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Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

Translated from the German by Martin R. Menke

Editor’s note: the translation has hewed closely to the original German of the conference report. In a few instances some linguistic liberties were taken to ensure readability in English, but we have tried to minimize these. On occasion the original German terms are retained in square brackets to clarify a translation.

From October 5 to 7, 2022, an international conference on [Otto] Dibelius took place in Marburg. LUKAS BORMANN of the Phillips University Marburg and MANFRED GAILUS of the Technical University Berlin organized the event. The organizers selected talks by sixteen scholars active in Protestant theology and historical, cultural, and religious scholarship on Otto Dibelius (1886-1967). The conference’s purpose was to develop a new understanding of this extraordinary personality in German Protestantism for the first time since the publication of his first and, so far, only biography thirty years ago.

The conference program consisted of seven thematic sessions. The first session featured contributions to the historiography concerning Dibelius. MARTIN STUPPERICH (Hannover) reported as a witness to the creation of the Dibelius biography written by his father, Robert Stupperich. In 1967, a group around Kurt Scharf had tasked the elder Stupperich with writing a biography to honor their esteemed teacher. The publisher, however, rejected the first draft. Subsequently, the son, Martin, took on the difficult task of revising the first draft with his father. Working with his wife, the doctorally qualified historian Amrei Stupperich, Martin Stupperich claimed to have composed a significant part of the [published] manuscript. He centered the biography on the theme of the church’s independence after 1919, one of Dibelius’s most important concerns. Martin Stupperich sought to mention the persecution of the Jews because originally Robert Stupperich had not focused on accusations of antisemitism against Dibelius. When the biography appeared in 1989, Dibelius was not perceived as an antisemite.

The two following presentations were dedicated to the intellectual formation of Dibelius in late Imperial Germany. ALBRECHT BEUTEL (Münster) traced Dibelius’ development before the First World War and described him as an ambitious church reformer who oriented his thinking about parishes and parish activities on the work of Emil Sulze. Pleading for a form of preaching easily understood by the people, which Dibelius connected to a differentiated parish organizational program, he engaged the ideas of Calvin and his experience gained while studying abroad in the Church of Scotland and its small parishes. Dibelius sought to encourage parishes actively to participate in the life of the church. In his work, Dibelius considered himself a modern Lutheran and kept his distance from pietism. Dibelius embraced much of the Prussian tradition from Queen Louise to Bismarck, which to him embodied Germany. While he interpreted the outbreak of war in 1914 as a divine epiphany, his writing from the period reveals no trace of antisemitism.

WOLF-DIETRICH SCHÄUFFELE (Marburg) analyzed Dibelius’ activities during the First World War. Schäuffele concluded that his wartime sermons concerned pastoral concerns but were influenced by nationalist phraseology and far removed from the reality of the front. As a superior pastor in Lauenburg, he served soldiers’ needs. A year later, he conducted patriotic rallies in the Protestant Berlin parish of Heilsbronnen. The Christian state was his ideal, whose morality should be guaranteed by the church and Christianity. He also considered Germany’s status as a world power to be essential. Dibelius believed in a Christian German mission, and he understood the war as a just and holy war in which God, as the Lord of history, was continuing his work of creation. It seemed incredible to him that God should permit the political might of Germans to break. In 1918, Dibelius joined the DNVP.[1] At war’s end, he advocated the stab-in-the-back legend and decried the Treaty of Versailles as a satanic construct.

In the next session, which concerned itself with the church as guardian after 1919, BENEDIKT BRUNNER (Mainz) presented a talk online in which he analyzed the public and publishing activity of Dibelius in the Weimar Republic. For more than fifty years, Dibelius called for a people’s church (Volkskirche). In 1919, he considered it time for a free, strong people’s church. Dibelius claimed he was the best-informed man of the Prussian Church, who published until 1933 in seven journals. Furthermore, he supported religious instruction in public schools and called upon the people to gather around the Protestant church to resist secularization. In 1925, Dibelius became General Superintendent of the Kurmark and assumed the leadership of the Prussian church. In a much discussed and observed debate with Karl Barth, Dibelius used triumphalist language to defend the imperial church and its responsibility for the people.

TODD H. WEIR (Groningen), whose presentation had been prepared in part and translated by MAURICE BACKSCHAT (Münster), addressed the work of Dibelius at the Apologetical Center, founded in Berlin Spandau in 1921. From a Protestant perspective, the center engaged with secularization and the German atheist [Gottlosen] movement. It advocated a Christian worldview. Karl Barth considered the language of apologetics dangerous. Dibelius saw in Barth a dogmatic, disconnected from the world’s reality, who hardly understood the church’s mission. After 1945, Dibelius continued his apologetic work during the Cold War. Dibelius conceived the people’s church [Volkskirche] as a counterpoint to secular culture, which the church should engage. Dibelius recognized positive religious energies in nationalism but envisioned himself on the apologetic front against National Socialism and the German Christian movement. Until 1933, he found it increasingly difficult to delimit the boundary between his apologetics and the right-wing margins.

The fourth session analyzed Dibelius’ engagement in public debate. LUKAS BORMANN (Marburg) opened the session with a presentation about Dibelius’ most influential work, The Century of the Church, which was first published in 1926 and appeared in six further editions. Dibelius addressed his work to the educated reading middle class. Dibelius’ thesis held that the Lutheran Reformation had eliminated the church. He saw a wave of churches on a global scale and developed a Protestant cultural program that employed racial and national socialist terminology.[2] He identified freethinkers, Jews, and Catholics as demons. He argued that, while sects and the German free churches formed distinct groups, the church aimed to include everyone. At the time, Dibelius claimed that the Protestant church could co-exist with any form of government; later faced with the GDR, he relativized that position. More recent research (for example, from Wolfgang Huber, Hartmut Fritz, and Benedikt Brunner) is more critical of Dibelius’ program. He did not reach the broader masses. Instead of recognizing the church as polysemous, he polarized it and thus found himself between the fronts of a diverse Protestantism.

BRANDON BLOCK (Wisconsin) gave a virtual presentation in which he concentrated on the West German reception of Dibelius’ work Authority [Obrigkeit], published in 1959. As bishop and chairman of the Council of the Protestant Churches (EKD) in Germany, Dibelius took a traditional anti-communist position. At the same time, the Councils of Brethren sought a new role for the church. In 1958, the East German bishops professed their loyalty to the GDR. Given the situation, Dibelius wanted to make a statement about the nature of state authority. The term “authority” [Obrigkeit] (Romans 13) no longer seemed to be an adequate interpretation. Dibelius’ new work sparked a debate in which conservative Lutherans recognized an analogy between the GDR and the Third Reich. The circle around Karl Barth and the Councils of Brethren rejected Dibelius’ text. They claimed that, with his reactionary conservatism, Dibelius may have strengthened counter-reactions, which encouraged the transformation of the Protestant church into a church open to democracy and society.

JOLANDA GRÄSSEL-FARNBAUER (Marburg) addressed Dibelius’ position on women’s issues. She analyzed the work We Call Germany to God [Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott] (1937), published by Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. She also studied critical reactions by contemporary female readers. We Call Germany responded to National Socialist church politics and criticized the German Christian movement. In the last chapter, the authors explained their view of the women’s movement. They thought women had contravened their destiny when they went to work for pay and sought education and public works. First and foremost, they were to be wives and mothers. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack contradicted this view, and theologians Meta Eyl and Gertrud Eitner identified an affinity of the text with National Socialist ideology. Although many women were active in the Confessing Church, it remained ambivalent on the question of women’s roles. Dibelius conceded to theologically educated women a role of service in the church but not the proclamation [of the gospel] in religious worship. Until the end, he refused to ordain women.

The fifth session focused on National Socialism and the church struggle [Kirchenkampf]. According to MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin), at the opening of Parliament in Potsdam (March 21, 1933), Dibelius welcomed the National Socialist regime’s initial antisemitic policies. Using racist rhetoric, he [claimed] he had expected the “inflow of fresh blood” [“das Einströmen frischen Blutes”] as early as April 1932 and believed in a resurgence of faith. For him, the solution to the Jewish question was to prevent immigration from Eastern Europe. Dibelius’ antisemitic attitude, Gailus claimed, was amply documented. He did not encounter problems with the German Christian movement until he lost his administrative power. As an advisor to the regional Confessing Church of Brandenburg, he remained a man in the middle. He was never a Confessing Church pastor in a Confessing Church parish. Dibelius desired a large, strong, autocratically governed Germany but rejected the hierarchy of the German Christians. After 1945, a negative understanding of Dibelius developed in East Germany; in West Germany, he was seen more positively.

ANDREAS PANGRITZ (Osnabrück) studied the poorly-explored relationship of Dibelius to Jews. Pangritz considered him an antisemite with a clear conscience. After 1945, Dibelius sought to relativize his views. In an article published in 1948, in a retrospective on the Reichspogrom,[3] he did not explain why the church had remained silent. Still, he did emphasize that it was a duty of honor for the Confessing Church to help persecuted Jews. He also claimed that, after euthanasia,[4] he could no longer acknowledge the National Socialist state as an authority. He declared that he had employed two non-Aryans. Since 1934, he had employed a “half-Jew” as a secretary. Already in 1928, Dibelius confessed that he had always been an antisemite. Regarding the boycott of Jewish stores in 1933, Dibelius wrote on April 9 in the Protestant Sunday newspaper of Berlin [Evangelischen Sonntagsblatt Berlin] that the international economy and the international press were in Jewish hands. He continued that Jews abroad were rallying against Germany. He concluded that Jews were a foreign race and Eastern Jews were of questionable moral character.

TETYANA PAVLUSH (Cardiff) had been scheduled to speak on Dibelius’s attitude towards denazification. Because she canceled her talk, MICHAEL HEYMEL (Limburg) presented a talk on the relationship between Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. In a sketch of their personalities, he pointed out that there had been no conflict of authority until both occupied high leadership posts in the church. Both were Prussians, convinced monarchists, and homeless [heimatlose] national Protestants. They welcomed Hitler’s seizure of power but found themselves in ecclesiastical opposition to the German Christians. During the Kirchenkampf, they acted as allies for a time. Dibelius was initially only an observer of the Confessing Church and began his full cooperation only in June 1934. The opposition position that Niemöller assumed after the war’s end originated in the Confessing Churches’ internal fissures. This is evident in the differing evaluations of the church conference at Treysa. Niemöller considered Dibelius the bureaucratic leader of an ecclesiastical administration, while Dibelius considered Niemöller the representative of a superseded ecclesiastical minority.

The three papers of the following session were devoted to the post-war era. CLAUDIA LEPP (München) analyzed the work of Dibelius as a bishop of Berlin (1945-1966) under four aspects. First, in 1945, when he resumed his office in the Prussian Council of Brethren, Dibelius acted as a strongman, solidified old structures, and prevented a reorganization as the Council of Elders around Niemöller intended. In his work, he included both German Christian and National Socialist pastors. Second, in his sermons and pastoral letters, he assumed the position of someone who could analyze and interpret contemporary affairs, in order to frame and structure the life of the people. He also compared the Federal Republic with the Weimar Republic and the GDR with the National Socialist state. Thirdly, he acted as an anti-communist engaged in a church struggle, insisting on the rule of law and freedom of opinion in the GDR. At the time, ninety percent of the GDR’s population belonged to a Christian church. Dibelius struggled in vain against the Socialist Youth Ceremony of Jugendweihe, since most Protestants were unwilling to resist the government’s ritual. Fourth, he acted as a national Protestant activist for the reunification of Germany. By 1957, he was banned from entering the GDR but formally remained a bishop of East and West Berlin until 1966.

HANSJÖRG BUSS (Siegen) focused on the East German political and ecclesiastical opponents of Dibelius as bishop of Berlin. He was the only East German representative on the Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany and, during the 1950s, he was the face of the Protestant church. During this time, the Protestant church in the GDR lost public support. In a film produced by East German television, Dibelius was portrayed as a cold warrior based on his notorious sermon at Potsdam in 1933. This reflected the East German regime’s tendency to see him as an ideological opponent. In East German media, he was portrayed in caricatures as a NATO bishop and purveyor of the hydrogen bomb. While the East German polemic against Dibelius included antisemitic overtones, it increased his support in the West. In 1958, opposition among the pastors of Berlin-Brandenburg increased. Günter Jacob, Superintendent of the Neumark since 1946, became his primary opponent. Jacob did not insist on a unified Protestant church in Germany and, after 1960, turned against the structure of the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, which was tailored to Dibelius and the office of the bishop.

SIEGFRIED HERMLE (München) used the annual reports written by Dibelius to analyze his tenure in office as chair of the Council of the Lutheran Church in Germany [Rat der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland] (1949-1961). The council consisted of eleven members and was intended to lead and administer. Eleven individuals ran for the chair’s position in the 1949 elections. A clear majority voted for Dibelius and Lilje as his deputy. Niemöller was no longer capable of gaining a majority. For Dibelius, the churches in the German states represented the central points of German Protestantism. The individual churches did not want a strong central leadership. The Council of the Lutheran Church in Germany should only occasionally speak publicly in the name of the individual churches. In the eight annual reports filed by Dibelius, relations between church and state took up much space. He believed Bonn protected the church while, in the GDR, the church was increasingly exposed to propaganda. He argued that the Church should not let itself be abused in the competition of political forces. He acknowledged differences of opinion in military matters but disagreed with the Councils of Brethren. This was a contrast that influences debates concerning peace to this day. The conservative majority of the Councils of Brethren agreed with him.

The last session concerned Dibelius on the international stage. THEA SULMAVICO (Halle) characterized Dibelius’ position in the rearmament debate as ambivalent. The GDR press responded with polemics when he signed the agreement on pastoral care in the military (1957). Dibelius, in The Boundaries of the State [Die Grenzen des Staates] of 1949, criticized modern war. His criticism of the secular state was aimed only at the GDR, not against the Federal Republic. For Dibelius, the Fatherland had a higher priority than the state. It was a matter of national honor to provide for the defense of one’s own country. He warned against the great danger from the East. After atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, he believed the Soviet Union to possess superiority over the West. He accused Niemöller and Heinemann[5] of political propaganda. He claimed Lutherans were better than the followers of Barth in keeping separate political questions and questions of faith. Neither side ever entirely accepted Dibelius’ claim that he was unpolitical.

BERND KREBS (Berlin) discussed Dibelius’ relationship with Poland. In the 1920s, the primary focus was on Germans under Polish rule. Two-thirds of these Germans left Poland. General Superintendent Juliusz Barsche advocated the integration of all Protestants in the Polish state. Dibelius was convinced of a German mission in the East. Using strongly nationalist tones, he represented the interests of German Protestants in Poland. Before 1914, the region included a million Protestant Christians; after the war, only 350,000 remained. German pastors [in Poland] followed the DNVP party line and were considered leaders in ethnic German circles. In the mid-1920s, tensions worsened. National Socialist policies exerted massive pressure on the Protestant church in Posen. German Protestants in Poland were disappointed by National Socialism. Poland remained a realm of different cultures, in which the desired Germanification failed. After 1945, Dibelius concerned himself with the Lutherans in Poland.

A promised presentation on Dibelius’ active participation in the Ecumenical Movement had to be canceled because KATHARINA KUNTER (Helsinki) could not attend. HARTMUT LEHMANN (Kiel) summarized the conference and asked if anyone actually knew who Dibelius was. Did the presentations together constitute a new understanding of Dibelius? Three facets, Lehmann argued, were recognizable: 1. Dibelius was a prince of the church who always claimed leadership roles. 2. He was a man of the political right who consistently combated the left. Like the average German Protestant of his age, he supported antisemitism and initially also National Socialism. He integrated individuals from different backgrounds into the Council of the Protestant Churches of Germany. 3. After 1945, Dibelius missed the opportunity for a new orientation of the Protestant Church. One could at least imagine an alternative behavior marked by repentance and reversal. The question of what might have happened if Dibelius, as leader of the church, had acted differently before and after National Socialism would go beyond historical scholarship. LEPP and HERMLE remarked that, in such an instance, Dibelius would not have been himself and would not have risen to the church leadership positions he held.

The conference took place with relatively good participation by female scholars within a mixture of several generations of scholars and a constructive atmosphere. Nonetheless, in evaluating the work of Robert Stupperich’s discussion of antisemitism, tensions became evident. Relating to ecumenicism and denazification, gaps in the scholarship were regrettably noticed. New were the investigations of Dibelius during the Kaiserzeit[6] and his relationship to the Weimar era. On the question of antisemitism and Dibelius’ “tragic” post-war role between polemics and his slow distancing from them, the final word has not been spoken. The contributions to the conference are to be published in an edited volume.

[1] Editor’s note: German National People’s Party, a right-wing conservative nationalist party.

[2] Translator’s note: the preceding two sentences are contradictory in the original German.

[3] Editor’s note: the pogrom of November 9, 1938.

[4] Editor’s note: the Nazis’ T-4 “euthanasia” program.

[5] Editor’s note: Gustav Heinemann, at the time President of the Synod of German Churches and Minister of the Interior under Konrad Adenauer.

[6] Editor’s note: refers to the period 1871-1918.

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

From October 5-7, 2022, an international conference devoted to new research on the German Protestant leader Otto Dibelius took place in Marburg. It was organized by LUKAS BORMANN (Philipps University of Marburg) and MANFRED GAILUS (TU Berlin). Sixteen scholars of Protestant theology, history, culture, and religion presented papers on Otto Dibelius (1880-1967), contributing to a new perspective on this outstanding personality of German Protestantism, more than 30 years after the publication of the first and so far only biography.

The conference program, which was divided into seven thematic blocks, began with an overview of the scholarship on Dibelius. MARTIN STUPPERICH (Hannover), whose father Robert Stupperich wrote a Dibelius biography, spoke as a personal witness. In 1967, his father was commissioned by a group around Kurt Scharf to write a biography in which he tried to capture the merits of the honoured teacher. This the publisher rejected, and so Martin then took on the difficult task of revising the first version together with his father. By his account, he and his wife, the historian AMREI STUPPERICH, wrote a significant part of the text. The emphasis was now on Dibelius’ main theme, namely the new independence of the church after 1919, insisting also to include the persecution of the Jews, since the accusation of antisemitism had been neglected by Robert Stupperich. Even in 1989, per Martin, when the biography was published, Dibelius was not perceived as an antisemite.

The next two lectures were devoted to the mentalities of the Imperial era. ALBRECHT BEUTEL (Münster) traced Dibelius’ career up to the First World War and described him as an ambitious church reformer who based his parish program on that of Emil Sulze. Appealing to a popular preaching style while organizing the complexity of his parish, he adopted ideas not only from Calvin but also from the Church of Scotland and its small congregations, which he knew from a study visit. His aim was to encourage active participation in the parish community. Dibelius saw himself as a modern Lutheran and kept his distance from Pietism. For him, the epitome of Germanness was Preussentum (Prussianism, like Bismarck and Queen Luise) was the epitome of Germanness. He interpreted the outbreak of war in 1914 as a “revelation from God”. During the Imperial period, Dibelius showed no signs of antisemitism.

WOLF-FRIEDRICH SCHÄUFELE (Marburg) went into more detail about Dibelius’ work in the First World War and came to the conclusion that although his war sermons had expressed pastoral concerns, they were strongly influenced by nationalistic phraseology and were far removed from reality. As head pastor in Lauenburg, Dibelius looked after soldiers in 1914, and a year later organized patriotic rallies in Berlin-Heilsbronnen. His ideal was the Christian state, whose morality was to be guaranteed by the church and Christianity. He considered it vital for the Wilhelmine Empire to exist as a world power. Dibelius believed in a Christian-German mission, interpreting the Great War as a just and holy war in which God was at work as Lord of History. It seemed hardly conceivable to him that God could work in such a way that would break the political power of Germans. In 1918, Dibelius joined the German National People’s Party (DNVP). At war’s end, he promoted the stab-in-the-back legend and denounced the Versailles Treaty as a satanic construct.

In the next thematic section, which revolved around the church as guardian after 1919, BENEDIKT BRUNNER (Mainz) examined the public and journalistic activities of Dibelius during the Weimar Republic in an online presentation. Dibelius stood for the national church [Volkskirche] for more than fifty years. In 1919, he saw the time had come for a free, powerful people’s church [Volkskirche]. He was the most highly informed man in the Prussian Church, publishing in seven journals by 1933. He also campaigned for religious education in state schools and called on people to rally around the Protestant church to resist de-Christianization. In 1925, Dibelius became General Superintendent of the Kurmark, at the top of the Prussian Church. In a widely publicized debate with Karl Barth, he defended the empirical church as one that bears responsibility for the people, while Barth criticized Dibelius’ triumphalist language and attitude.

TODD H. WEIR (Groningen), whose lecture was co-written and translated into German by MAURICE BACKSCHAT (Münster), examined Dibelius’ work in the Apologetische Centrale founded in Berlin-Spandau in 1921, which grappled with secularism and the ‘godless’ movement and advanced a ‘Christian world view’. Karl Barth found the language of the apologists dangerous. Dibelius considered Barth a dogmatist who was disconnected from the reality of the world and who could barely see the mission of the church. After 1945, Dibelius continued his apologetics into the Cold War. He understood the people’s church [Volkskirche] as the antithesis to secular culture and the institution which could confront secularism. In nationalism he saw positive religious energy, even as he himself participated on the apologetic front against Nazism and the German Christians (DC). By 1933, he found it increasingly difficult to distinguish himself from the right-wing fringe in his apologetics.

The fourth thematic section, which dealt with Dibelius in public debate, was opened by LUKAS BORMANN (Marburg), who gave a lecture on Dibelius’ most influential publication, the book Das Jahrhundert der Kirche [The Century of the Church] (1926), which went through six editions. It was written for an educated middle-class readership. According to Dibelius’ argument, the Lutheran Reformation purged the church. In contrast, he saw a global wave of the church and developed a Protestant cultural program that used ethnic (völkisch) and nationalist terminology. By demons he meant freethinkers, Jews, and Catholics. While sects and free churches focused on specific groups, the Protestant church encompassed the whole people. Dibelius later distanced himself from his view that the Protestant church could live with any state system. More recent research (e.g. Wolfgang Huber, Hartmut Fritz, and Benedikt Brunner) judges his program critically. It didn’t reach the general public. Instead of understanding the church as a polyseme, he polarized it and got caught between the fronts of a many-sided Protestantism.

In his online lecture, BRANDON BLOCH (Wisconsin) focused on the West German reception of Dibelius’ writing Obrigkeit [Authority] (1959). As bishop and Council Chair in the Protestant Church in Germany [EKD], situated between the divided German states, Dibelius represented a traditionally anti-communist position, while the [Confessing Church] Councils of Brethren in the EKD pleaded for a new role for the church. In 1958, East German bishops declared their loyalty to East Germany. In this context, Dibelius wanted to say something about the nature of state authority in the modern age. The term “government” (Romans 13) no longer seemed to him to be a correct translation for this. His authority document unleashed a debate in which conservative Lutherans saw an analogy between the GDR and the Third Reich, while the circle around Karl Barth and the Councils of Brethren rejected the document. Through his reactionary conservatism, Dibelius may have strengthened counter-reactions that promoted the transformation of the Protestant church into a church open to democracy and society.

JOLANDA GRASSEL-FARNBAUER (Marburg) dealt with Dibelius’ attitude to the “women question.” In doing so, she referred to the text Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott [We call Germany to God] (1937) published by Dibelius and Martin Niemöller and to critical reactions from contemporary readers. The writing reacted to Nazi church politics and settled accounts with the German Faith Movement. In the last chapter, the authors commented on the women’s movement. They felt that women had defied their destiny when they took up paid work and sought education and public work because they were wives and mothers first. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and the theologian Meta Eyl contradicted this, while Gertrud Eitner noted that the writing ran close to Nazi ideology. Although many women were active in the Confessing Church (BK), there was an ambivalent attitude towards women. While Dibelius allowed theologically educated women to serve in the church, they were not allowed to preach in church services and he refused to the end to ordain women.

The fifth section focused on National Socialism and “Church Struggle.” According to MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin), on the day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), Dibelius welcomed the National Socialist Jewish policy of the first weeks of Nazi rule. Using völkisch rhetoric, he had already expected “the influx of fresh blood” in April 1932 and had seen the reawakening of faith. For him, too, the solution to the Jewish question was not to allow any immigrants from the East. Dibelius’ antisemitic attitude is well documented. He only had problems with the German Christians [DC] when he was deprived of administrative power. As an adviser to the regional Confessing Church [BK] of Brandenburg, he remained a man of the middle and did not stand for a BK parish, as the BK pastors did. Dibelius desired a great, strong, and autocratically-governed Germany but opposed the DC church government. After 1945, in the context of the Cold War, a negative image of Dibelius emerged in Eastern Germany and a positive one in Western Germany.

ANDREAS PANGRITZ (Osnabrück), who described Dibelius as an antisemite with a clear conscience, examined Dibelius’ relationship to Judaism, which is still little researched. After 1945, Dibelius glossed over his attitude. In an article from 1948, looking back on the Kristallnacht Pogrom, he did not say why the church was silent at the time, but only that it had become a duty of honor in the BK to help persecuted Jews. He also claimed that, after the euthanasia program, he had no longer been able to recognize the Nazi state as an authority, adding that he had employed two non-Aryans. A half-Jewish woman had been working for him as a secretary since 1934. As early as 1928, Dibelius admitted that he had always been an antisemite. Regarding the boycott of Jewish businesses, he wrote on April 9, 1933, in the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt Berlin that international business capital and the press were in Jewish hands and that Jewry abroad was stirring up anti-Germany sentiment, that Jews were a foreign race, and that Eastern Jews were of dubious moral quality.

TETYANA PAVLUSH (Cardiff) was scheduled to contribute on Dibelius’ stance on denazification. She was unable to attend.

Instead, MICHAEL HEYMEL (Limburg) followed with a lecture on the relationship between Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. In a sketch of their personalities, he pointed out that a conflict of authority between the two only emerged when they met in church leadership positions. Both were Prussians, convinced monarchists and homeless national Protestants who welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, but then found themselves in the church opposition to the DC. In the Church Struggle they had acted as temporary allies, since Dibelius was only involved in the beginnings of the BK as an observer and his involvement only began in June 1934. The contrary position that Niemöller took after the end of the war was rooted in the BK’s internal divisions. This can be seen in the different assessments of the Treysa church conference. Niemöller saw Dibelius as the administrator of a church apparatus, while his opposite number saw him as a representative of an outdated church minority position.

The three lectures in the following thematic section were dedicated to the post-war period. CLAUDIA LEPP (Munich) analyzed the work of Dibelius as Bishop of Berlin (1945-1966) from four angles. In 1945, Dibelius acted as a mover and shaker in the Prussian Council of Brethren by taking up his old office again, consolidating the old structures and preventing a new order in the spirit of the Dahlemite Council of Brethren. He also took on DC and NS pastors. Secondly, in his sermons and pastoral letters, he took on the role of an interpreter of times who wanted to shape the life of the people. He compared the Federal Republic with Weimar and the GDR with the Nazi state. Thirdly, he acted as an anti-communist church fighter who valued legal security and freedom of expression in the GDR. At that time, 90 percent of the GDR population belonged to a Christian church. Dibelius fought in vain against the [Communist] Youth Consecration (Jugendweihe) because the majority of the church people were not prepared to resist. Fourthly, as a national Protestant unity fighter, he campaigned for German reunification. After 1957 he was no longer allowed to enter the GDR, but remained formally Bishop for both East and West Berlin until 1966.

HANSJÖRG BUSS (Siegen) dealt with the political and ecclesiastical opponents of the Berlin Bishop Dibelius in East Germany. He was the only East German church representative on the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany) Council and the face of the Protestant church in the 1950s. During this time, the Protestant Church in the GDR lost support. In memory of the infamous Potsdam sermon in 1933, an actor portrayed him as a cold warrior in a GDR television film. This corresponded to the tendency of the regime, which saw him as an ideological opponent, and of the press media, which caricatured him as a “NATO bishop” and the person who brought the H-bomb. With its somewhat antisemitic undertones, the GDR polemic actually strengthened Dibelius’ support in the West. In 1958, opposition to him increased among pastors in the working group in Berlin-Brandenburg. Günter Jacob, General Superintendent of Neumark since 1946, became his opponent. He did not adhere to a unified EKD and after 1960 turned against the basic order of Berlin-Brandenburg, which was tailored to Dibelius and the episcopal office.

SIEGFRIED HERMLE (Munich) examined Dibelius’ time as EKD Council Chair (1949-1961) based on his reports to the EKD Synod. The eleven-member council was intended to provide leadership and administration. Eleven people ran for the position of chair in 1949, with the clear majority of votes going to Dibelius, with Lilje as deputy. Niemöller was no longer someone about whom people could agree. For Dibelius, the focus of church life was on the regional churches. They did not want central management; only occasionally did the council need to speak publicly on their behalf. In Dibelius’ eight reports, the church-state relationship took up a lot of space. He saw that the church in Bonn was protected, but in the GDR it was increasingly exposed to propaganda. It should not allow itself to be exploited in the play of political forces. On military issues, he recognized different opinions but positioned himself against the Brotherhoods (Bruderschaften), a contrast that continues to have an impact in debates on peace issues to this day. The conservative majority of council members followed his lead.

The last thematic section dealt with Dibelius in international relations. THEA SULMAVICO (Halle) characterized Dibelius’ stance in the rearmament debate as ambivalent. The GDR press reacted to the military pastoral care contract he signed (1957) with polemics. In his 1949 work The Limits of the State, Dibelius criticized modern war. However, his criticism of the secular state was only directed against the GDR, not against the Federal Republic. For him, the Fatherland ranked higher than the state. For Dibelius, it was a question of national honor to ensure the defense of his own country. He invoked the great danger from the East and, after atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, judged the Soviets militarily superior over the West. He accused Niemöller and Heinemann of political propaganda and said that Lutherans were better at distinguishing between political questions and questions of faith than the Barthians. However, Dibelius’ unpolitical nature was not always accepted by both sides.

BERND KREBS (Berlin) spoke about Dibelius and Poland. In the 1920s, the theme was Germans under Polish rule. Two thirds of them left Poland. General Superintendent Juliusz Bursche advocated the integration of all Protestants into the Polish state. Convinced of the German mission in the East, Dibelius presented himself as strongly nationalistic in support of the interests of German Protestants in Poland. Before 1914 there were a million Protestant Christians there; after the war 350,000. German pastors were oriented to the DNVP and were considered political leaders of German identity (Deutschtum). Tensions increased in the mid-1920s. At that time, Nazi politics put the Protestant church in Posen under massive pressure. German Protestants were therefore disappointed with National Socialism. Poland remained an area of diverse cultures, and the desired Germanization failed. After 1945, Dibelius turned to the Lutherans in Poland.

An announced lecture on Dibelius’ commitment to the ecumenical movement had to be canceled due to the absence of KATHARINA KUNTER (Helsinki/Finland).

HARTMUT LEHMANN (Kiel) concluded by asking whether we now really knew who Dibelius was and whether what we had heard was coming together to form a new picture. Three facets can be recognized: 1. The pragmatic church prince Dibelius, who always claimed leadership positions. 2. The man of the political right who consistently fought the left. Like the average German Protestant of his time, he supported antisemitism and, at the beginning, also National Socialism. He integrated various positions in the EKD council. 3. Dibelius missed the opportunity to reorient the Protestant Church after 1945. An alternative approach in the sense of repentance and conversion was at least conceivable. The question of what would have happened if Dibelius had behaved differently as a church leader before and after National Socialism obviously went beyond historical research. LEPP and HERMLE noted that in this case Dibelius would not have been himself and would not have risen to the church leadership positions he held.

The conference took place with a mixture of several generations of research and a constructive atmosphere, although tensions were noticeable in the evaluation of Robert Stupperich’s work and the topic of antisemitism. One complaint would be “gaps” with regard to ecumenism and denazification. The statements about the imperial Dibelius, his relationship to Weimar, the still open question of antisemitism and Dibelius’ “tragic” post-war role between Eastern polemics and his slow retreat from it were noteworthy. The conference contributions are to be published in an anthology.