Tag Archives: Tetyana Pavlush

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.

Review of Tetyana Pavlush, Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Tetyana Pavlush, Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Auseinandersetzung der evangelischen Kirchen beider deutscher Staaten mit der Judenvernichtung im “Dritten Reich” im politsch-gesellschaftlichen Kontext (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition, 2015). Pp. 573. ISBN: 9783631656655.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

This book (the author’s 2014 dissertation at the Freie Universitat in Berlin) examines how the Holocaust and its legacy were addressed between 1945 and 1989 by Protestant church leaders, journalists, laypeople, and theologians in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). It is an ambitious work that traces church and public discourses about the Holocaust, antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, post-Holocaust theology, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and issues of memorialization, in conjunction with the major events and anniversaries that raised public awareness of these issues and often provoked national debates. The Cold War issues always lurk in the background.

Pavlush focuses primarily on four events: the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and the wave of antisemitism that swept Germany around the same time; the controversy about Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy); the 1967 Six-Day War; and the 1979 national broadcast in the FRG of the U.S. television docudrama The Holocaust. In a separate chapter she examines the 1968, 1978, and 1988 anniversaries of the November 9 pogroms (“Kristallnacht”) as indicators of how East and West Germans viewed their history.

She sets her discussion of these events within a larger framework that draws on three intersecting levels of analysis to trace how German Protestants in general addressed their past throughout this period. The first level is a comparison between public and church conversations about the Nazi past and the Holocaust in the GDR and FRG. The second charts the chronological course of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of dealing with the past) over the decades as evinced by the aforementioned controversies and responses to them. Here she examines how the public discourses in East and West changed over time as measured by specific events (this is best illustrated by her comparisons between the different “Kristallnacht” anniversaries). The third examines how international events, such as the Eichmann trial, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Vietnam war, influenced church and public conversations about Germany’s past and its contemporary obligations.

Clearly, any one of these topics would suffice as a dissertation topic, and the scope and complexity of this work is simultaneously its strength and weakness. In many ways this is a masterful survey of the major postwar controversies and developments over the decades as Germans addressed their past. It illustrates how engaged the Protestant churches were in this process. There is a wealth of background information and documentation, the events she has selected were indeed turning points, and she gives helpful context to the various debates. Juggling so many events, time periods, and underlying narrative currents, however, makes for an extraordinary level of complexity, and Pavlush navigates this complexity more successfully in some places than in others.

She does a fine job of tracking and contextualizing the different discourses in East and West, and this may be the book’s most valuable contribution. From the beginning, the two postwar German states defined their relationship to the Nazi past differently. Aligned with the eastern bloc, the GDR became tied to Soviet narratives that emphasized anti-fascist and Communist opposition to the Third Reich. National Socialism was portrayed as a capitalist phenomenon, and the issues of antisemitism and the genocide of the European Jews were seldom addressed. Although there was a small Jewish population in the East (and her account of the role of Jewish leaders in the GDR is fascinating), Jewish-Christian dialogue existed only to a limited degree, whereas it quickly developed a visible and importantly symbolic function in the west. Throughout its history the GDR never established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. As Pavlush notes, this reality led to an “asymmetrical” dynamic between East and West: there was a lot more going on in the FDR than in the GDR. As a parliamentary democracy firmly anchored in the West, the FRG quickly assumed the mantel of responsibility in the international arena for addressing the past through reparations, war crimes trials, and relations with Israel. By the early 1950s, there was a public square in the FRG in which the Nazi past had become a constant point of reference for international and domestic issues.

What Germans understood by the very concept of “the Nazi past” varied greatly, however, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Public opinion polls in the late 1940s showed that almost 40% of Germans retained antisemitic attitudes, and there were outbursts of antisemitic violence. The EKD’s 1945 Stuttgart declaration made no direct reference to the murders of the Jews. The Württemburg Society’s 1946 declaration and the April 1948 declaration of guilt toward the Jewish people by the church of Saxony were the earliest church attempts to address the Holocaust explicitly. Like the EKD’s 1948 Wort zur Judenfrage, these statements offer a snapshot of the theological challenges and the political difficulties of the time. There was a general failure to address church complicity and acknowledge the relationship between Christian theological teachings about Judaism and Nazi antisemitism, and the persecution of the Jews was often conflated with general postwar German suffering.

Moreover, many of the leading Protestant figures in the postwar era had historical baggage of their own. In their responses to postwar controversies, they sought to justify their role before 1945 and place themselves on the right side of postwar history, as can be seen in the often opposing political positions taken by figures like Eugen Gerstenmaier, Otto Dibelius, Lothar Kreyssig, Martin Niemoeller, and Helmut Gollwitzer. Events like the Eichmann trial and the Hochhuth play became litmus tests for competing versions of history. One of the advantages of studying a forty-year period is that the differences between the different generations of prominent Protestants become evident. Pavlush delineates three clear generations, driven by different life experiences, postwar agendas and worldviews: those who were already active in or had begun their careers by the 1930s; those born during the late 1920s and early 1930s, who came of age during the Nazi era (Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Dorothee Soelle), and the third generation, born during the late 1930s or 1940s (Bertold Klappert, Peter von der Osten-Sacken), who were still children in 1945. Many in the second generation turned critically against the first, often not only historically but politically in terms of Cold War issues. The last generation was the one that became most engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue. She also examines the role of the different Jewish leaders on both sides of the border who engaged with Protestants about these issues: Siegmund Rotstein, Robert Raphael Geis, Eugen Gollomb, Nathan Levinson, and Edna Brocke.

The first Jewish-Christian organizations began quite early, often founded by those who had been engaged in rescue or resistance activities before 1945. In 1949 the German Koordinationsrates der Juden und Christen was founded, and during the 1950s groups for Jewish-Christian cooperation emerged in the major cities. The three German organizations for Judenmission, which had been dissolved during the Third Reich, reconstituted themselves as well, and so another ongoing tension in the German discussion was between those engaged in dialogue with Jews and those who wanted to revive Protestant efforts to evangelize and convert Jews. In 1958 Lothar Kreyssig, a judge and Confessing Church layman who had attempted to halt the euthanasia program, founded Action Reconciliation (Aktion Sühnezeichen) under the auspices of the EKD. The organization began to send young Germans to serve in countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, and the first AS volunteer to Israel arrived after the Eichmann trial.

By this time there were some striking differences between the FRG and the GDR. Young East Germans couldn’t get visas for the Aktion Sühnezeichen trips, for example. Yet the 1961 Kirchentag (which convened in the early summer before the construction of the Berlin Wall in August; it was the last Kirchentag that East and West Germans celebrated jointly until 1991) helped spur a new phase of Jewish-Christian engagement in both Germanys. Dusseldorf Rabbi Robert Raphael Geis gave the keynote address. The EKD working group on “Jews and Christians” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Juden und Christen’) was founded at the 1961 Kirchentag, as a sign of the churches’ commitment to fostering Jewish-Christian relations.
Pavlush’s discussion of the emergence of Jewish-Christian relationships and the related church statements is the most uneven aspect of the work. That’s partly because of how the book is structured; many of the seminal statements on Jewish-Christian relations were direct responses to the events she discusses separately in other chapters. Hence, her treatment of this issue is scattered across the different chapters and interwoven with other topics without a clear transition from one point to another. Sometimes there’s not even a clear chronology. She deals in a single paragraph, for example, with the national EKD study commission on Kirche und Judentum in 1967, its 1975 study, the 1981 Rhineland synod, and the 1965 establishment of the Institut für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Hamburg. Rather than going into detail about the genesis of these developments and the ways in which they addressed the past and contemporary issues, she then discusses Nostra Aetate before giving a brief overview of how the Middle East conflict affected Jewish-Christian dialogue in the GDR. Among other things, this book could really use an index.

The other problem is the blurring of lines between Catholic and Protestant issues and responses. Although this book is ostensibly about the Protestant churches, the author ventures into issues that were far more significant for the Catholic church (such as Nostra Aetate and the Hochhuth play), and she also refers to some of the Catholic Jewish-Christian circles and statements. This adds another thread of complexity to an already complex work, although it does illustrate the extent to which these events drew reactions from both churches. The primary example is her discussion of Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy, which provoked a firestorm because of its critical portrayal of Pope Pius XII. Because of the considerable public debate and widespread media coverage of Hochhuth, one can make the case that Protestant reactions give some insight into the public discourse about Nazi history at the time. Some Protestant observers viewed the play as a broader critique on both the Catholic and Protestant churches. In the GDR, Hochhuth’s condemnation of the Pope was seen as part of a deeper critique against fascism and the West. In its timing, the play coincided with (and perhaps helped provoke) the beginnings of the attacks on the legends of the Church Struggle. Certainly this was how figures like Otto Dibelius viewed it; he attacked Hochhuth for a “cheap and highly naïve version of history.” As in so many other postwar events, the dividing lines from the era of the Protestant Church Struggle reappeared. In contrast to Dibelius, Helmut Gollwitzer and Gunther Harder supported Hochhuth’s critique of the Pope, extending it to the Protestant churches as well.

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem was another major turning point. In 1959/60 there had been a wave of antisemitic violence, which led the churches to issue statements condemning antisemitism. While many of the EKD leaders spoke out (Otto Dibelius, who was chair of the EKD council at the time, sent a telegram of solidarity to Ben Gurion in Israel) Pavlush observes that the substance of the statements didn’t really go beyond what had been said at the 1950 Weissensee synod. Yet the trial itself demanded and provoked a rawer engagement with the past.

It aroused special interest among Protestant leaders because the only non-Jewish German witness was Heinrich Grüber, who had led the Confessing Church’s office to help “non-Aryans” (most but not all of them baptized Christians). In that capacity Grüber had dealt with Eichmann directly. In a church newspaper before the trial, Grüber wrote memorably that “it was only the ‘Hitler in us’ that gave power to the ‘Hitler over us’” and urged the German press to report on the trial in a way that would help German readers to feel a personal connection to what had happened in the Holocaust. Grüber used the trial as the occasion to confront his fellow Germans, noting the number of Nazis who had found their way into prominent postwar positions, and he charged EKD leaders with the failure of repudiating their earlier antisemitic statements. He also warned that the trial could be misused in the Cold War context to awaken tensions between the two German states—and was criticized by East Germans as a consequence. Pavlush examines the reactions on both sides of the German border, as well as perspectives of the Israeli audience, including Holocaust survivors, for whom Grüber’s testimony often seemed defensive and an attempt at apologia.

The trial compelled Germans to take a position about their past and their German identity in the contemporary world. The 1967 Six-Day war was another such occasion. Pavlush contextualizes it in the broader landscape of the 1960s, which included the student rebellions, the Vietnam War, the beginnings of a more critical view of the German churches record under Nazism, and the emergence of a new generation of political theologians like Dorothee Soelle who applied the lessons of the Holocaust to the burning issues of the 1960s. This chapter offers a good discussion of the theological and political debates of that era. The Cold War realities and alliances shaped perspectives in East and West toward the state of Israel, which in turn affected how Protestants viewed the agenda for Jewish-Christian relations. Here too there were generational and political divides. Some from the first generation of Church Struggle veterans viewed solidarity with Israel as a necessary moral position for postwar Germans; others were critical of the West and Israel. The mood in the GDR was largely anti-Zionist, although there were isolated voices in the GDR churches that called for greater balance on the issues and supported Israel’s right to defend itself.

The final example, the 1979 nationwide broadcast of Holocaust, was another turning point in the West. Yet unlike the Eichmann trial and the Hochhuth play, it didn’t trigger a similar widespread discussion in the GDR. It was broadcast only in the FRG, of course, but as Pavlush notes, it is striking that East Germans didn’t seem to follow or engage with the intense press debates and coverage in the West. Once again, however, the broadcast coincided with other events to spur a new wave of discussion about the past. In the decade that followed in the FRG, there was a growing number of forums and conferences at the church academies, new and more critical scholarship on the role of the churches during the Nazi era, and civic initiatives around the country in which local communities began to examine their history. A related development was the 17-page 1978 EKD study, Zur Verfolgung des Judentums durch den Nationalsozialismus, which traced not only the church’s record between 1933 and 1945, but critically examined how the Protestant church had interpreted (and sometimes misconstrued) that history after 1945 – for example, by conflating the suffering of the Jews with that of postwar Germans and by politicizing the Kristallnacht commemorations.
Pavlush’s book illustrates that the process of theological and political Vergangenheitsbewältigung was shaped by numerous factors over the decades between 1945 and 1989, and she shows how often the attempts to address the Nazi past became part of contemporary political agendas. Ironically, the photograph on the book cover itself highlights the complexity of the issues that confronted postwar churches. It shows the main stage at the Jewish-Christian dialogue session at the 1961 Kirchentag, with the Star of David and the Kirchentag symbols prominently displayed. Then and now, the Protestant Kirchentag symbol consists of a large central cross surrounded by four smaller crosses in each quadrant—virtually identical to the symbol of the Romanian Iron Guard, an antisemitic clerico-fascist group that sought to merge Orthodox Christianity and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. Its adoption as the Kirchentag logo was no doubt unintentional, but it’s unlikely that this went completely unnoticed by Jewish and international visitors (one of my colleagues at the Holocaust Museum immediately asked me about it). Over seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the historical minefields continue to exist.

Note: The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.