from Melanchthon, but no eyewitnesses or contemporary testimony. Luther with a hammer is a heroic figure and a builder of the Lutheran church. In the alternative image he is a reformer within the church. This works best for ecumenical purposes, including a friendlier conversation with Catholics. What about the full range of Luther, however, including his attacks on the Pope, on Erasmus, on peasants, and on Jews? Some see Luther leading to the Enlightenment, to democracy, and to pluralism. Lehmann is skeptical, arguing that we need to view him in his own time and in his full complications. If we focus instead on the Reformation rather than Luther, we still have difficult questions. Why did Luther’s followers quarrel right after his death? Why did they turn quickly toward orthodoxy, rather than a further exploration of reform? Why have Lutherans in Germany twice been ready to accept dictatorship? Why have Lutherans elsewhere, in the United States and Australia, for example, also quarreled with each other? A careful look at these issues could be a part of the Luther Decade, but it would fit less comfortably into the plans already in place. Finally, Lehmann in an afterword suggested that historians in 2017 may actually give little attention to the Luther Jubilee. In recent years, an interpretation has developed that gives the year 1517 merely one place among many in the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Renaissance that pointed toward the modern world.

This tightly-knit conference produced much to consider for those interested in contemporary church history.  It seems likely that the KZG volume which prints the papers in 2013 will be worthy of attention.

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Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust: “The Holocaust Today: New Directions in Research and Teaching,” November 1-4, 2012, Northwestern University.

By Lauren Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

Professor Emeritus Jacques Kornberg, from the University of Toronto, began his introduction to the panel on the German Protestant churches with the following observation: “I have been studying the Catholic Church in Germany for a long time. I’m happy to say, the Protestant churches were worse.” Kornberg drew a laugh from the sizeable audience, but it would be one of the very few moments of levity for the two panels of the conference devoted to investigating the German churches during the Third Reich.

Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and Northwestern University, Lessons and Legacies continues to be a major conference for Holocaust scholars in North America and Europe. This year’s theme emphasized new research and teaching methods, and the scholars giving papers on the German churches set out to emphasize this in their investigations.

The panel chaired by Kornberg consisted of Robert Ericksen from Pacific Lutheran University, Christopher Probst from Saint Louis University, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ericksen’s paper, entitled “Antisemitism Under the Faulty Gaze of Early Postwar Germans,” took the case study of Klaus-Wilhelm Rath, professor of economics at the University of Göttingen, to complicate the current understanding of the denazification process. Using the example of Rath, who was part of the “terror group” of pro-Nazi academics at Göttingen, Ericksen outlines the process: an initial charge by the Allies led to relatively severe penalties, followed by years of appeals and a gradual softening of the penalties. Rath was dismissed summarily from his position in 1945. He lost his first appeal; second and third appeals led to his classification as a category III offender (assigned to those who had enthusiastically supported the regime). He appealed one final time, in 1950, sensing the change in mood towards denazification in West Germany, and taking advantage of the fact that denazification proceedings were now controlled by Germans. The final appeal resulted in a category IV classification, as a so-called Mitläufer, or “fellow traveler” of the regime. Rath was not satisfied – he wanted a full exoneration – but the change in status meant that he was no longer deemed an antisemitic agitator. This for a professor whose 1944 publications included a book depicting the Jews as responsible for the manipulation of the economy aimed at world domination, and who was designated in 1944 by the Nazi regime as one of the most important Nazi professors at Göttingen!

Like Ericksen, Probst presented material that comes in part from his recently published book on the demonization of Jews in Nazi Germany. Unlike Ericksen, whose focus is on members of the higher levels of the academy, Probst is interested in lower-level clergy in rural areas. In “German Protestant Attitudes Towards Jews and Judaism in Württemberg,” he explores the changes in antisemitism exhibited by Protestant pastors from the end of the Weimar Republic to the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. This snapshot across the conventional time periods is useful in presenting threads of continuity that otherwise are more difficult to follow. Probst shows that distinctions between religious and racial antisemitism are important insofar as the former identified Jews as a religious “other” capable of redemption through conversion, while the latter employed racial or biological language to describe an irredeemable, immutable “other.” The problem he underscores in his paper is that the Lutheran pastors he examines in and around Stuttgart used both modes of expression in their discussions of Jews before, during, and after the Third Reich. These same men, who used antisemitic tropes in their lectures and sermons, ultimately became part of a “rectory chain” that hid some seventeen Jews in their parsonages between 1943 and 1945. One of his subjects, the Heimsheim pastor Heinrich Fausel, delivered a lecture on “the Jewish question” in 1934. Seeking to distance himself from biological and racial notions of Jewishness, he borrowed liberally from the Bible and the writings of Martin Luther to emphasize the failings of Jews across centuries. At the same time, he insisted that the rejection of Christ was the pivotal moment for the Jews as a Volk, and that the German Volk must defend itself against the “terrifying foreign invasion” that began in the nineteenth century, with the emancipation of the Jews. By 1943, Fausel was hiding Jews in his home. There is no evidence to indicate that he changed his mind about them, leading Probst to argue that people often behave in ways that contradict their own beliefs, and that German pastors during the Nazi period are no exception.

Schmidt’s essay, “The Dilemma of being a Good Neighbor and a Good Citizen in the Protestant Village of Süssen,” based on research for her book about rural Judaism during the Holocaust, asks the same probing questions that anchor Probst’s study. Süssen was (and continues to be) a small town not far from Stuttgart. Her subjects are civil servants, in this case the mayor, Fritz Saalmüller, and the town’s pastor, Martin Pfleiderer. Both had deep associations with Lutheranism in the area, and both were early Nazi enthusiasts. Pfleiderer later changed his mind and left both the Nazi Party in 1936, claiming he had been ignorant of the “true” ideology at play. He did not, however, mention the Jews of Süssen, who were deported and killed. Saalmüller, who became mayor in 1933, did not share Pfleiderer’s change of heart, and as mayor he was definitively antisemitic, enforcing the regime’s policies that forced Süssen’s Jews to sell their property before they were deported. Like the pastor, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht upon the outbreak of war in 1939, but served for its duration. In 1944, he was ordered by a superior to shoot an American POW, which he did; in 1946, it was for this crime that he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Petitions for clemency came from all corners on his behalf, including from the bishop of Württemberg, who described Saalmüller as a “good, upstanding Christian” and loyal to his community. No mention was made of his dealings with the Langs and Ottenheimers, the Jewish families in Süssen who had been killed in the East. The postwar mayor of Süssen, August Eisele, was also not interested in pursuing these matters, and in fact for thirty years (!) suppressed Jewish reparations files submitted to him by three children of the deported Jewish families who had survived the Holocaust.

The panel analyzing the Catholic Church in Germany also treated antisemitism as its main focus. Panel members included Beth Griech-Polelle of Bowling Green State University, as chair; Martin Menke of Rivier College; Martina Cucchiara from Bluffton University; Kevin Spicer from Stonehill College; and commentator Suzanne Brown-Fleming, from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like those who presented on Protestantism, these scholars aimed to complicate traditional notions of Catholic antisemitism and the ways it manifested itself during the Third Reich. The panelists limited their explorations to the pre-1939 period.

Menke’s paper, “German Catholicism and Nazi Racism, 1933,” highlighted a pressing question iterated recently by Thomas Brechenmacher: where is the agency in the Catholic Church in twentieth century Germany, particularly where antisemitism is concerned? Menke considered multiple answers: the individual bishops, the bishops as a whole, the Center Party leaders, and German Catholic laity. Although he did not tender an explicit answer to this thorny question, his paper made clear that he judged all parties at least partly responsible. He related what historians now commonly accept: following the examples of their Catholic bishops, Catholics in Germany rejected Nazi racism – understood distinctly here from antisemitism – as an intrinsically un-Christian ideology. On this ground, the episcopate condemned the Nazi movement as a whole. Antisemitism, however, was a different matter: In fact, the only public figure to denounce racism and antisemitism officially was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Austria, who stressed Nächstenliebe vis-à-vis the Jews. (Innitzer was an active proponent of the Austrian fascist government of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg; he also endorsed the 1938 Anschluß, signing a declaration with an approving “Heil Hitler!”.) Menke is particularly hard, and justifiably so, on the bishops. They stated frequently, both during and after the Third Reich, that their priority was to defend the Church. Properly understood, this should have extended to a condemnation of any immoral action undertaken by the state. The bishops did not do this for several reasons: the Nazis did not take over the state until 1933; by that time, communism was accepted as the greater evil to be combatted; and finally, the Church treated Nazism as it did any other heresy, calling for a slow, unhurried examination. However, by the end of March 1933, when Hitler consolidated his hold on power, the bishops were ready to cooperate with his government, and set an example that permitted the acceleration of latent antisemitism among the Catholic populace.

Cucchiara’s work on Catholic nuns in Nazi Germany introduces women agents to a scene that frequently focuses on men as the exclusive subjects. In “Jewish Girls in Catholic Schools in Nazi Germany,” she studies the German-based School Sisters of Notre Dame, whose motherhouse was located in Munich until the 1950s. Their behavior between 1933 and 1938 complicates the conventional understanding of Catholic nuns as rescuers and convents as good hiding places for Jews. Cucchiara finds that convent-run schools were spaces of fusion, in which Catholicism and Nazism co-existed with the full knowledge, even open support, of the nuns. Jewish girls did experience more safety hidden in convents in comparison to other hiding places they may have discovered, but this does not follow, she argues, that Nazism failed to penetrate. The nuns in question worked to preserve their classrooms as distinctly Catholic spaces in the Third Reich. However, preservation often occurred with the least difficulty through integration with the state. As a result, they worked hard to highlight the positive, good works of Hitler and his regime, and emphasized continuity and sacrifice, bringing the regime more closely in line with their own religion. Cucchiara reports that Jewish girls remembered later that there was a remarkable absence of antisemitism exhibited by their religious caretakers, but this does not mean that the convents were hotbeds of anti-Nazi activity. Cucchiara concludes by urging historians to avoid imposing a false separation of religion, as represented by Church members and leaders, and Nazi Germany, and to treat witnesses who testify to this separation with care.

Kevin Spicer’s paper, “The German Catholic Church and the ‘Judenfrage’ in Weimar Germany” rounded out the panel, concerned explicitly with the connection between religious and racial antisemitism during the Weimar era. He identifies the dual pillars of the “Jewish question” for Catholics at that time: the theological pillar, identifying conversion as a possible remedy, and the societal pillar, lamenting and fearing the influence of Jews on German-Christian culture and society. During the years of the republic, a third pillar evolved, identifying Jews as a racial and biological enemy, though many Catholics continued to adhere to the more traditional, culture- and social-based aversion to Jews. Spicer’s most intriguing revelations involve Augustin Bea, the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Germany from 1921 to 1924. Bea was convinced that antisemitism was inextricably linked to anti-Catholicism; occasionally using anti-Jewish and antisemitic language, he and others defended Jews insofar as they, like Catholics, were a persecuted religious minority in Germany, and that the problem could be better solved by working with, not against, them. Otherwise, they would continue to pose a distinct potential danger to future German prosperity. His role in the production of Nostra Aetate at Vatican II, and his work to bring Jews and Christians into greater and more open dialogue in the post-Holocaust world, present Bea as a staunch opponent of discrimination and prejudice and a champion of ecumenism (unusual for a Catholic). However, in the early 1920s in Germany, Bea had not yet found this orientation.

It was fitting that Suzanne Brown-Fleming began her comments with Nostra Aetate, that great and necessary Church document promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of Vatican II. Its importance to the post-Holocaust Church is undeniable, but Brown-Fleming adeptly highlighted the individuals presented by the panel, who in the 1920s and 1930s were still mired in anti-Jewish, antisemitic ways of thinking, but who nonetheless began to grope toward reforming their interactions with their Jewish neighbours. Although Menke, Cucchiara and Spicer present historical figures who found ways to accommodate a regime that ultimately tried to solve the “Jewish problem” by physically exterminating them, the Catholic bishops, the School Sisters, and Bea never condoned the extreme racial rhetoric of Nazism. She concluded by citing one of the most significant questions that calls for further investigation, that could easily be applied to the Protestant context as well: why did some Catholics resist and other did not, and of those who resisted, what prompted them to do so?

By way of concluding this report, I want to relate an unexpected occurrence that unfolded outside of the two panels devoted to the study of the German churches, that nevertheless has a direct bearing on scholars of the German churches. Immediately preceding the panel on German Catholicism was a workshop on new cultural approaches to the Holocaust. The afternoon workshop, featuring Doris Bergen, Alon Confino, Mark Roseman, and Amos Goldberg, attracted a large audience and engendered a lively discussion, following remarks that concentrated on the role of agency and that called for the decentering of “race” from the story of the Holocaust. Religion, Christianity specifically, was identified as an element that needed to be reinserted vigorously into the narrative to make the Holocaust imaginable and representable. In the Q&A, Alan Steinweis questioned the presentation of this as innovative and “new”, pointing to Bergen and several others in the audience, including Kevin Spicer, Robert Ericksen, and Dagmar Herzog, who have contributed substantial and acclaimed works on the role of religion and the Christian churches in the Holocaust. As a spectator who had listened closely to the remarks, I found myself in agreement with Steinweis: surely those of us who work on the German churches did not produce our work in a vacuum?  Hasn’t the field of modern German history been moving for a while now towards the full integration of religious history into its narratives? The workshop is perhaps a good reminder that this integration has not yet been achieved, and that studies of the German churches, both Protestant and Catholic, must continue to present themselves as vital to the study of German society and culture as a whole, and not simply as “church history” or “religious history,” in order to explain as accurately as possible how attitudes about “otherness” can lead to persecution and genocide. In Nazi Germany, racism and Social Darwinism is part of this, but Christian belief that for centuries had depicted the Jews as “other” is just as culpable. In the wake of the turbulent exchange, as the scholars for the panel on German Catholicism settled into their seats and awaited their audience, Kevin Spicer summarized it best: “Our colleagues who don’t normally deal with the churches are discovering religion, and we’re all very excited about that.”

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Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

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

Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

By Victoria J. Barnett, Director of Church Relations, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Jens Gundlach, Heinz Brunotte 1896-1984: Anpassung des Evangeliums an die NS-Diktatur. Eine biographische Studie (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 2010).

The issue of complicity has become a major focus of Holocaust historiography in recent years, fueled by the research of historians like Christopher Browning, Robert Gellatelly, Peter Hayes and many others. While the very word “complicity” connotes a more secondary, passive role, the work of these scholars has documented the extent to which complicity was in fact an active and participatory process, particularly with regard to the persecution of the Jews. Germans from every walk of life participated in and benefited from these measures. Continue reading →

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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.

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Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

The annual meeting of the journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, took place in Kreisau, now in Poland, where Helmuth James von Moltke led the “Kreisauer Kreis,” a group of resisters against the Nazi state. We met from September 15-17, 2011, on the Moltke estate, now renovated and serving as a retreat center. German and Polish presenters spoke on the topic, “Kirchliches Versöhnungshandeln im Interesse des deutsch-polnischen Verhältnisses (1962-1989).”

Underlying issues on this topic are obvious. German-Polish relations had not been good since the re-establishment of Poland after World War I and the German bitterness that ensued. German crimes against Poland during World War II then added huge grievances on the Polish side. In the early postwar period, West Germany was tempted to downplay German guilt and complain about things such as the Polish border on the Oder-Neisse line—a border that left Germany without a large portion of its 1937 boundaries—and the perceived injustice of Germans mistreated, dispossessed of property, and driven out of Eastern Europe. This conference, focusing upon church responses to German-Polish relations from 1962-1989, dealt with three main themes found in the churches: German attitudes toward Poland, Polish attitudes toward Germany, and the underlying role of Christian identity in individual nations as well as in Europe as a whole.

Andrea Strübind presented a paper on the “Tübingen Memorandum,” a foreign policy statement by Protestant intellectuals that appeared in Die Zeit on March 2, 1962. This statement was signed by eight prominent individuals: Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Ludwig Raiser, Klaus von Bismarck, Georg Picht, Günter Howe, Helmut Becker, Joachim Beckmann, and Werner Heisenberg. These men identified themselves as Protestants and spoke of the need for private citizens of conscience to speak out on public issues, but the EKD and its more conservative leadership quickly distanced itself from these Protestant voices. The Memorandum offended many West Germans, even though its ideas subsequently drove West German policy. The authors included a claim for the free status of Berlin, but coupled it with the right of self-determination for the GDR, a foundation of human rights in foreign policy questions, and the need for “Wiedergutmachung” and reconciliation—including acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line—in Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe. This statement raised hackles, not least because of its claim to a foundation in Christian ethics. In Klaus von Bismarck’s earlier words in relation to his family’s estates in Pomerania, “We have no claim on lands that God has taken from us.” Not all Germans were so magnanimous.

Polish efforts toward reconciliation in the 1960s included a correspondence between Polish and German bishops, but they mostly talked past each other. Polish bishops were willing to speak of “forgiveness,” rather than “reconciliation.” Christians forgive each other, they wrote. But they also expect confession and changed behavior. In general during the 1960s, West Germans were far more interested in the GDR and eventual reunification, than they were in questions of confession and forgiveness between Germany and Poland. Two decades later, as described in a paper by Gerhard Besier, Helmut Kohl picked up on this idea of Christian unity, making a gesture that combined his own roots in the Catholic Church with the Catholicism of Poles. In November 1989, he met in Kreisau with the Polish leader, Mazowiecki. Kohl insisted that the meeting should include a Catholic mass. This led to a “Friedensgruss” and a hug at the end of the service. It proved a powerful symbol of German-Polish reconciliation, useful both to Kohl and Mazowiecki, whether or not the emotional moment was spontaneous or planned.

Katarzyna Stoklosa presented a paper interrogating the idea of Polish Catholicism and Polish identity as reflected on Radio Maryja. This radio station, quite popular among some portions of the Catholic demographic in Poland (and among some Poles in the U.S.), emphasizes Polish nationalism with strong components of Catholic piety, ethnocentrism, and antisemitism. Willfried Spohn then offered ecumenism as the one hope for harmonious relations between the religions and nations of Europe. He leads a project at Göttingen University focusing on the ongoing effort to create European identity out of disparate nations. Noting the former widespread belief that Europeanization and secularization represent parallel processes, he acknowledged the resurgence of the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Catholic Church in Poland, not to mention the place of Islam in today’s Europe, as elements in a counter-thesis that unbroken secularization is by no means a certainty in the 21st century.

Having discussed various ways in which Christian leaders tried to deal with the disharmonies of early postwar Europe, conference attendees then speculated on whether religious identity coupled with ecumenism might provide the right set of tools for a harmonious future.

 

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Conference Report: Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference, March 17-19, 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2011

Conference Report: Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference, March 17-19, 2011, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On March 17-19, 2011, Pacific Lutheran University hosted the Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education. This event began on the evening of March 17th with the showing of a film, The Last Survivor. This documentary focuses on survivors of four genocides—one from the Holocaust and one each from Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Congo. The co-directors, Michael Pertnoy and Michael Kleiman, introduced and discussed the film. They were joined by Justin Semahoro Kimenyerwa, a child survivor of the genocide in the Congo who now resides in the United States. The next morning Carl Wilkens spoke about another recent genocide. He was the only American to stay in Rwanda throughout the killing there, despite many who urged him to leave. His description of the genocide, in words and photos, helps explain his present work, which is to travel around the United States, sometimes by bicycle, raising awareness about genocide and other extreme forms of injustice.

Another highlight on Friday involved a discussion of the Huguenot rescue of Jewish lives in and around Le Chambon, France. This story about Pastor André and Magda Trocmé, along with other rescuers, is well known. Patrick Henry, a recent author on the rescue of Jews in France, gave the main presentation. He was assisted by Nelly Trocmé Hewett, a teenage daughter of the Trocmés at the time, who gave her first-person account of the rescue activities. Saturday morning included a dramatic presentation by “Living Voices.” This involved a one-woman show, “Through the Eyes of a Friend: The World of Anne Frank.” We also had a presentation on artistic responses to the Holocaust, including the work of Anselm Kiefer. A session on “Poetry after Auschwitz” began with a presentation on Theodor Adorno, followed by readings of poetry by writers such as Irena Klepfisz, a poet in Yiddish and English, who is also a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. An afternoon session on Saturday included a presentation by two professors from Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Kevin Simpson (psychology) and Joel Davis (history) described their interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust in a presentation under the title, “Explaining Evil: Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust.”

Readers of this journal are reminded that PLU will host a Holocaust conference each spring. Planning for the next conference, scheduled for March 15-16, 2012, has just begun. Interested persons are invited to contact Robert Ericksen at ericksrp@plu.edu.

 

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Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church

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

Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010). 489 pp. ISBN 978-0739132937.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book is a somewhat surprising entry in the ongoing wars over Catholics, the Holocaust, and Pius XII, especially in terms of the background and experience of its author. David Cymet, born and raised in Mexico City, traveled to the United States in 1944 as one of the first two Latin American students to study at an American rabbinical school. After four years at the Mesivta Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, he returned to Mexico to study architecture, followed by an academic career teaching architecture at his alma mater, the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, and then at the National University of Mexico. He also served the Mexican government in various capacities from the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, in the National Housing Institute and in the Ministry of Human Settlements. In the 1980s he moved to the United States, where he began working for the New York City Department of Education in 1986, also earning a doctorate at the University of Delaware in 1991. Described in his author’s note as “a student of the Holocaust since his earliest youth,” Cymet spent the first decade of the twenty-first century – presumably retired from his multiple careers – researching and writing this book.

We might be surprised when a trained architect from Mexico, after a distinguished public and academic career, writes a 500-page book on history for Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. We will be less surprised when the subject is the Holocaust. Furthermore, though it is almost fifty years since Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy became a first salvo in the Pius XII wars, the level of controversy has scarcely diminished. Thus we will not be surprised that David Cymet, a Jewish man raised in a Catholic country, has chosen to concentrate on the Catholic Church, theVatican, and the wartime Pope, and that he comes to harsh conclusions.

Cymet begins with the observation that Jews were not in a position to critique the Catholic Church in the first years after 1945. They had much more pressing concerns, such as immediate assistance to survivors, finding visas for DPs, and securing the place of Jews inPalestine(xi). Cymet then gives credit to major authors who began to probe the role of the Catholic Church, including Hochhuth, Saul Friedlander, Guenter Lewy, Klaus Scholder,  and Carlo Falconi, as well as later figures such as Michael Phayer, Gitta Sereny, and Fr. John Morley, SJ (xiv-xvi). “The aim of this study,” he says, “is to look critically at the polemic and present a view of the issues within the wider context of their contemporary political and ideological background” (xvi).

There is no doubt that Cymet tilts toward the more critical observers within the “wider context.” His opening statement about “defenders” of the Catholic Church, who provide the “apologetics” mentioned in his title, is harsh indeed: “Unlike their not-so-distant cousins – the Holocaust deniers – they did not claim that the Holocaust never happened, but rather chose to take cover behind half-truths, misrepresentations, and subtle distortions. At the margin of legitimate discussion beholden to historical truth, the defenders of all sorts aimed at derailing the discussion by creating a thick cloud of confusion and doubt” (xvi).

Flaws can be found in this book. In one chapter he mentions Guenter Lewy correctly, but then calls him Lewy Güenther in endnotes, repeating this mistaken last name and mistaken spelling through a sequence of five notes (13). He praises Doris Bergen’s work, but in his bibliography he cites her as the author of In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (2000), rather than correctly noting the editors, Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (461). He is careless of chronology at times, such as when he says Guenter Lewy “reacted” to We Remember (1998) and its claim that Cardinal Faulhaber was a defender of Jews. When Lewy, as quoted, called it “little short of falsification of history when Faulhaber’s sermons in 1933 are hailed . . . as a ‘condemnation of the persecution of Jews,’” Lewy may have been right; but his statement in 1964 was not a reaction to aVatican publication of 1998 (9).

Despite these lapses and despite Cymet’s occasionally impassioned prose, with words such as “mean-spirited” and “diabolical” signaling his point of view, his thorough and detailed telling of the story makes for a sobering read. He accepts David Kertzer’s view (The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2001) that Christian anti-Judaism cannot be seen as significantly different from racial antisemitism, and he finds many Catholic statements in Germany and elsewhere in which common cause with racial antisemites is clearly expressed. His chapter on “Catholic Europe ‘Defends’ Itself from the Jews” begins with Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI’s unfinished encyclical often regarded as a significant attack on antisemitism. But Cymet notes the residual antisemitism in those parts which justify the “social separation” of Jews and the justification for Christians defending themselves against Jews, “as long as the unbelief of the Jewish people persists” (142). He then describes anti-Jewish legislation written with Catholic support in Poland,Italy,Hungary, and Slovakia prior to the war (150-63). In a chapter on “The Final Solution in Christian Europe” (305-74), he emphasizes the obvious, that this murder took place in Christian countries. He also points out the instances in which Catholic leaders protested in favor of Catholics of Jewish descent, but not, despite many entreaties, against the deportation and murder of Jews as Jews.

Cymet’s chapter on “Vatican Response to the Final Solution” first notes that the Klerusblatt in Germany described the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 as an “indispensable safeguard for the qualitative make-up of the German people” (375). He also describes Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Vichy France as “clero-Fascist” countries which increased the severity of their anti-Jewish laws from 1938 to 1942, until they fed into the killing process itself. What was the Vatican response? Here Cymet points out the many avenues of information available to the Vatican, while stressing the silence that ensued. In a segment on “The Rome Deportations, a Paradigm of Vatican Policy,” he quotes Michael Phayer: “No other event placed Pius XII in greater physical proximity to the Holocaust than the deportation of the Roman Jews.” The paradigm for Cymet is seen in his conclusion that, here as elsewhere, “the Church stood calmly at the sidelines” (387).

Cymet makes extensive use of Kertzer, Morley, Lewy, Phayer, Saul Friedlander, and a host of others. I do not think he approached this project from a place of neutrality, with the thought that he might end up defending the Catholic Church, for example. However, he prepared his brief energetically. Those who would argue for the defense must acknowledge that his evidence for the prosecution weighs heavily. He identifies a burden of anti-Jewish prejudice, human insensitivity, and silence in the face of evil which fitted itself too comfortably within the Catholic nations, the “bloodlands,” of Central Europe.

 

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Review of Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, eds., Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus

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

Review of Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, eds., Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus. Historische Mitteilungen im Auftrage der Ranke-Gesellschaft, 72 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 922 pp. ISBN: 978-3-515-09282-1.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This review appeared first in German History, Vol. 28 No. 2 (June 2010): 246-48, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

At the collapse of the Nazi State, some Germans committed suicide, unwilling to face a world without their Führer; some Germans were brought to Nuremberg, where they were placed on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and most Germans began to act as if they had never been attracted to Adolf Hitler, despite sometimes copious evidence to the contrary. Already in 1946 Max Weinreich wrote Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People;  but most professors managed to cultivate the idea, common to a large portion of their German fellows, that they had played no role in Nazi crimes and had merely been caught under the boot of a totalitarian regime. This postwar denial endured largely intact for a generation or more. In the past two or three decades, however, it has been overturned by scholarship which shows that ‘good Germans’ of every sort succumbed to the attractions of Hitler and worked willingly within and for the Nazi State. Such an assessment clearly includes German professors and their universities. Despite purges of Jewish faculty, despite the burning of books, despite violations of academic freedom, the Nazi goal of ‘Gleichschaltung’ (coordination) within the universities is now widely thought to have been ‘Selbstgleichschaltung.’ It was professors who helped burn the books and professors who competed for preferment after their Jewish and leftwing colleagues had been removed.

Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus is one of several recent attempts to focus on scholars in the humanities as one aspect of this problem. The plan for the book, formulated in 2000, involved thirty-five disciplines. Participants hoped to create a foundation for future scholarship, showing where research on each of these disciplines stood at the time and creating a sort of grid by which interdisciplinary comparisons could be made. Jürgen Elvert somewhat disarmingly admits that the goals of the project were not achieved (p. 17). No contributor could be found for some areas, some contributors agreed to produce a chapter but failed to deliver, and some contributors produced work unworthy of being printed. Nonetheless, this ‘failed’ project resulted in twenty-eight chapters plus an introduction, filling some 922 pages. It is a very useful work, though hardly a quick read and somewhat uneven in quality and thoroughness. Individual contributions vary from a low of thirteen pages to a high of sixty on standard topics such as history, sociology, literature and political science, with much attention to philology as well as fields as diverse as classical archaeology and modern theater.

Hans-Joachim Dahms, one of the contributors, was an early player in the uncovering of academic complicity. In 1987 he co-edited Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus and he has since written extensively on philosophy during the Nazi era. Here he gives a very useful assessment of that discipline, arguing that no actual ‘National Socialist philosophy’ emerged during the Third Reich, nothing to equal, for example, the anti-Jewish, anti-Einstein ‘German Physics’ pushed by two Nobel laureates, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. He blames this upon the quarrelsomeness of German philosophers and their ongoing arguments over neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, and other branches within their field. Many important philosophers, however, did endorse the Nazi state, most famously Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s supporters later argued that his famous pro-Nazi address in 1933 as Rektor atFreiburg had nothing to do with his philosophical ideas and represented merely an early, mistaken assessment. Dahms cuts him no such slack: ‘It has long been clear that his NS enthusiasm during the Third Reich never stopped and that even after 1945 he never distanced himself from National Socialism in general or from his own actions during that time’ (p. 43). Dahms sketches the careers of other pro-Nazi philosophers, such as Alfred Baeumler ofBerlin, who said at the time of the book burning in 1933: ‘What we remove today are poisonous materials which were collected during a time of false tolerance. It is our task to let the German spirit within us become so powerful that such materials can no longer be collected’ (p. 48).

Horst Junginger, taking on the discipline of Religionswissenschaft, illustrates some of the irony and complexity of the Nazi era. As a student of comparative religion, Junginger cannot approve the old tendency to study religion only from the perspective of orthodox Christian belief. He mentions Adolf von Harnack, for example, arguing a century ago for the primacy of the Christian point of view (p. 52). Junginger then bemoans the postwar influence of Karl Barth, whose Christology rejected all non-Christian faiths as false attempts to find the true God (p. 85). Comparative religion of the sort practiced today expects a more modern approach, more objective, based upon empirical evidence and similar to anthropology in its method. Ironically, Junginger finds that just that sort of open modernity produced a strange variety of racist and völkisch religious movements during the Nazi period. Many of the individuals he describes began as Protestants. They studied theology and then often spent time on a mission field, perhaps in India, as in the case of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. Back in Germany their linguistic skills and openness to non-Christian religions allowed them to fill newly created university positions in comparative religion. Within the nationalistic and racist atmosphere of their day, however, they were likely to use their freedom from Christian orthodoxy to endorse syncretistic beliefs closely related to the Nazi Weltanschauung.  Some, like Hauer with his German Faith Movement, tried to return to a purer, pagan past. Others, like the Deutsche Christen within the official Protestant Church, used comparative religion to reach the unlikely conclusion that Christianity had no actual connection to Judaism, but had always been entirely and inherently anti-Jewish. Walter Grundmann, professor of theology at the University of Jena and founding director of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, worked at de-judaizing the Christian tradition and even Jesus himself (as described recently by Susannah Heschel in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany). Dozens of professors attended conferences at Grundmann’s institute and contributed to its work. No scholar today would consider the work of Grundmann or the ideas of Hauer objective attempts to study and learn from religious traditions, yet many professors made that claim in the Nazi era and achieved success.

Every chapter in this book acknowledges the affinity of German scholarship for the ideas of the Nazi state, though authors differ in their assessment of culpability and in the breadth of their critique. Most academics never cooperated with the regime quite as much as the regime would have liked; most retained some loyalty to the ideals of their profession. Yet the story remains grim and much closer to the one told by Max Weinreich in 1946 than defenders of academia might like to think. This book is an important source for insight into the phenomenon. As is often the case, these German authors could have paid more attention to scholarship produced in Britainand America. However, most made good use of archival records, correspondence, and other forms of primary documents. Kulturwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus thus takes its place beside similar volumes, such as Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., 2004) and Die Rolle der Geisteswissenschaften im Dritten Reich, 1933-1945 (Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ed., 2002), in helping us understand the failure of humanities scholars in Nazi Germany to be humane.

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Conference Report: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education

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

Conference Report: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, March 18-20, 2010, Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, WA.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On March 18-20, 2010, Robert Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies at Pacific Lutheran University, hosted the Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education. This program grows out of generous gifts from the Mayer, Powell, and Heller families which have made possible an endowed chair as well as this annual conference.

The sessions began on March 18 with a lecture by Christopher Browning. He spoke on “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities,” based upon his research for his most recent book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp. Browning gave a nuanced analysis of the benefits and difficulties in using survivor testimony. While he discussed in detail various aspects of survivor testimony which must be considered by historians, he also concluded with the thought that it is not the obligation of survivors to give testimony which matches our expectations.

Friday’s sessions began with two presentations by Holocaust survivors. Philip Waagner, who is a member of the Speakers Bureau of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center (Seattle), described his remarkable experiences as a child survivor in Holland. Sarah Tamir also described her childhood experiences, as well as the Holocaust memory activities now undertaken by the large survivors’ community in her home of Melbourne. The afternoon session began with a presentation by Sara Horowitz, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, speaking on her latest project, “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory.” Professors Lisa Marcus, Rona Kaufmann, and Jennifer Jenkins, all of PLU, spoke on “Jewish Literacies and the Holocaust;” and Tomaz Jardim, a recent Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, spoke on “Ambiguous Justice: The Mauthausen SS Before American Military Commission Courts.” Friday ended with the announcement of two student winners of the Raphael Lemkin Student Essay Contest at PLU, highlighted by James Waller speaking on the themes within his important book, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Mass Murder and Genocide.

Saturday’s session focused on the theme of bystanders. First, Carl Wilkens described his experience of the Rwandan Genocide. As the only American who stayed in Rwanda throughout the violence, he took great risk but survived without harm and was able to intervene successfully in several situations. Victoria Barnett then continued our discussion of bystanders, with recent reflections on her book, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust. John Roth responded to her presentation in a session chaired by John Conway. Throughout this day, students and others in attendance were inspired to consider the importance of their own response to injustice and also the potential for brave individuals actually to make an impact.

The next PLU Holocaust Conference will take place March 17-19, 2011. Interested persons are invited to contact Robert Ericksen (ericksrp@plu.edu) with inquiries or suggestions.

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Conference Announcement: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education

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

Conference Announcement: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, March 18-20, 2010, Pacific Lutheran University.

Host: Robert P. Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Professor of Holocaust Studies, Pacific Lutheran University

Pacific Lutheran University will host the Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Holocaust Conference, March 18-20, 2010, on the PLU campus.   Professor Christopher Browning, internationally recognized author of “Ordinary Men” and a former professor at PLU, will deliver the opening Raphael Lemkin Lecture at 7 p.m. on March 18. His topic is, “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities.”

Other conference highlights include Professor Sara Horowitz and her ground-breaking research on “gender, genocide and Jewish memory”; Carl Wilkens, an eye-witness to the Rwandan genocide, testimony from Holocaust survivors; an exploration of the psychology of evil; and a special presentation of music from the Holocaust.

This conference is free and all sessions are open to the public. Registration is requested. The program on Saturday, March 20, is designed with educators in mind, and is focused on lessons of diversity and tolerance that can be learned through the Holocaust. Educator clock hours are available. For further information, please contact Brenda Murray at 253-535-7595 or the PLU Kurt Mayer Professor of Holocaust Studies, Robert Ericksen, at ericksrp@plu.edu.

For full details, including conference program and online registration, please visit www.plu.edu/holocaustconference.

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November 2009 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

November 2009 — Vol. XV, no. 11

 Dear Friends,

In this month of anniversaries, we recall not only the twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell, but also the earlier German revolution of 1918, and the horrific Chrystal Night pogrom of 1938. These events are constitutive of kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, so I hope the following reviews will be of help in coming to terms with these legacies.

I will be glad to hear from any of you with your comments, But please remember to send them to my personal address, as below, and not to press the REPLY button unless you want all our subscribers to hear your opinions.

1) Conference Report: German Studies Association, 2009

2) Book reviews

a) Ruotsila, Christian anti-internationalism
b) Vos, Pryfogle, George, Faith in the World. Mark Gibbs and Vesper Society
c) P. Raina ed., Bishop George Bell
d) Jekeli. German Intellectuals in Romania under Communism
e) Leichsenring, Die katholische Kirche und “ihre Juden”

3) Book notes: Lazarus, In the shadow of Vichy. The Finaly Affair

1) Conference Report:

At the recent German Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. (October 8-11, 2009), several members of the Association of Contemporary Church History participated in a panel entitled, “Protestant Theological Responses to Race and Religion in Nazi Germany.” Moderated by Robert P. Ericksen (Pacific Lutheran University), three papers explored various aspects of Protestant theology and practice: Kyle Jantzen (Ambrose University College), “Blood and Race or Sin and Salvation: Parish Pastors Debate Rosenberg’s Mythus”; Christopher Probst (Howard Community College), “Protestant Scholarship, Luther, and ‘the Jews’ in Nazi Germany”; and Matthew Hockenos, “Converting Jews in the Third Reich: Antisemitism and the Berlin Judenmission, 1930-1950.” Richard Steigmann-Gall (Kent State University) provided a commentary on the papers.

Jantzen’s paper explored the reactions of parish clergy in three regions of Germany (Brandenburg, Saxony, and Württemberg) to the ideological challenge posed by racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg’s famous work, Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts). Protestant clergy often found it hard to discern Rosenberg’s significance within the Nazi Party or the important of the Mythus officially, Rosenberg’s book represented his own private opinions, while at other times party officials hailed his views as intellectual treasures central to Nazi racial ideology. A few parish pastors (generally from the radical Thüringian wing of the German Christian Movement) took Rosenberg seriously and proclaimed the truth of his racial ideology. Most clergy who encountered his work rejected it as heretical. While they often acknowledged Rosenberg as an expert on race and were frequently obsessed with defining the proper relationship between the German Volk and the Christian Church, they generally rejected Rosenberg’s denial of the transcendence of God, the sinfulness of humanity, and the validity of the Old and New Testaments. Where Rosenberg championed Jesus as a heroic Aryan fighter, Protestant clergy affirmed Jesus as the Son of God (and a Jew) who defeated sin and death by suffering and dying on a cross. Jantzen concluded that Rosenberg functioned as a line in the theological sand whose work caused all but the most extreme German Christians to reaffirm important aspects of traditional Protestant orthodoxy. He also noted that the widespread criticism of Rosenberg’s ideas might suggest that he was not as important a figure as some scholars have asserted.

Probst’s paper analyzed the interpretation of Martin Luther’s writings on the Jews by Heinrich Bornkamm, Protestant professor of church history in Gießen, Leipzig, and (after the war) Heidelberg. Probst argued that Bornkamm viewed Jews through a prism of Volk and race that drew upon his background in historical theology. Seeking to address the tumultuous events unfolding in Germany, Bornkamm forwarded his own version of Luther’s nonrational argumentation about Judaism, harnessing Luther’s powerful irrational antisemitic rhetoric in tacit support of antisemitic Nazi policy.

After noting Bornkamm’s pro-Nazi and antisemitic sentiments in 1935, he commented on the “Jewish press” which had formerly controlled the forces of “left liberalism,” while in 1939, he wrote about the “powerful and undeniable truth of racial-thinking” and of a religiously inspired Bolshevism led by stateless Jews Probst examined his short 1933 work, “Volk and Race in Martin Luther.” According to Bornkamm, Luther must have known “something” of the “biological and historical unity of a State” and had “at least a notion” of the “biological basic elements in the structure of mankind” which overlap borders of State and Volk, “which we call races.” Thus Bornkamm espoused an interpretation of Luther’s Judenschriften that closely paralleled Nazi conceptions of Volk and race. Paradoxically, then, even as Bornkamm affirmed Luther’s struggle with Jews to be a spiritual effort the goal of which was conversion, the twentieth-century church historian continually conflated religious and racial antipathy towards Jews as he interacted with the writings of the sixteenth-century reformer.

Hockenos’s paper examined the history of the German Protestant Church’s Berlin-based “Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews” (Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden), commonly refered to as the Berlin Jewish Mission, during the Nazi era and the immediate postwar years. Exploring how the men and women who staffed the Berlin Jewish Mission understood the “Jewish question,” Hockenos asked whether the missionaries’ earnest desire to convert Jews to Christianity put them at odds with antisemitic racial theories or whether missionaries incorporated Nazi racial theories into their missionary worldview?

Surprisingly, the Berlin Jewish Mission remained open through much of the Third Reich, baptizing 704 Jews between 1933 and 1940 in its Messiah Chapel in the German capital (Hockenos estimates that about 3500 Jews converted to Christianity under the influence of the German Jewish missions) until the Mission was shut down by the Gestapo in January 1941. Many Protestants rejected the work of the Berlin Jewish Mission German Christians, who were openly antisemitic, ridiculed the idea that Jews might convert to Christianity for genuinely spiritual reasons, assuming Jewish conversions were politically motivated. Even members of the Confession Church, however, considered the presence of Jews in the Christian community as problematic because they brought with them undesirable “Jewish traits.” The few Protestants who did support the Berlin Jewish Mission believed that if the church approached Jews in the spirit of brotherly love and shared with them Christ’s message of love and forgiveness, the “Jewish problem” could be solved through conversion. Although missionaries identified Jews as a race with certain negative characteristics, they believed that converted Jews, whose faith was genuine, were cleansed, purified, reborn and transformed by the sacrament of baptism, thereby receiving a grace which overcame their race.

The internal conflicts of this position could be seen already in a 1932 article by the president and the director of the Berlin Jewish Mission, Hans Kessler and Edwin Albert. As they wrote, “There is no such thing as a German gospel or a German Christ. The gospel is the gospel for all people, regardless of race. The gospel has the power to transform men of all races, even the Jews. When one no longer believes this and believes only in race . . . they can longer call themselves a Christian.” People who think this way, they went on, reject Jesus and “come into opposition with God, just as the Jews once did.” Continuing in this minor key, Kessler and Albert railed against the spirit of Jewry, insisting that it needed to be overcome a task which could only be accomplished by the Holy Spirit (and not the German spirit). As such, the two men argued that the Jewish Mission stood at the forefront of the struggle of the German people against modern Jewry. At the close of his paper, Hockenos used the term “missionary antisemitism” to describe these complicated and at times contradictory theological responses.

Richard Steigmann-Gall’s commentary brought into focus the central idea common to all three papers, namely, that Protestants in the Third Reich adopted a wide range of perspectives on race and religion, mixing aspects of Nazi antisemitism and racial salvation with either religious or racial antipathy to Jews and a confessional theology which was just as likely to affirm the Jewish origins of Christianity, the Jewishness of Jesus, and the transformative effects of conversion, regardless of race. Various members of the audience also posed questions, making for a lively and fruitful discussion.

K.Jantzen, Calgary

2a) Markku Ruotsila, The origins of Christian anti-internationalism. Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press 2008. 240 Pp. ISBN 978-1-58901-191-5.

Despite its somewhat cumbrous title, Markku Ruotsila’s study is both topical and relevant to present concerns. His insightful analysis of a significant section of American Protestantism stresses the continuity of this group’s strongly-held views about America’s destiny and in particular its conduct of foreign policy. He traces the origins of attitudes which dominated and still dominate the mentality of the Protestant minority, commonly called “the Religious Right”, and shows how their views were formulated in the crises of a century ago, particularly in their strident opposition to the policies advocated by the Democratic Party’s President Woodrow Wilson.

This opposition was based on certain key presuppositions. First and foremost, conservative Evangelicals held that traditional orthodox Christianity was the sole source of truth and hence their guide to public policy. Cooperation between Christians and non-Christians compromised their beliefs, and was therefore unacceptable. Any international organization, such as the proposed League of Nations, even if supposedly devoted to peace, was bound to fail because of the unprincipled and dubious association with non-Christian states such as Japan and China. For such Protestants, it was the supreme virtue of the United States that it had a divinely-appointed call to witness to and defend the true faith.

This belief in the special destiny of the United States and its accepted calling to witness to Christ came of course from the first Puritan settlers. By the end of the nineteenth century, this Protestant tradition had hardened into a theological and political conservatism, evidenced by both a literal reading of the bible, and the promotion of Victorian family values and morality. At the beginning of the new century, its champions were already engaged in a bitter struggle against the forces of modernization, secularism and indifferentism. They took especial aim at the advocates of theological liberalism, whose ideas seemed to be based on the heresies of German biblical criticism. They particularly attacked the idea that Christian salvation could be brought nearer by schemes of collective or reformist improvement. They never shared the optimistic assumptions of humanistic betterment so widely adopted by the supporters of the Social Gospel movement of the times. So too conservative Evangelicals deplored the perceived weakening of America’s cherished spiritual values. They opposed many of the changes from an essentially rural to a much more morally ambiguous urban and industrialized society. Contrary to the views championed by progressive politicians, such as President Wilson, they were not inclined to give in to the temptation of moving with the times.

America’s participation in the first world war only intensified this confrontation. Both for personal and political reasons, President Wilson laid great stress on the moral reasons behind the war effort in 1917. No less altruistic was the propaganda put out on behalf of his peace plans in 1918, including his proposals for a League of Nations to ensure “perpetual peace”. Indeed Wilson and his supporters fully believed that the opportunity beckoned to apply the principles of Christianity on a cosmic scale, led of course by the reformist and “progressive” enthusiasts who were Wilson’s most ardent backers in the churches.

It used to be said that “The League of Nations enjoyed the support of all organized religion; and for those who had no religion, it formed an adequate substitute”. Ruotsila;s careful research disputes at least the first half of this adage as far as American Protestantism goes. He scrupulously analyses the various segments of American anti-internationalist Protestantism, and describes the theological bases of their utterances. Basically all of them shared a common rejection of the immanentist theology of the Social Gospel, with its confident belief in human self-sufficiency and the beneficial effect of collective improvements though institutional measures. These conservative Evangelicals were, by contrast, firmly convinced of human sinfulness, and their utter dependence on God for everything, including politics. They totally rejected the kinds of anthropocentric assumptions which underlay the reformers’ ideas for the rectification of world evils by political means.

Ruotsila’s contribution is to show how prevalent the religious arguments were in the heated debates over the ratification of the League’s Covenant. He argues rightly that these have not been given their due weight in most secular histories, either of the League or of twentieth century America. And he shows how widespread and well mobilized were the utterances of those who used their conservative theologies to combat not merely the League of Nations, but all other aspects of modernization and secularization. His evaluation of the various positions adopted by the dispensationalists, hard-line Baptists, conservative Lutherans and Presbyterians, and even a few isolated Episcopalians and Methodists, is excellently nuanced. Each produced their own variant on a similar theme. Generic Christian anti-internationalism was a sub-theme of anti-modernism. The League of Nations offered an unacceptable mixture of unwelcome features: a multinational co-operation with non-Christians; the creation of a dangerous supranational authority; the vision of an impossible goal of human betterment. This would be an apostate deviation from America’s true calling. The fundamental belief that the United States was and is a uniquely Christian nation with a special role to play in the world was already deeply rooted in such circles a hundred years ago. Its recurrence and indeed fulfilment in George W. Bush’s unilateral war in Iraq shows how strongly these conservative Evangelicals’ ideas continue to be played out, even after the League of Nations has long since disappeared.

Interestingly enough, Markku Ruotsila is an adjunct professor of American church history at the University of Helsinki. Is there any comparable position in any American University devoted to Finnish church history?

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2b) N.Vos, D.Pryfogle and M George, Faith in the world. Mark Gibbs and Vesper Society, Being God’s Lively People. San Francisco: Vesper Society Imprint 2009. 129 Pp. ISBN 1441479201, <http://www.vesper.org/>http://www.vesper.org

This short but vivid tribute to Mark Gibbs and the Vesper Society records a remarkable trans-Atlantic partnership which encouraged the laity of the churches to take their faith into the world of their everyday lives in new and stimulating ways. Mark Gibbs was an Anglican layman, living in a wind-swept cottage on the north Yorkshire moors, who teamed up with a group of American businessmen mainly from the San Francisco area, seeking to enlarge the horizons of church members, and to see the wider implications for their faith in the world. Too often, it seemed, the clergy had called on the laity to support church-related projects and institutions, but had not equipped them to witness in their secular occupations. Since the laity comprised 99% of church members, and the clergy only 1%, there was an obvious disproportion in the amounts spent on Christian education for the non-professional members in the church pews.. For twenty years from the middle 1960s, Mark Gibbs and the Vesper Society saw it as their mission to mobilize the laity through a series of educational programmes, which pulled together leading Christian laymen to expand their witness and make it relevant to their day-to-day occupations. They paid special attention to the ethical principles which should apply in all walks of life, and sought to overcome the barriers and limitations of too narrow an emphasis on personal salvation in the pious church circles. Rather Christian witness had to apply to all spheres of life, and lay men and women were the ones to make this happen. Mark Gibbs had a special flair for arousing such concerns, not only comforting the afflicted but afflicting the comfortable. For many years he became a roving ambassador for lay renewal, writing, teaching, stimulating, inspiring and sometimes irritating to achieve his ends. In America, the Vesper Society provided the resources to organise seminars, retreats and conferences where the message for lay renewal could be heard. Together they made a significant impact.

Interestingly, the project was largely derived from Germany. After the Second World War, the German Evangelical Church developed two major initiatives designed as reparations for the churches’ disastrous failure to resist the evils of the previous Nazi regime. The first of these was the creation of a series of Evangelical Academies, of which Bad Boll, near Stuttgart was – and is – the most famous. These professionally-staffed institutions provided a large-scale and year-round programme of seminars and short courses, some of them residential, which were a form of continuing Christian education, ranging over a wide number of topics, and using debates and discussions on controversial and topical subjects to draw out the Christian implications. Over the years, the result has been to build up a large corps of informed and critical lay opinion.
No less significant were the biennial Kirchentage or Church Rallies, held in major cities, usually for a week in June, which brought – and still bring – together many thousands of people, including foreigners, in stimulating debates and discussions. Organized and led by lay people, these rallies do much to offset the often sombre and unexciting life in the local Protestant parishes. They also provide an opportunity for all church-related organizations in the social, political and mission fields, to broadcast their messages in a vital and net-working fashion.

These were the models Mark Gibbs brought to America where he found receptive audiences. His belief that the renewal of the church depended on lay people acting beyond the church walls and taking up their ministries in daily life, proved popular and attractive. He helped to overcome the laity’s isolation and to equip them for their everyday vocations. It was also a call for prophetic witness for social justice and peace, particularly during the height of the Vietnam War, and hence ran parallel to the efforts promoted by such bodies as the World Council of Churches, and the emphasis stemming from the Second Vatican Council. Gibbs found new ways to inspire his audiences to be faithful followers of Christ in the secular worlds where they lived. For the layman, he believed, was the essential interpreter of the Christian message in the battlefield of the world, and must be properly equipped for such a task. At a time of turbulent political events and challenges, this reflective Christian witness was most helpful.

Mark Gibbs’ understanding of the church was always inclusive and ecumenical, and sought to overcome the limitations of private piety and individualistic attitudes in social morality. Such a purely private faith, he believed, was as dangerous as a fanatically political creed, and both needed the world-restoring allegiance of the gospel of God.

Unfortunately Gibbs died in 1986, and without his energy and drive the cause languished, especially in England. But in many ways his ideal has flourished with the rapid expansion of lay-led voluntary agencies, ministering and witnessing all over the world. With the obvious decline of clergy-based influence, the laity is now taking a much more active role. But we still need men of Mark Gibbs’ calibre to maintain the enthusiasm and direction of God’s lively people as they live out their faith in the world.
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2c) Peter Raina ed. , Bishop George Bell. House of Lords Speeches and Correspondence with Rudolf Hess. Oxford, Berne etc: Peter Lang. 2009. 226 Pp.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958. Tributes to his memory have already appeared in this Newsletter, viz a report on the Memorial Conference held in Chichester (September 2008)) and a full account of the papers given at that conference (April 2009). But we can happily add to these a short note about the edition of Bell’s speeches in the House of Lords and his correspondence with the Nazi leader Rudolf Hess, prepared by one of Bell’s devoted admirers, Peter Raina. We can certainly be grateful that he has researched into the massive archive Bell left behind to dig out the texts of his speeches given in the House of Lords during his twenty-one years as a member of the bench of bishops, as well as the remarkable but wholly ineffective exchange of letters between Bell and Hitler’s Deputy, Hess, from1935 to 1938. (Hess’ German texts are also printed). These materials can only reinforce the impression that Bell was a courageous, outspoken, singular and persistent voice of conscience in those most difficult years for Christian witness. He believed, however, that he had the duty to speak out for the Church on matters of public concern. The House of Lords offered him a public platform, even if his fellow peers were rarely in agreement. Nor were most of his fellow bishops. But Bell was not to be deterred by opportunistic considerations, as was most notable in the famous speech he made in February 1944 denouncing as inhumane the British policy of indiscriminate bombing of German cities, which is reproduced here in full. His protest was based on two main thoughts: first, that the war should be prosecuted in ways which would uphold the ideals for which it was being fought, and secondly, that such destructive bombing made no distinction between the supporters of Nazism in Germany and the numerous opponents of the regime who, Bell believed.would one day rise up and overthrow the monstrous tyranny imposed by Hitler. This was a belief he had long held. Indeed Bell’s whole career had been deeply affected by what he considered was the mistake, even the crime, of the Versailles Peace Treaty, which had so insulted Germany and thereby led to the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. He campaigned long and hard against the vindictive anti-German attitudes held by many leading Britons, and pleaded for the cause of peace and reconciliation throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His leadership in the international ecumenical movement of the mainly Protestant churches had given him many contacts in the European churches as well as in pacifist circles. So he was naturally outraged by the vicious measures adopted by the radical Nazis especially against the Jews. He personally organized numerous relief efforts on their behalf, and rescued a number of Protestant clergymen by providing them with asylum in England. His concern for refugees and his desire to raise awareness (and funds) for their situation was clearly reflected in his pre-1939 speeches, as was his indignation at their treatment as enemy aliens after war broke out. By the end of the war, Bell was looking at the wider horizons and seeking new patterns for post-war reconstruction and reconciliation, as well as renewal though a recommitment to Christianity. These are the themes which are reflected in his speeches, all well and succinctly thought out, penetrating in his resolve not to let the issues be overwhelmed by pragmatic or political considerations, and consistent in his witness to Christian values. Bell sought to make this witness relevant to all aspects of life, and therefore was bold to offer his opinions on a wide range of topics, some of which he could only know at second-hand.

In 1936 Bell took the opportunity of one of his periodic visits to Germany to obtain an interview with Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess. Bell was undoubtedly influenced by the idea that a personal contact with top German leaders could ensure that they were made aware of the criticisms of the Nazi treatment of the German churches, and would take measures to remedy the repressive actions of their underlings. Thus he told Hess bluntly that church circles abroad were apprehensive of those “prominent leaders of the party who have far more radical opinions and favour a far more radical policy to the whole Church question”. In 1937 he tried to use the same channel to express his concern about specific Confessing Church victims of Nazi repression, and asked for the modification of the measures taken against them. His intervention on behalf of Pastor Martin Niemoeller shortly after his arrest in July 1937,however, earned him a brusque reply for his audacity in pleading on behalf of a clergyman whose “attacks and slanders against the State and its Head have reached such dimensions that the State has been forced to set the law against Pastor Niemoeller” Furthermore, Hess’ letter retaliated by asking how Bell would like it if the British Government’s policies were attacked by Germans on behalf of an unrestrained Irish clergyman. This missive concluded with the peremptory statement: ”90 per cent of the German people did not bestow their confidence on their Government, so that afterwards this Government should tolerate a situation in which a few misguided persons should threaten the internal peace and the basis for the security of the nation as well as its Christian religion”. Undeterred Bell tried again a year later to ask for an alleviation of Niemoeller’s prison terms. He received no reply.

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2d) E.P.Jikeli, Siebenbürgisch-sächsische Pfarrer, Lehrer und Journalisten in der Zeit der kommunistischen Diktatur (1944-1971) [European University Studies, Series III, History and Allied Studies, Vol. 1044.] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2007. Pp. 321. $86.95. ISBN 978-3-631-56769-2.)

(This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, October 2009, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author)

Erwin Peter Jikeli’s study of ethnic German intellectuals in Romania during the first half of the communist era opens a discussion of questions familiar to historians of modern Germany but newer to scholars of communist Eastern Europe. To what extent was the ruling ideology in this case, Romanian communism imported from abroad or imposed from above? Was it only endured by the populace, or did certain elements in society welcome it from below? To what extent were intellectuals in this case, pastors, teachers, and journalists committed democrats engaged in resistance against their regime while making superficial public compromises? Or were they willing collaborators out of ideological conviction or for professional gain?

In this published version of his doctoral dissertation from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Jikeli (who was raised and educated in Romania) explores the vocational history of ethnic German intellectuals from the Siebenbürgen (“Seven Fortresses”) region of Romania, where Saxons first settled in the twelfth century as defenders of Transylvania. Jikeli employs a social-scientific approach, applying biographical techniques to understand the pastors, teachers, and journalists he analyzes. Indeed, one of the unique features of Jikeli’s study is his attempt to survey 259 former members of the three professions (many had emigrated to Germany proper before and after 1989). Unfortunately, only 91 (just over a third) responded at all and only 52 (barely one-fifth) filled out his long, probing questionnaires, the others “presumably afflicted by a moral dilemma or fear of the truth” (p. 7). These limitations aside, Jikeli is to be commended for his wide use of primary sources, including diaries, biographies, letters, chronicles, newspapers and publications, and all manner of official correspondence and personnel records (some of which, he notes, contained lies meant to discredit the intellectuals during the communist era).

Following a methodological introduction and four chapters of historical and socio-political background, Jikeli probes the attitudes and actions of his subjects during the first half of the Romanian communist era from the installation of the single-party system under Soviet military pressure to the intense Stalinism of the 1950s to the relaxation and adoption of independent foreign, economic, and cultural policies in the early years of Nicolai Cea escu’s reign in three main chapters. The year 1971, when the Romanian dictator implemented a harsher domestic policy (and when the thirty-year freeze on archival records began to affect his study), marks the end point of Jikeli’s research. Two subsequent chapters assess the issues of party membership and contact with Securitate, or Romanian secret service.

Jikeli’s goal is to understand the extent to which these Saxon pastors, teachers, and journalists maintained some critical distance from the regime and attempted to represent the interests of their minority group. What he discovers is that all three groups of intellectuals suffered under policies which attempted to draw professionals from the “healthy” social categories of workers and farmers and which suppressed minority populations (primarily Hungarians) in favour of Romanianization. German Protestant pastors (mainly Lutheran since the Reformation) in Transylvania found themselves under great suspicion since they were only indirectly under the control of the state and since they stood by definition in opposition to the atheism of the communist party. For that reason, pastors were monitored and recruited intensely by the Securitate. German teachers were pressured to join the communist party, not least because of their important role as transmitters of the state’s materialist and assimilationist educational program. Journalists were required to be party members and worked under editors-in-chief who were party appointees charged to direct the propaganda program of the press.

Jikeli argues that all three groups of German intellectuals found ways to subvert or evade some of the burden of their association with the communist system (his few survey respondents were quick to provide these kinds of stories) and to bolster siebenbürgisch-sächsisch identity. But given the important position held by Romanian professionals and particularly by these natural leaders in the minority population, there can be little doubt that they must have made significant accommodations with the Romanian party-state. Due to the lack of survey respondents and the absence of relevant secret service files, however, Jikeli concludes that we will never likely know the full extent of such collaboration among the ethnic German intellectuals of Romania.

Kyle Jantzen, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

2e) Jana Leichsenring, Die katholische Kirche un “ihre Juden”. Das “Hilfswerk beim Bischoeflichen Ordinariat Berlin” 1938-1948. Berlin: Metropol Verlg. 2007 349 Pp. ISBN 978-3-938690-58-1

This thoroughly researched dissertation for Berlin’s Technical University tells the story of the Catholic agency belatedly established in 1938 to assist those Catholics of Jewish ancestry as they faced persecution and deportation by the Nazis. (Ms Leichsenring’s footnotes are exemplarily exhaustive!) But the meat of the thesis concerns the often reluctant measures, taken with inadequate means by the Catholic authorities, to help these unfortunate members of their flock, and includes a number of heart-wrenching stories of their fate. Leichsenring estimates that there were approximately 45,000 Catholics labelled by the Nazis as “Jews” or “Mischlinge”. Many resided in Berlin, so that it was natural that the office to help them should be placed under the auspices of the Berlin Bishop, Konrad von Preysing. At first, efforts had been made to assist such Catholics to emigrate through the St Raphael’s Verein, but the Gestapo placed increasing restrictions on this program, and in 1941 ordered the society to be dissolved. In any case, in October 1941 no further emigration of Jews was allowed. (The same decree put an end to the Protestant Church’s similar efforts, along with the arrest of its principal organiser, Pastor Heinrich Gruber). But the Catholic Hilfswerk continued, under the direction of resolute and resourceful leadership of Margarete Sommer, whose valiant endeavours deserve to be better known. Since emigration was no longer possible, Sommer had to concentrate on personal assistance on the spot. Her imaginative and thorough efforts to give whatever assistance to her individual contacts was possible are here fully recorded and praised But she also wanted to mobilize the whole church to protest against the injustices and terrorization which her charges were undergoing. To this end she prepared a number of reports, from February 1941, especially on the effects of deportation, and the drastic living conditions in the ghettos in the east where these individuals had been sent. A year later she reported on what she had learnt about the so-called Wannsee Conference, which led her to the conviction that the Jews were to be murdered en masse, and that the same treatment was to be given to those Catholics in mixed marriages and their children. Bishop Preysing then forwarded these reports to his superior Cardinal Bertram in Breslau. In fact Sommer also personally went to see Bertram, but was not believed. Her plea for a strong public denunciation by the whole Catholic hierarchy of the Nazis’ misdeeds was turned down The Cardinal refused to act on such unverified information, and limited himself to written protests to specific Reich ministers and bureaucrats about the Nazi plan to dissolve Church-blessed mixed marriages. When Sommer went to visit him for one last time in April 1944, he refused to see her, and ordered Preysing to keep her under control. Leichsenring thus adds to the already established evidence that the Catholic response to the persecution of the Jews was far too limited, and was given, even by Sommer herself, only to practising Catholics. The conclusion has to be reached that, while it is untrue to say that nothing was done, far greater efforts could have been made if the Catholic bishops had been more determined to take up arms against the regime. But having given their allegiance in 1933, and afraid for the consequences if the Reich Concordat was to be revoked, and in the circumstances of total war, none of the bishops were prepared to act publicly on behalf of the Jews, who had been so denounced in every piece of Nazi propaganda. The record of the Hilfswerk, whose papers Leichsenring has so competently researched, is therefore one of frustration and very limited success.

JSC

3) Book notes: J.B.Lazarus, In the shadow of Vichy. The Finaly Affair, New York: Peter Lang, 2008. ISBN 978­4331-0212-7
In the immediate post-Holocaust years, Catholic-Jewish relations in France were deeply perturbed by the controversial issue of the future fate of Jewish children whose parents had been murdered by the Nazis and who had been given refugee by Catholics in convents and schools. After the end of hostilities, these care-givers were not surprisingly reluctant to part from these charges. But the Jewish community organisations went to great efforts to reclaim the children and sought to place them with Jewish relatives, or in Jewish communal institutions, or even to let them take part in an early aliyah to Palestine. The most notorious case, where one French Catholic care-giver sought to thwart these claims, came in the dispute over two small boys, the Finaly brothers. This Catholic true believer refused to deliver the boys to their aunts in New Zealand and Israel, had them secretly baptised as Catholics and even eventually had them smuggled out of France to Spain. She also successfully mobilized the Catholic community to her side using arguments derived from the Dreyfus affair of fifty years earlier. The anti-Semitic overtones were explicit. Fortunately, as the author makes clear, there were other Catholic clerics appalled by this bigotry. Finally a settlement was reached and the boys were returned to their relatives. But the polarization of French opinion was only healed when more eirenic views prevailed, as was seen in the declarations on relations with Judaism at the Second Vatican Council. JSC

With every best wish
John Conway

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