Tag Archives: Victoria J. Barnett

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Göttingen: V&Runipress, 2013). Pp 280, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783847101734.

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

The history of the Protestant women involved in resistance against the Nazi regime is well-documented, but it remains under-examined in the broader literature about the German Church Struggle and the resistance movements. Manfred Gailus, a contributing editor to this journal and co-editor of the book under review here, has devoted much of his recent work to correcting this.[1]

Gailus-HerzMit Herz und Verstand is one of his recent additions to the literature. In addition to the fine overview of the topic in the introduction by Gailus and co-editor Clemens Vollnhals, it consists of biographical and historical profiles of Agnes and Elisabet von Harnack, Elisabeth Abegg, Elisabeth Schmitz, Elisabeth Schiemann, Margarete Meusel, Katharina Staritz, Agnes Wendland and her daughters Ruth and Angelika, Helene Jacobs, Sophie Benfey-Kunert, Elisabeth von Thadden, and Ina Gschlössl.

Only a few of these women are recognizable names (notably Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, but usually in conjunction with her more famous father, theologian Adolf von Harnack), yet even a brief description of who they were and what they did illustrates why their stories are deserving of greater scholarly attention. In addition to achieving their doctorates, both Harnack sisters were active feminists during the 1920s. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack (who held a doctorate in Germanistics and philosophy) helped found the Deutsche Akademikerinnenbund and became the chairwoman for the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, and Elisabet von Harnack (who had studied political economics and church dogmatics) was a leader on women’s issues and school reform. Elisabeth Abegg was a Quaker who had worked with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze during the 1930s and helped hide almost 80 Jews during the Nazi era (for which she has been honored by Yad Vashem). Abegg taught at the Luisenschule, a Gymnasium for young women in Berlin when Elisabeth Schmitz also taught. Schmitz of course was the author of the 1935 memorandum to Confessing Church leaders urging them to speak out in solidarity with the persecuted Jews; she subsequently resigned her teaching position in protest after the November 1938 pogroms. Elisabeth Schiemann was one of the first German women to attain a doctorate in botany and genetics, published several well-received studies and was affiliated with Friedrich-Wilhelms University and the Botanical Museum in Berlin. She joined the Confessing Church in 1934 (she was a member of the Dahlem parish) and became one of its most vocal members, writing letters to Martin Niemoeller urging him to speak out more forcefully. She personally delivered Elisabeth Schmitz’s memorandum to Karl Barth in Basel, and Franz Hildenbrandt used excerpts from a 1936 memorandum written by Schiemann in the 1937 statement on the Jews that he submitted to the 1937 Confessing synod (he acknowledged her text). While we now know that Elisabeth Schmitz was the author of the famous 1935 memorandum, Margarete Meusel (to whom it had been attributed) wrote a similar memorandum and worked throughout the Nazi era helping and hiding “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews.  Katharina Staritz, a Confessing Church theologian of Jewish descent who worked with the Grüber office, is known for her protest against the Breslau church authorities’ decision to bar people wearing the yellow star from the churches—for which she immediately lost her job. With no cover from the church, she became the target of Nazi propaganda and ended up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Agnes Wendland, wife of a Confessing Church pastor in Berlin, hid several Jews in their parsonage and was helped by her daughters Ruth and Angelika. Helene Jacobs was one of the few Germans to make no compromises with the regime, beginning with her refusal in 1933 to fill out the Aryan certificate for university study and ending with her participation in the Kaufmann resistance circle that forged false documents for Jews and helped them escape (Jacobs, too, spent the final war years in Nazi prisons). Sophie Benfey-Kunert was a staunch feminist who became the first woman in Hamburg to take the theological exams; she was chaplain in a women’s prison before she married Bruno Benfey. Benfey, one of the “non-Aryan” pastors in the Hannover church, became the target of Nazi propaganda and found no support from Bishop August Marahrens; the Benfeys finally emigrated to the Netherlands in 1939 and returned to Göttingen after 1945. Elisabeth von Thadden founded a small private school that continued to accept Jewish students until the regime took it over in 1941; she then became involved in various resistance activities and was arrested in early 1944. She was beheaded in the Plötzensee prison in September 1944. Ina Gschlössl, who founded the Association of Protestant Women Theologians in 1925, was fired from her teaching job as a religious educator in 1933 after making critical remarks about Hitler; she eventually worked for the Confessing Church’s Inner Mission.

The story of each woman is important in its own right, but the real value of this volume is that the essays go beyond the biographical, portraying the women in a broader historical context that records both their significant achievements before 1933 and the scandalous treatment of them after 1933, particularly within the church. It also includes the post-1945 period, which shows that their contributions were largely forgotten and dismissed.  This volume illustrates why the study of these women offers some important correctives to our general understanding of the larger issues in the German churches, the emergence and nature of different resistance movements, and the early postwar dynamics.  It is impossible to understand these women separately from the historical, social, and political context of early twentieth century Germany. They were among the first generation of women in western societies (not only in Germany) to mobilize politically, study for advanced degrees, and enter traditionally male professions. The social shifts of the Weimar years opened the way for them to enter the political sphere in Germany; almost 7 percent of the Reichstag representatives in 1926, for example, were women. Their stories show how very different the experiences of these women were from the young men in their generation. This is especially evident in the essay on Agnes von Zahn-Harnack.  During the 1920s she published and spoke widely on the women’s movement; organized German academic women and was the German delegate to the meetings in Amsterdam and Geneva of the International Federation of University Women and was elected to its board. In that international context she became one of the leading German voices on the “peace question.” The accounts in this volume of their various activities throughout the 1920s reveal a “Who’s Who” of early German feminist leaders.

Thus, although many of the women studied here sought careers or were active in the German Evangelical Church, they also shared a history of feminist and political activism in the interwar period. A number of them (both Harnack sisters, Abegg, Schmitz, Wendland, and von Thadden) had worked in Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze’s social ministry in east Berlin during the 1920s. Others were involved in early German feminist organizations like the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein (which Agnes von Zahn-Harnack led) and the religious socialist movement. In each of these three organizations, they had contact with Catholics and Jews, which was a factor in their active help for Jewish friends and colleagues after 1933.

Their interwar activities offered a different foundation in 1933 for political opposition to National Socialism. Not surprisingly, it also made the women easy targets. They were attacked not only by Nazi newspapers and party leaders, but also by male Confessing Church leaders who dismissed them. The introduction to this book opens with a vivid account of a 1937 pamphlet, Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott, written by Otto Dibelius and Martin Niemoeller, which in addition to defending the Confessing Church attacked the feminist movement, particularly women with advanced academic degrees, criticizing them for the declining birth rate and changing social values. Although women comprised seventy to eighty percent of the Confessing Church membership in Berlin, there were no women in church governance and only one woman (Stephanie von Mackensen) attended the Barmen Synod in May 1934. The 1930s saw an ongoing battle for the right to ordination that received scant attention or support among Confessing Church leaders. (It should be noted that were a few male Confessing Church leaders who supported the women theologians’ battle for ordination; according to the women I interviewed for my book, these included Kurt Scharf, Hermann Diem, and Martin Albertz.)

The issue where the historical record of these women really casts a poor light on their male counterparts in the Confessing Church, however, is in their political clarity and their willingness to take early stands with respect to the persecution of the Jews. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and other board members dissolved the Bund Deutsche Frauenvereine in March 1933 after being confronted with the demand to dismiss “non-Aryan” members and merge the organization with the Nazi Deutsche Frauenfront. Even more impressively, when the Frauenbund was reconstituted in 1945, women who had been Nazi party members or members of Nazi women’s’ organization were barred from membership. Despite their impressive record of political consistency, attacks on these early feminists continued into the 1980s, when they were accused of having somehow prepared the ground for the Nazi ideological precepts about women such as the “Mutterkult.”

The authors of each of these biographical essays bring different strengths and insights to the studies of these women. One of the most valuable aspects of the volume is the authors’ detailed examination of the papers and correspondence many of the women left behind. This material shows that they were critical not just of the sexism but the antisemitism within the Confessing Church. In addition to the aforementioned memoranda and protests, for example, Schmitz and Schiemann publicly criticized Walter Kunneth’s anti-Semitic attacks on Judaism They were also critical of the Confessing Church’s inherent political and theological conservatism. As the daughter of Adolf von Harnack, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack had grown up in an atmosphere of liberal, humanistic Protestantism that she feared was abandoned by the Confessing Church. Although she supported it in the Church Struggle, she criticized its conservatism, writing that “if we don’t pay attention, (the confessional front) could conjure up a new orthodoxy that would be the opposite of what we want.”

By looking at the culture and perspective of German feminism throughout this era, this volume makes an important contribution that goes beyond simply documenting the role played by these women. There continues to be a gendered division of history that runs through most of the literature on the Protestant Kirchenkampf, including the numerous books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (For those readers who are wondering, Bonhoeffer made no reference to the ordination debates and related feminist issues and showed no public solidarity with the Confessing Church women, despite the fact that he had taught several of them in Berlin and his close friend Elisabeth Zinn was among them.) The integration of these women’s lives into the scholarship could give us some new perspectives on the internal church debates. By portraying their political clarity and courage, particularly with regard to the persecution of Jews, this volume illustrates that there were people in the Confessing Church who stood up to the Nazi regime when it counted—many of them were women.

 

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.

Notes:

[1] In my 2011 review in this journal of Gailus’s study of Elisabeth Schmitz (Mir aber zerriss es das Herz), I noted the three volumes of documentation that came out of a project at Göttingen University during the 1980s and 1990s, the Frauenforschungsprojekt zur Geschichte der Theologinnen. The three volumes are “Darum wag es, Schwestern…”: Zur Geschichte evangelischer Theologinnen in Deutschland (1994); Der Streit um die Frauenordination in der Bekennenden Kirche: Quellentexte zu ihrer Geschichte im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1997); Lexikon früher evangelischer Theologinnen: Biographische Skizzen (2005). Works in English that have incorporated research on these women include my For the Soul of the People (1992) and Theodore Thomas’s Women Against Hitler: Christian Resistance in the Third Reich (1995)

 

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Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and the Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and the Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer [1]

In recent years, the field of Bonhoeffer studies has been dominated by debates about two biographies: Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[2] While members of the popular media and Christian commentators have generally lauded these stylish works, historians of the period as well as many Bonhoeffer scholars have generally been critical of them.

One of the reasons for this difference of opinion, argue Victoria J. Barnett and Andrew Chandler, is that many recent interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been driven by theology rather than history. As a result, often “the dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage.”[3] Related to this is the mythology which quickly grew up around Bonhoeffer in the years after the war, when his books Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison established him as a serious biblical Christian and martyr, both of which were especially attractive to a North American audience. For better or worse, Bonhoeffer has received more attention than his historical roles in the German church struggle, resistance, or ecumenical world would merit. It is surely the power of his life, writing, and testimony that has accomplished this, thanks in good measure to the tireless efforts of his best friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge. Still, it means he is an easy figure to lift out of his historical context. Finally, a third factor which influences recent interpretations of Bonhoeffer is the contemporary prominence of Holocaust studies, which tempts authors to make the subject of Jewish persecution and annihilation more important to Bonhoeffer and other Protestant leaders than it actually was back in the day.[4] As Stephen Haynes argued in his 2004 work The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint, theological radicals, liberals, and conservatives have all identified Bonhoeffer as one of their own, a tradition only continued by Metaxas and Marsh.[5]

Schlingensiepen-DBLost in all of the attention paid to Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is the fact that an English-language translation Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s 2006 biography of Bonhoeffer was also published in 2010.[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance is surprisingly unknown and seldom reviewed. Even this journal—dedicated to twentieth-century German church history and replete with Bonhoefferiana—failed to assess either the original German version or the subsequent English translation. Nor can this oversight be explained on account of any inadequacy in the qualifications of the author or the quality of the research. The following analysis is both a compensation for the absence of a more timely review and an attempt to reconcile differing views of Bonhoeffer through a close analysis of Schlingensiepen’s work.

In his own review of the Metaxas and Marsh biographies, Schlingensiepen echoes the criticisms of Clifford Green,[7] Victoria J. Barnett,[8] and others. Moreover, he sums up the German scholarly frustration with the two American interpretations:

Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights’ movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.[9]

As his comments suggest, Schlingensiepen’s approach to the Bonhoeffer story is shaped very much by his own history in the German Protestant church. It would be hard to find a scholar with better credentials for writing a Bonhoeffer biography. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s father Hermann was a Confessing Church pastor who knew Bonhoeffer, who directed one of the Confessing Church seminaries, and who participated in the German church struggle. A pastor and theologian himself, Ferdinand maintained a close, fifty-year friendship with Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s confidante and biographer. Indeed, in the Acknowledgements, the author notes that Bethge realized his thousand-page biography was too long for most readers and asked Schlingensiepen to compose a shorter version which would update his own interpretation. Moreover, Schlingensiepen worked for former Confessing Church leader Kurt Scharf for a decade, knew various members of the extended Bonhoeffer clan, and employed the same editor as Bethge had worked with in the completion of his magisterial biography decades earlier.

All this makes Schlingensiepen intimately aware of the context in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived, learned, served, thought, wrote, and acted. His rich contextualization of Bonhoeffer influences the biography in two ways: first, Bonhoeffer is understood not as a lonely genius but in relationship to the many family members, friends, mentors, and colleagues who enriched in his life; second, Bonhoeffer’s theology and politics are developed in close connection to the German church struggle.

Bonhoeffer’s People

Schlingensiepen has much to say about the many people who contributed to Bonheffer’s life. His parents Karl and Paula and siblings Karl-Friedrich, Walter, Klaus, Ursula, Christine, Sabine, and Suzanne nurtured him, inspired him, failed to understand his decision to study theology, travelled with him, conspired with him against Hitler, advised him, corresponded with him, and supported him during his final years in prison. So too did his in-laws from the Delbrück, Dohnanyi, Schleicher, Leibholz, and Dreβ families. Indeed, Bonhoeffer’s entrance into the resistance movement is inconceivable without his family connections, and in particular those of brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, assistant to federal justice minister Franz Gürtner, brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, a high-ranking lawyer for Deutsche Lufthansa, brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher, an important official in the air travel ministry, and uncle Paul von Hase, a high-ranking army officer and the city commandant of Berlin.

Beyond immediate and extended family members, Schlingensiepen weaves a host of other characters into his Bonhoeffer biography. He describes Superintendent Max Diestel as the “discoverer of Bonhoeffer” who watched over his theological development, sent him abroad for life-changing experiences in ministry and education, and introduced him to ecumenical work (33-34). In Schlingensiepen’s account of Bonhoeffer’s time at Union Seminary in New York, the author focuses on four deeply influential friends, both at that time and later. Paul Lehmann, an American of German-Russian ancestry, developed a friendship with Bonhoeffer that lasted from their student days to the war years, even though Bonhoeffer resisted his plea to stay in the United States in 1939 (63-64, 70, 230, and 267). Frank Fisher was the American student who introduced Bonhoeffer to the vibrant but marginalized black church in New York (65, 70). Erwin Sutz was a Swiss student who introduced Bonhoeffer to Karl Barth and became both an ecumenical partner and a vital communication link for Bonhoeffer in Switzerland during the war (67-70, 87-88, 262). Finally, Jean Lasserre, a French student at Union Seminary, profoundly influenced Bonhoeffer’s thinking about both pacifism and the Sermon on the Mount and became a long-running partner in international and ecumenical dialogue (70-73, 93, 173-174).

As Schlingensiepen explains Bonhoeffer’s life, thought, and work, there are scores of other influential and often overlooked characters who make their appearances: scholars like Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, and especially Karl Barth; friends and coworkers like Franz Hildebrandt, Hermann Sasse and Wilhelm Vischer, Gertrud Staewen, Julius Rieger, and of course Eberhard Bethge; ecumenical contacts like Wilhelm Visser’t Hooft and Bishop George Bell; the patron Ruth von Kleist-Retzow; and Bonhoeffer’s students from Finkenwalde. Whether he was developing his theology, writing confessional statements, combatting German Christian opponents in the church struggle, educating theology students, engaging in ecumenical dialogue, or resisting Hitler, Bonhoeffer never worked alone. Schlingensiepen always places him among people and regularly shows how dependent Bonhoeffer was on others.

Several examples illustrate this. In the summer 1933, though the formulation of the Bethel Confession was assigned as a joint project to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, Schlingensiepen points out how it was in fact Swiss Old Testament scholar Wilhelm Vischer who contributed the vital section on the people of Israel (134-136). Similarly, the author notes that while Martin Niemöller and twenty other pastors (Bonhoeffer included) founded the Pastors’ Emergency League later in 1933, the idea actually came from two country pastors, Eugen Weschke and Günter Jacob (137).

In 1934, Bonhoeffer spent much of his time combatting August Jäger, state commissioner for the Prussian provincial churches and the violent implementer of the German Christian takeover of the Old Prussian Union Church and attempted creation of a centralized, authoritarian Reich Church. As Martin Niemöller and the Pastors’ Emergency League fought against Jäger’s boss, German Christian leader and Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, Bonhoeffer agitated in the same direction from London, where he was pastoring. Here Schlingensiepen introduces Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who supported Bonhoeffer by writing German President Hindenburg about Müller and Jäger. Schlingensiepen explains how Bonhoeffer wrote forcefully but unsuccessfully to his ecumenical partners in Geneva, asking them to oppose the Müller regime. It was then that Bell, who was president of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, sent around a pastoral letter to the member churches of the Council, denouncing the radical unconstitutional seizure of authority in various provincial churches in Germany. Subsequently, after the Barmen and Dahlem Synods, it was the initiative of Bell and through him also the Archbishop of Canterbury—both of whom spoke in person to the German ambassador to England—that pushed Hitler’s government into jettisoning Jäger (152-154, 158-160, and 164-167).

Schlingensiepen also shows Bonhoeffer’s connections to key women in this history who are generally overlooked by other Bonhoeffer scholars. First, when Bonhoeffer began teaching theology in the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde, he met and became friends with Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. She was a Pomeranian noblewoman who went on to introduce him to local aristocrats, to substantially support the underfunded seminary, and to open her home to Bonhoeffer for holidays and writing retreats (180, 244, 247, and 281). Finally, in 1941, after Bonhoeffer heard about various Jewish rescue operations from his ecumenical friends in Switzerland, he returned to Berlin and told close friends about them. Among these was Gertrud Staewen, who had been his friend since the two had worked together with Karl Barth, advocating on behalf of persecuted theology professor Günther Dehn in 1931 and protesting at the Protestant National Synod in 1933 (101, 141). Schlingensiepen suggests that Bonhoeffer asked Staewen to serve as the key link in the rescue of Berlin Jews sometime in the summer of 1941—in short, to take over the work of Heinrich Grüber and Werner Sylten, both of whom had been thrown into concentration camps. Based on her correspondence, Staewen accepted this call, working together with others in Berlin to support Jews being deported and to help some of them go underground. As part of this work, she maintained regular contact with ecumenical partners in Switzerland and with Bonhoeffer, who encouraged her but could not participate in the rescue work directly, because of his involvement in the resistance (263-264). These are just a few examples of the many ways in which Ferdinand Schlingensiepen places Dietrich Bonhoeffer within the larger context of activists engaged in church-political battles, theological writing and training, and subversive political activities.

The German Church Struggle

The second noteworthy aspect of Schlingensiepen’s contextualization of Bonhoeffer is in the careful attention he pays to the German church struggle, from the Nazi seizure of power and rise of the German Christian Movement in 1933 to the end of Bonhoeffer’s leadership of the Finkenwalde seminary in 1937. The author writes of “the many fronts on which [Bonhoeffer] was fighting and the many groups of people with whom he wrestled, … a bewildering abundance of events.” Significantly, he argues that “it was during the chaotic, fateful year, 1933, that the course was set for the 12 years of Hitler’s dictatorship, and thus for everything that was to follow in Bonhoeffer’s life” (116). Having established the significance of events in 1933, Schlingensiepen goes on to describe the events of the church struggle in their necessary detail, avoiding the confusion that so often accompanies this conflict. The author begins with Bonhoeffer’s leadership speech of February 1, Hitler’s seizure of power, the rise of the German Christian Movement, and Bonhoeffer’s essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in which he proposes three possible responses to state injustice: to call the state to account, to give aid to the victims, and ultimately, to not only “bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel, but to seize the wheel itself” (126). The politics of the Young Reformation Movement, the rise of Martin Niemöller, the church constitution issue, the takeover of the Old Prussian Union Church government, the church elections of July 1933 and German Christian seizure of Protestant church governments, the emergence of an opposition movement, the drafting of the Bethel Confession, the fall 1933 Prussian and national church synods, and the formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League—all these are given appropriate attention in a single chapter on the year 1933.

From there, Schlingensiepen goes on to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s service as pastor in London and then as director of the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde. At the same time, however, he explains Bonhoeffer’s participation in the church struggle, including the campaign against the Reich Church and Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, the Barmen Declaration and the formation of the Confessing Church, the establishment of church finance departments in the Prussian provincial churches, the appointment of Hanns Kerrl as Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Kerrl’s attempt to govern the churches through Reich and provincial church committees, and the appointment of Dr. Friedrich Werner as director of the German Protestant Church chancellery and head of the Berlin High Church Council.

Especially noteworthy is Schlingensiepen’s understanding of the relationship between the Barmen, Dahelm, and Oeynhausen Synods of the Confessing Church. For Bonhoeffer and his colleagues, “the decisions of Dahlem were just the necessary ‘form’, the ordering of the Church required by the ‘content’ of the Theological Declaration of Barmen” (165). Indeed, the author argues that “there was no one in the Confessing Church who took the decisions of the Confessing Synod of Dahlem more seriously than did Bonhoeffer” (172). Bonhoeffer consistently refused to recognize the authority of the official church governments, emphasizing that the Confessing Church was the sole legitimate church government and even applying the old formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus to the situation: “Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church separates himself from salvation” (189). He would not even make peace with Kerrl’s more moderate church committees taking the radical position that “Barmen [was] a tower against the subversion of church doctrine, Dahlem the tower against the subversion of the ecclesiastical order,” and Oeynhausen “our defence against the subversion of the church by the world as, in the shape of the Nazi state, it intervenes through its finance departments, Legislative Authority and committees, and is now tearing into separate groups the church of those who confess our faith. Here we cannot and must not give in one single time!” (194). This aspect of Schlingensiepen’s account is particularly important, since the divisions within the Confessing Church between Lutherans in the “intact churches” of Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hanover who were willing to work with the German Protestant Church government and the Dahlemites who rejected any authority outside the Confessing Church are often misunderstood or ignored. And it is precisely here that we see the radicalism of Bonhoeffer, rejecting both the enthusiasm of the German Christian Movement to fuse Nazism and Christianity and the unwillingness of the Lutheran wing of the Confessing Church to abandon the state church tradition of German Protestantism. Schlingensiepen helps us to make sense of Bonhoeffer’s theological and existential journey through the events German church struggle.

The Historical Bonhoeffer

But who is Schlingensiepen’s Bonhoeffer? The author’s short answer is that Bonhoeffer’s life, actions, and death cannot be explained solely according to traits he inherited, but must take into consideration his formation as a youth at home and in university. Above all, Schlingensiepen sees three key characteristics in Bonhoeffer: “intellectual curiosity, an incorruptible sense of right and wrong, and the courage to make uncomfortable decisions with potentially dangerous consequences” (xviii-xix). Moreover, he argues we must also:

become engaged with what, for Bonhoeffer, theology was. Bonhoeffer wanted to expose theology to ‘the fresh air of modern thinking’. He insisted that the message of the Church must always apply concretely to the reality of the world. Timeless truths he considered useless, for ‘what is always true is precisely what is not true today’. (xix)

This is what is so striking about Schlingensiepen’s Bonhoeffer. His combination of curiosity, moral courage, and theological creativity makes him so utterly unpredictable, so full of paradoxes (perhaps even contradictions), and so impossible to pigeonhole.

Bonhoeffer’s Formation

Bonhoeffer’s formation surely contributed to this. He grew up in upper middle class privilege, steeped in the education and culture of a professional family. While he lost an older brother in the First World War, his own wartime service was as a 12 year-old “messenger and food scout” for the family, secretly participating in the black market trading of which his siblings disapproved (11). From an early age, he was independent minded, and surprised his non-church going family by choosing to study theology (16). Time and again, Schlingensiepen highlights the unconventional and unpredictable aspects of Bonhoeffer’s journey, whether it was joining the non-conformist Hedgehog fraternity at Tübingen or quitting the group when they expelled their Jewish members (19). Later, this independent streak showed itself in his choice of Reinhold Seeberg as his doctoral supervisor, even though Bonhoeffer had worked far more closely with Adolf von Harnack, and though Seeberg had little time for Bonhoeffer’s interest in Karl Barth’s doctrine of revelation (29-30).

Bonhoeffer’s formation continued along unconventional lines. Already while an undergraduate, he had travelled throughout Italy and down into North Africa, experiencing both Islam and Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it was Bonhoeffer’s exposure to Catholic worship in Rome that fuelled his growing interest in ecclesiology (22-25). Then, following the completion of his doctorate in 1927, Bonhoeffer experienced more of the world, serving as a pastoral assistant in a German congregation in Barcelona for a year, then studying at Union Seminary in New York for another year. There he encountered the friends who introduced him to African-American Christianity and pacifism. During this time he travelled widely in the United States and Mexico, experiencing cultures far outside his own. And even before he went to America, he had also contemplated the idea of travelling and studying in India, in part due to the suggestion of his grandmother, who believed it would give him the benefit of a non-Western and non-Christian perspective (61). Later, of course, Bonhoeffer would continue to travel widely on behalf of the ecumenical movement, giving him relationships, experiences, and perspectives far different from those of most German Protestant clergy. Once again in 1934 he thought of India, and even received an invitation from Gandhi (171). In the fateful year of 1939, he journeyed a second time to the United States, only to break off his stay and return to Germany in order to be present during the crises in church and nation.

Radical Thinking

For Schlingensiepen, this combination of personality, upbringing, and educational formation lies behind Bonhoeffer’s habit of pursuing radical theological ideas and church-political positions. As early as 1928 in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer lectured on the need for an all-or-nothing decision concerning Christ in “the most profound matters we are facing, namely, concerning our own lives and the life of our people” (49). When he turned to the question of ethics, he argued that moral decisions involved the consciousness of the commandments of God, the watchful eye of God, and the grace of God in each moment of life. For Bonhoeffer, ethics were, from the beginning, about doing the right thing in every unique circumstance, not about following abstract principles. As he put it:

There are no acts that are bad in and of themselves; even murder can be sanctified. There is only faithfulness to or deviation from God’s will. There is no law with a specific content, but only the law of freedom, that is, bearing responsibility alone before God and oneself (49-50).

Bonhoeffer carried this same radicalism into 1933 and the events of the church struggle, whether in his February radio speech denouncing Hitler’s style of leadership as seductive and idolatrous (117), in his judgment that German Protestants had “totally lost both their heads and their Bible” when it came to the Jewish question (121), or in his now famous assertion that the church might have to “seize the wheel” and engage in the direct political action of resisting the unjust state (126). In a public debate at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer was the lone representative of the Young Reformation Movement, facing groups of professors and students from the German Christian Movement and the church-politically neutral camp before an audience of 2000 (131). In early summer, he and his friend Franz Hildebrandt even proposed a Protestant interdict—a collective refusal to perform Protestant funeral services until the church’s legal rights were restored. When their shocked colleagues refused to consider the idea, the two men considered leaving the church (132). Still in 1933, Bonhoeffer described the application of the antisemitic Aryan paragraph in the church as a false doctrine and (with friends) distributed protest leaflets at the Protestant National Synod in Wittenberg in September (137, 141).

By the beginning of 1934, by which time Bonhoeffer had taken up pastoral duties in two German congregations in London, he had begun to adopt a prophetic tone concerning the crisis in German Protestantism (154). He fully embraced the radical stance of the October 1934 Dahlem Synod’s resolution that “the constitution of the German Evangelical Church has been destroyed” and that “the Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church creates new organs of leadership” (165). At the ecumenical Youth Conference in Fanø that same year, Bonhoeffer mobilized his students to pass a resolution stating “that the rights of conscience, undertaken in obedience to God’s Word, exceed in importance those of any State whatever.” A second resolution noted that the state has attempted “to become the only centre and source of spiritual life,” asserted that the church and not the state must preach the Word of God, and concluded that “the Church works within the nation, but it is not ‘of the nation’” (169). At the main ecumenical conference in Fanø, Bonhoeffer argued forcefully that “the work of the World Alliance means work of the Churches for peace amongst the nations. Its aim is the end of war and the victory over war.” In a sermon at the conference, he continued on this same theme: “What God has said is that there shall be peace among all people—that we shall obey God without further question, that is what God means. Anyone who questions the commandment of God before obeying has already denied God” (171).

Throughout the balance of the church struggle, Schlingensiepen portrays Bonhoeffer as firm in his uncompromising radicalism. He drew more and more on the Sermon on the Mount as the basis of his thinking, adopted elements of monasticism as the basis for his seminary work at Finkenwalde, argued that there could be no salvation outside the Confessing Church, refused to participate in the moderate process of church committees, looked ahead to a “coming of resistance ‘to the point of shedding blood’,” and emphasized that the obedience and belief will lead the Christian into the image of Christ, including the image of suffering and martyrdom (173-174, 182, 189, 193-194, 198, 207-208). Furthermore, he prepared to refuse an expected call into military service (with the possibility of a death sentence) and sharply rebuked Confessing Church pastors who swore an oath to Hitler in 1938 (208, 212).

In contrast to his uncompromising moral and theological resolution, Bonhoeffer found personal decision making difficult. He often wavered, feeling “again and again that all the decisions I had to make were not really my own” (39). This was true of his time abroad in Barcelona and New York between 1929 and 1931, and again in 1939 when he briefly returned to the United States. He couldn’t identify exactly why he promptly returned to Germany, but was convinced the decision was in God’s hands (230). He saw himself as a sojourner on God’s path (235, 236). This was also true of his decision to enter the resistance and the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. More and more he came to understand that “with God we do not take up a stance—we walk along a path. It goes forward, otherwise we are not with God. God knows where the path goes, throughout its length; we know only the next step and the ultimate destination” (294).

With the beginning of his knowledge about German resistance plans, beginning in 1938, Bonhoeffer entered a new phase, theologically. Much of this is reflected in his work on Ethics, and appears in his many reflections Schlingensiepen includes on decision making, ethics, and Christian responsibility. For instance, in rejecting inner migration as a response to the early successes of Hitler’s armies in the Second World War, Bonhoeffer embraced instead an earthy, situational view of ethics. For him, the world had been reconciled to God by Christ and God had chosen to fundamentally accept the world. As a result, Schlingensiepen explains, the world “can become the place in which human beings assume responsibility, make peace, protect life and overcome murder, violence, and atrocities.” Bonhoeffer did not pursue “principles, standards or duties as eternally valid,” but encouraged people “in every historical situation, to listen anew to God’s commandments and to follow Christ” (251). As a result, Bonhoeffer could both accept the necessity of the removal of Hitler by assassination and reject the euthanasia of handicapped Germans on the basis of the commandment not to kill. The key to this was Bonhoeffer’s radical understanding of freedom. As the theologian put it:

Jesus stands before God as the obedient one and as the free one. As the obedient one, he does the will of the Father by blindly following the law he has been commanded. As the free one, he affirms God’s will out of his very own insight, with open eyes and a joyful heart; it is as if he re-creates it anew out of himself. (251)

Later, as Bonhoeffer became more deeply enmeshed in the resistance, his brother-in-law and close friend Hans von Dohnanyi asked him about the permissibility Christian participation in murder, since God’s law condemned it. Schlingensiepen summarizes Bonhoeffer’s response: “Murder is still murder, even when, in the case of Hitler, it is absolutely necessary. One must be prepared to take the guilt for this sin upon oneself. Bonhoeffer added that if he could get near enough to Hitler, he would throw the bomb himself” (274). This corresponded with his earlier advice to General Hans Oster, a fellow resister, that treason could be morally necessary if it prevented further criminal atrocities as were taking place in Poland. Still Bonhoeffer was not without his doubts. He wondered whether he could still function as a pastor, if he was among those with Hitler’s blood on their hands.

Continuing his discussion of Bonhoeffer’s thinking about guilt and responsibility, Schlingensiepen quotes the famous section in Ethics in which Bonhoeffer confesses the guilt of the church—the guilt of leaving undone what should have been done, and of doing what should not have been done:

The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has been guilty of the lives of the Weakest and most Defenceless Brothers and Sisters of Jesus Christ. (277)

For Bonhoeffer, this sense of responsibility and need to confess was rooted in the relationship between obedience and freedom. As one who knew those involved in the assassination plot, he wrote about “the freedom of those who act responsibly,” declaring “there is no law behind which they could take cover. … Instead, in such a situation, one must let go completely of any law, knowing that here one must decide as a free venture” (281). The free and responsible person breaks the law, recognizes his guilt under the law, and so affirms the law.

During this time, and from 1943 on, when he was in prison, Bonhoeffer’s ethics evolved into a new understanding of Christianity. In this “journey to reality,” Bonhoeffer entered what Bethge called a “turning point from Christian to man for his times.” He focused increasingly on concepts like “earth,” “reality,” and “world,” which he meant in a positive sense (293-295). He amazed himself “that I am living, and can live, for days without the Bible,” at other times drinking in Scripture, but all the while growing in “opposition to all that is ‘religious.’” He added, “But I must constantly think of God, of Christ; authenticity, life, freedom and mercy mean a great deal to me. It is only that the religious clothes they wear make be so uncomfortable” (295).

Schlingensiepen devotes a good deal of attention to these developments in Bonhoeffer’s thinking, which culminated during his time in prison. Even as his romantic relationship with his eventual fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer was growing, even as his captors continued to interrogate and torture him, Bonhoeffer worked on theology for what he called a “religionless” time (349). Schlingensiepen insists this was not the product of the earlier prison shock which had tempted him to consider suicide as a kind of ethical extension of his resistance (324). Rather, it was a new forward-looking orientation, by which he understood that the gospel was always turned towards the whole world. Here Schlingensiepen quotes his own father, who reflected on Bonhoeffer’s prison writings after the war: “This world is, even though at enmity with God or far away from God, still the world that God loves. So there can only be a church which turns toward the world” (351). Bonhoeffer himself wrote of blessing the world, declaring its belonging to God, even as the world inflicts suffering on the Christian.

Schlingensiepen explains that for Bonhoeffer, the core question which emerged was “what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (351). In his prison letters, Bonhoeffer began to wrestle with the concept of “religionlessness.” For him, the conduct of the German churches during the Nazi period was one more factor that invalidated traditional religious language. Beyond that, however, the older problem of the church’s refusal to face modern science and its explanations of the world apart from any reference to God meant that the church was always on the defensive, always turning God into a God of the “stopgap.” Grappling with what it meant to live in such a world come of age, he argued for the need to bring God into this very place of worldliness: “The same God who makes us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God, is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God.” In this context, Bonhoeffer understood God as near, as suffering, as weak. Continuing, he wrote: “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross, God is weak and powerless in the world, and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us” (353). Schlingensiepen explains that, in his religionless Christianity, Bonhoeffer understood Jesus in the idea of presence. “Being-for-others” was both the essence of Jesus and the calling of the Christian who would live in faith (353-354).

Conclusion

There are many other rich thematic veins to be mined in Schlingensiepen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945 which I have only touched on: Bonhoeffer’s consistent peace ethic; his pastoral activity; his ecumenical journeys to England, Switzerland, and Sweden; his approach to theological education; his participation in the rescue of Jews; his friendship with Eberhard Bethge; his romance with Maria von Wedemeyer; his doubt- and confidence-filled incarceration; his death; and his status as martyr.

What must be clear, however, from the detailed analysis of Schlingensiepen’s account of Bonhoeffer’s relationships, his participation in the German church struggle, his unconventional formation, and his radical theological ideas, is that Bonhoeffer is exceedingly complex. No biographer will portray him faithfully without a great deal of historical and theological spade work. Schlingensiepen focuses on Bonhoeffer’s intellectual curiosity, strong moral compass, courage, and creative modern theology. I have suggested that these characteristics make Bonhoeffer unpredictable, paradoxical, and impossible to pigeonhole. Conservatives value a Bonhoeffer who teaches the Bible, stands upon confessions of faith, and takes the lordship of Christ so seriously that he is willing to kill or die for it. He is, to be sure, a serious Christian. Liberals value a Bonhoeffer committed to peace, internationalism, and ecumenical Christianity—a cultured and curious man open to literature, music, and modern life, including an intellectually critical relationship with both the Bible and confessional theology. In Schlingensiepen’s biography of Bonhoeffer, we discover a man who encompasses both of these images and somehow holds them together in a life marked by a most radical, subjective, and challenging form of Christian discipleship. Here is someone worth knowing.

Notes:

[1] Although I arrived at the title for this review article independently, I later discovered that my colleague Andrew Chandler of the University of Chichester had written a review of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) under an almost identical title. See Andrew Chandler, “The Quest for the Historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54, no. 1 (January 2003): 89-96. It is with his kind permission that I continue to use it. I would also like to thank Victoria J. Barnett for her encouragement to examine Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s biography of Bonhoeffer and for her helpful editorial suggestions.

[2] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010); Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

[3] Victoria J. Barnett, “Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly 20, no. 3 (September 2014), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2014/09/interpreting-bonhoeffer-post-bethge. See also Chandler, “The Quest for the Historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

[4] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, “Making Assumptions about Dietrich: How Bonhoeffer was Made Fit for America,” The Bonhoeffer Center for Public Engagement, http://thebonhoeffercenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37:schlingensiepen-on-metaxas-and-marsh.

[5] Stephen R. Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).

[6] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, trans. Isabel Best (London: T&T Clark, 2010). See also the original German version: Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Eine Biographie (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2006). Henceforth all references are to the English edition and are noted parenthetically.

[7] Clifford Green, “Hijacking Bonhoeffer,” Christian Century, October 19, 2010, 34-35.

[8] Victoria J. Barnett, “Review of Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly 15, no. 3 (September 2010), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2010/09/review-of-eric-metaxas-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy-a-righteous-gentile-vs-the-third-reich.

[9] Schlingensiepen, “Making Assumptions about Dietrich.”

 

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Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2014). 473 pages, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783766842992.

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

The history of “non-Aryan Christians” under National Socialism has been a peripheral issue in much of the historiography and a notoriously fuzzy one even in works that focus on the German churches, reflecting the ambiguities of the category itself as well as the unpredictable fates of those who were so labelled. In Nazi Germany the term “non-Aryan” was often used interchangeably with “Jew,” yet for many Germans there was a distinction. Jews had been persecuted throughout European history, but the Emancipation laws of the nineteenth century opened the way to greater opportunity and assimilation, often but not only through conversion to Christianity.  For some, the decision to assimilate through conversion was a pragmatic one, made in the belief that it would lead to a better career and firmer standing in German society; for others, it was made for reasons of marriage or conviction. In any case, it was a double-edged sword, creating a dividing line in German society that became very evident after 1933.  Christians of Jewish ancestry did not think of themselves as Jews and were not viewed as such by religiously observant Jews, and many of these Christians shared the antisemitism of the times. After 1933, however, Nazi law designated anyone with Jewish ancestry as “non-Aryan,” blending the religious and racialized categories, and as a result many baptized Christians suddenly found themselves categorized as Judenchristen, Nichtarier, or nichtarische Christen.

Estimates of the number of people who fell into this category under Nazi law vary. This volume gives the total figure as around 400,000 (a figure that includes members of Christian churches as well as secular Germans with some Jewish ancestry). A 1945 World Council of Churches publication that quoted German governmental figures from 1933 put the number at 250,000 (and the number of religiously observant or secular Jews at 550,000), but some ecumenical leaders in the U.S. and Europe who were involved in refugee work in the 1930s gave numbers as high as one and a half million—based, I suspect, on the total numbers of refugees (not just Christians) that these organizations sought to assist.

The Nazi regime began to pass anti-Jewish laws immediately.  The two major 1933 laws—the April 1, 1933, “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” and the September 1933 law dis-barring “non-Aryan” lawyers—had sweeping effects. In both instances, there were exemptions for Jewish veterans of the First World War as well as for people who had been practicing law or serving in the civil service as of August 1, 1914, and throughout 1933 and 1934 these laws were irregularly implemented, particularly where so-called Mischlinge, or Germans of partial Jewish ancestry, were concerned.  It wasn’t really until the 1935 Nuremberg laws that the categories and degrees of “racial Jewishness” were legally defined.

In the instance of the April 1 law there was another important exemption, elucidated in the May 6 Reichsgesetzblatt: the churches. The April 1 law essentially left the implementation of the law up to the regional and provincial church governments, and in the case of the Protestant churches, of course, the German Christian Movement was eager to introduce a church version of the Aryan paragraph throughout Germany.  Their attempts to do so sparked the widespread theological and ecclesial debate that culminated in the Protestant Kirchenkampf.  As opponents of the Aryan paragraph argued, it directly contradicted church teachings on universal salvation, baptism, conversion, and ordination.  There were of course other church teachings, such as the centrality of love for one’s neighbor, that should have led to a broader solidarity with everyone persecuted under the Nazi regime, but for the most part Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany drew a clear distinction between secular and religiously observant Jews on the one hand, and baptized Christians who fell under the Nazi racial laws on the other.  Solidarity with the former group was virtually non-existent (on the contrary, Protestant leaders like Otto Dibelius rushed to justify the Nazi anti-Jewish measures). Concerns for the latter group proved to be erratic and short-lived, as the initial controversies about the Aryan paragraph dissipated and support for those affected crumbled under internal and external pressures.

Ludwig-EvangelischEvangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt is not a comprehensive history of this topic; nonetheless it is a valuable contribution to the literature.  As its subtitle indicates, it is primarily a Gedenkbuch with brief biographies of 180 German Protestants whose lives were changed by the racial laws and the responses of their church. The editors have cast a wide net. The individuals profiled here include not only theologians and members of the Christian clergy, but individuals who were barred from studying theology before 1945 and others who, barred from other professions, decided to study theology in exile. Also included are teachers of religious education, Christians in “mixed” marriages, Austrians who came under Nazi law after 1938, and even several individuals who were Deutsche Christen or members of the Nazi party. While most of those profiled were members of the German Evangelical Church, there are also several profiles of individuals from Methodist, Baptist, and other free churches.

The editors’ introduction is an admirably clear overview of the subject, portraying the complexities of the Nazi laws and the gradual intensification of pressures on these individuals, and concluding with a brief but devastating portrait of the churches’ responses up to and after 1945. There are several very useful appendixes, including a table that locates these individuals by Landeskirche and “racial” category as defined by the 1935 Nuremberg laws, a bibliography organized by name that gives the sources for the information about each individual, and an extensive bibliography of the relevant literature. An additional appendix is a compilation of all the various measures against each individual as well as their fates and subsequent careers—a listing that gives a poignant overview of the numerous ways in which many of these people suffered. Pastors and teachers were forced into retirement, spouses were publicly humiliated, anonymous threats were sent. A number of people were betrayed by colleagues; some were sent to prisons, concentration camps, or forced labor. Some found safety for a time in one of the Confessing Church institutions.  Most of them emigrated and many—though not all—remained abroad after 1945. Those who returned encountered a mixed reception by church leaders and had to wage legal and procedural battles in some instances in order to re-enter their careers. Several people briefly returned to Germany before deciding to leave again.

The 180 biographical studies, written by a number of clergy and scholars, comprise the heart of the book. By extending their study beyond the names of the clergy already known from the literature on the Kirchenkampf, the authors and editors demonstrate the diversity of this sector of the population and have included many women in their profiles, which gives a portrait of the gendered dynamics surrounding the issue. While some of these individuals were familiar names from existing studies of the Confessing church and the Gruber office, there were a number of individuals that I hadn’t realized were affected by the racial laws and there were other names that were completely new to me.  There are a number of individuals from “brown” regional churches, and the accounts of their experiences offer important information about how the actions of church leadership in those regions affected both opposition voices and “non-Aryan” Christians.

While some of these people found refuge and solidarity in the Confessing Church, for examples, others found it lamentably passive and silent. Ernst Althausen, the Russian-born grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, worked in the interwar period with ethnic German refugees in the east, leading him to study theology in Berlin. He joined the Pastors Emergency League but complained to Martin Niemoeller that it wasn’t enough to stand up to the German Christians. Althausen worked for the Berlin Judenmission and came under pressure from the Nazi party and the church alike. After he had to wear the yellow star in 1941 his Confessing Church colleagues in Berlin stopped allowing him to hold church services and (at the age of 80), he was banned from public speaking.

The stories of “non-Aryan Christians” who were either sympathetic to Nazism or married to such people are particularly striking. Pastor Georg Börner, a supporter of the Deutsche Christen and the Nazi Party, didn’t join either organization only because his wife was one of the daughters of Kurt Eisner, the Jewish social democrat who was assassinated after leading the 1919 German revolution in Bavaria. Throughout the 1930s Börner was publicly attacked in Der Stürmer and the SS Schwarze Korps, but Nazi party members in his parish defended him, Bishop Hans Meiser stood behind him, and during the war the Bavarian governmental president issued a special order permitting him to stay in his pastorate.  His wife remained unscathed, and after 1945 the Börners remained in their parish until his retirement in 1968. One pastor who did become a member of the Deutsche Christen as well as the Nazi Party was Hellmut Fischer, who successfully hid the fact that he had a Jewish grandmother until 1938, when the Bavarian government decided to require Aryan certificates for clergy. Fischer quietly requested to be transferred to a non-pastoral position, but in December 1938 Landeskirche officials told Fischer he would have to leave the ministry.  His parish council stood up for him, declaring that he was a good pastor and “politically reliable.” The outbreak of the war resolved things: Fischer was drafted, the Landeskirche tabled the proceedings against him, and he was able to return to a parish after the war in Würzburg.

As these examples illustrate, many of these people are so interesting and surprising that readers will be tempted to do additional research (I found myself wondering, for example, where Eisner’s daughter stood politically in all this, and what happened to Eisner’s other children). The volume as a whole illustrates that those designated as “non-Aryan” Christian represented a broad spectrum of backgrounds and theological and political perspectives. As such it is a major contribution to our understanding of the complexity of the issue. The range of Germans affected by the Nazi racial laws was wide and their fates varied widely. Some people came under immediate pressure in 1933; others retained their positions until the late 1930s. Some of the people portrayed here moved toward a broader solidarity and engagement on behalf of all persecuted Jews, in contrast to the rest of their church. And, as the editors note in the introduction, the stories of these individuals attest to the widespread antisemitism not only during the Nazi era but afterward, when some of them continued to suffer under their church leadership and the antisemitism of friends and colleagues.

(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.)

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Review of Heike Springhart, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern: Der Beitrag von Religion und Kirche für Demokratisierung und Reeducation im Westen Deutschlands nach 1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Heike Springhart, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern: Der Beitrag von Religion und Kirche für Demokratisierung und Reeducation im Westen Deutschlands nach 1945 (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt, 2008), 360 pages. ISBN: 9783374026128.

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

The immediate aftermath of World War II was one of the most eventful and decisive transition periods in twentieth century history.  The Axis nations had been defeated, but there were millions of displaced persons and refugees, extensive destruction of cities and infrastructure, and a rapidly shifting postwar political landscape that eventually culminated in the formation of the Soviet bloc and NATO, the division of Germany into east and west, and the onset of the Cold War.

There was a widespread sense among the victorious Allied authorities that the postwar agenda for Germany was just as crucial as the military defeat of the Nazi regime, and that the long term stability of Europe would depend on addressing the German situation differently than the victors of the First World War had done after 1918.  Thus, the postwar policies of the British, U.S., and French occupation governments were focused not just on immediate political and military issues but on the longer-term challenge of ensuring political and civil stability, a task that included changing the political culture of Germany through re-education, denazification and various civil society programs.

This approach particularly characterized the American zone.  Whether in Roosevelt’s speeches, Hollywood newsreels, military propaganda, or publications by U.S. aid organizations, the rationale behind U.S. involvement in the war had often been articulated as a fight for American democratic ideals. Hence, a central goal of many U.S.-led postwar programs was to educate and train Germans in the practices of democracy.

Springhart-AufbruecheHeike Springhart’s Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern is a detailed history and analysis of one such program, the partnership between the U.S. military government and German Protestant church leaders and organizations in Württemberg. Her focus is the work there of the U.S. Branch for Education and Religious Affairs (ERA) between 1946-1948, which she sets in a broader historical context by examining the individuals and organizations, both in the U.S. and in Germany, who during the war helped lay the theoretical and political foundation for the ERA’s work. There is also a concluding chapter that offers a conceptual framework for understanding the potential role of religion in post-conflict processes of democratization and social transformation, drawing on the German example as a case study.

The ERA’s agenda cannot be understood separately from the wartime “White Papers” and programs that began to address these issues before 1945. Springhart particularly examines the influence of Paul Tillich, the religious socialist German theologian who left Germany in 1933, as well as the Council for a Democratic Germany, an organization of leading German emigres and U.S. intellectuals that was founded in 1944. During the war Tillich, who was teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, delivered a series of radio addresses for the Voice of America directed toward “the other Germany” (Thomas Mann regularly spoke on a similar series of radio broadcasts for the BBC).  In talks that combined criticism of Nazism, praise of democracy, and an appeal to the deeper cultural and moral standards of the German people, Tillich hoped to reach not only Confessing Church members, but potential oppositional groups in the military and among intellectuals. The Council for a Democratic Germany was one of several U.S. organizations that sought to raise American awareness of “the other Germany” and draft potential approaches for democratization programs after the defeat of Nazism.

Springhart also explores some of the literature that began to shape this thinking during that war, notably the work of Talcott Parsons, a Harvard sociologist who believed that societies could be changed through “controlled institutional change,” and Richard Brickner, a New York psychiatrist who in a 1943 book (Is Germany Incurable?) argued that the positive qualities of the German psyche had to be strengthened through social and political re-education programs. As early as 1942, U.S. military and political leaders began discussing such programs as crucial tools for the democratization of postwar Germany. It was clear that the implementation and effectiveness of such programs would depend on reliable German partners, and the primary partners identified early on were German church leaders, particularly those with ties to the Confessing Church.

The ERA emerged in 1946 as a distinct division under the auspices of the Office of Military Government (OMGUS), with sub-offices focusing on Catholic, Protestant, and “Interfaith-Relations and Free Church” affairs. General Lucius Clay’s directive to ERA officials was that they offer support and guidance to German religious leaders of all faiths to strengthen the work of existing religious bodies such as church youth organizations and the social welfare programs of the Evangelical Hilfswerk. The ERA also played a key role in the development of various postwar Evangelical Church press agencies and radio broadcasting services. The Allied goal was not that the ERA actually establish and run these programs themselves, but rather help the Germans themselves to do so.  Still, over the course of time the U.S. developed a number of programs in conjunction with the ERA’s agenda, including cultural and educational exchanges that brought German clergy and academics to the United States.

In Württemberg the OMGUS staff reached out to Bishop Theophil Wurm, whom the Americans regarded as a trustworthy church leader with a strong anti-Nazi record. Wurm put them in touch with a network of church leaders and theologians that included Eberhard Müller, who founded the first Evangelical Academy in Bad Boll in 1946, and Eugen Gerstenmaier, who as a member of the Kreisau Circle had been imprisoned after July 20 and after the end of the war became director of the Evangelical Church Hilfswerk in Stuttgart.

One of the most interesting aspects of Springhart’s study is the role played by figures like Gerstenmaier, Wurm, and theologian Helmut Thielicke in the ERA’s work in Württemberg.  Wurm was nearing the end of his career (he died in 1953), but Gerstenmaier went on to political prominence as a CDU political leader, eventually serving as Bundestag president, and Thielicke became a prominent theologian. Gerstenmaier and Thielicke, both of whom traveled to the United States on governmental cultural exchange programs in the late 1940s, became conservative, pro-Western voices in the German political debates of the 1950s onward, in contrast to other Kirchenkampf veterans like Martin Niemoeller, who quickly became an outspoken critic of U.S. policies.  Their early postwar involvement in the ERA programs gives greater insight into their subsequent political perspectives as well as the internal controversies and debates within German postwar Protestantism. All three, of course, had been involved in the internal Protestant Kirchenkampf debates of the 1930s, but they had not stood on the radical Dahlemite end of the Confessing Church spectrum and there were strong tensions between them and more radical Confessing Church voices in Württemberg like Hermann Diem even before the end of the war.

Those tensions erupted in the early postwar period, particularly with respect to how the Nazi past should be addressed. Even among partners like Wurm, there was growing resentment about programs like denazification and the beginnings of the war crimes trials. Springhart’s study reveals considerable ambiguity in how ERA officials addressed the ongoing legacy of National Socialism in the churches, although the reports she cites by OMGUS officials (as well as by critical outside voices like Karl Barth) show a growing awareness that their German church partners were not as consistently anti-Nazi and pro-American as they had thought.  In addition, one of the major American church donors to ERA programs for German churches was the U.S. Missouri Synod Lutheran church, whose leaders had a good relationship to Missouri-born President Truman (Truman was Baptist). The German staff officer in the Württemberg-Baden ERA office was Karl Arndt, a Missouri Synod Lutheran accused of making antisemitic and pro-Nazi remarks; despite ongoing controversy about Arndt he retained his position and even defended the revival of a pro-Deutsche Christen group.

The ERA programs were but one part of the extensive outreach by U.S. government groups and churches in postwar Germany, but Springhart’s case study is particularly useful in its portrayal of the philosophy behind many of these initiatives, and for all the challenges they faced they did leave a permanent infrastructure of programs dedicated to broader democratic political discourse in Germany. In the decades that followed, the Evangelical publishing branches, radio and television programming, the Evangelical Academies, and other programs that emerged from the ERA’s work became defining aspects for the public voice of the Evangelical Church of Germany and, it must be added, for the emergence of a different understanding of the public responsibilities of the church from that before 1933. Although published several years ago, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern remains a timely and valuable study of the Branch for Education and Religious Affairs and its local impact, especially amidst the growing number of works on this critical period in German history.

(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.)

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Conference Report: “Verständigung und Versöhnung: Beiträge von Kirche, Religion und Politik (Understanding and Reconciliation: The Contributions of Church, Religion, and Politics)”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Conference Report: “Verständigung und Versöhnung: Beiträge von Kirche, Religion und Politik (Understanding and Reconciliation: The Contributions of Church, Religion, and Politics)” 18th Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lectures, Institut für Gesellschftswissenschaften und Theologie, Europa-Universität Flensburg, July 10-12, 2015.

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

The role played by religious leaders and institutions in political processes of reconciliation, particularly in the wake of conflicts and wars, is a topic of growing interest, due both to the revival of interest in interfaith work and the number of contemporary conflicts in which religion is a factor. It’s a topic in which the historical precedents are often obscured by the realities of contemporary issues, but it’s interesting to reflect on how those precedents shape our assumptions today. In U.S. popular culture the reputation of the Second World War as “the good war” is based not only on the clear-cut moral and political issues surrounding the war against Nazi Germany but on what unfolded in the aftermath of that war. European cities were rebuilt in what in historical terms seems like record time, Germany was reintegrated into collective European society, and despite the Cold War the Second World War was followed by decades of relative political and economic stability throughout Europe.  One has only to reflect on the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the ongoing conflict in the Sudan to realize what a rare phenomenon postwar Europe was in all these respects, despite the widespread scope of the war’s damage, the millions of displaced persons, and the fact that a genocide had just occurred.

The contemporary challenges of multiculturalism and political stability in Europe and the historical period of reconstruction after 1945 were the topics of this year’s Bonhoeffer Lecture conference in Germany, a two-day conference organized and hosted by the Institute for Social Science and Theology at the Europa-Universität in Flensburg. The German Bonhoeffer Lecture, sponsored by the Stiftung Bonhoeffer-Lehrstuhl, is a biennial program that convenes U.S. and European Bonhoeffer scholars in a wider conversation with European scholars on historical and contemporary issues.

The focus of the first day was “Religious Pluralism as a Challenge for Social Understanding Today,” with a particular focus on Muslim-Christian relations in Germany. Conference host Ralf Wuestenberg, professor of systematic and historical theology at the university in Flensburg, introduced the theme by analyzing the applicability of Bonhoeffer’s late writings about the “scarring over of guilt” to conversations about guilt, reconciliation, and the challenges of inter-European reconciliation today.  Klaus von Stosch, a professor of Catholic theology in Paderborn who also teaches at their Center for Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies, discussed the ways in which theological Muslim-Christian dialogue in Germany today has led to deeper understandings of his own Catholic theology, and the potential of the intercultural programs at the Paderborn Center for a better understanding of pluralism. Çefli Ademi, a postdoctoral fellow for Islamic Theology at the Westphalian Wilhelm University in Münster, delivered a paper on the possibilities within Islamic jurisprudence for co-existence and in some cases integration into western European legal systems. Christiane Tietz, professor of religious philosophy at the University of Zurich whose recent work has focused on interreligious understanding, analyzed and summarized the ways in which interreligious work and dialogue function in today’s Europe.

The second day, “Reconciliation as a Service of the Church and Task of International Politics after 1945,” offered an overview of post-World War II reconciliation in Europe, particularly with respect to the role and responses of the different churches. Konrad Raiser set the foundation by giving an overview of the history of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century, particularly in terms of its dedication to international peace. My own paper traced the engagement of U.S. churches in postwar Germany, particularly through the work of the Federal Council of Churches and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Karsten Lehmkühler, professor of ethics at the University of Straßburg, talked about the ongoing process of German-French reconciliation after 1945, and Tim Lorentzen, who teaches church history at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, analyzed the role of Christian memorial culture in the process of German-Polish reconciliation.

As the topics indicate, most of the presentations (as well as the discussion that followed) explored theologically-based approaches to dialogue and the ways in which such dialogue can shape broader political discourse. The presentations on the second day, however, illustrated that even theological agendas and discourses are shaped by the historical realities of the respective dialogue partners.  A conference volume is being planned.

(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.)

 

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Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group.  What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share?  How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments?  While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals.  The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic  Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews.  While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

  • Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
  • Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
  • Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
  • Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
  • James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
  • Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
  • Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
  • Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
  • Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”
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Clarification and Addendum to My Review of Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Clarification and Addendum to My Review of Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

Marsh - StrangeA closer look at the original sources cited in Professor Marsh’s book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has led me to write this clarification. In my review (September 2014) I commented on “a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking” with respect to Marsh’s claim that there was a homoerotic relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge. The letter can be found on page 252 of the book; Marsh apparently found the original in the Bethge papers, although he gives no archival citation in the footnote (65). This is incidentally the only place in the entire book where a supposedly newly discovered document is cited in the notes.

Because the passage quoted was so unusual I didn’t immediately recognize it, but as it turns out, it’s from the letter published as nr. 102 in Bonhoeffer Works Volume 14, and the text of the letter differs significantly from the translation offered by Marsh. In his book, Marsh actually quotes a phrase from this letter (which he misdates) two paragraphs before: “I miss you often.” In the passage from the supposedly unpublished letter, Marsh renders the text as follows: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and is desperately sick….The semester is coming to an end, and I miss you often.”

The full passage as quoted on page 225 of volume 14 of the Bonhoeffer Works reads as follows:

There is a lot of confusion here at the end of the semester, and I miss you often. I always greatly look forward to your letters! And the unrest in church politics on top of it all. ‘The heart is a defiant and despondent thing.’ (Jer. 17:9) Defiance and despondency – all that just dies in prayer. Let us remain faithful and in the process also remain true to each other.

“The heart is a defiant and despondent thing” is actually a quotation from Jeremiah and Bonhoeffer is commenting on the unrest in church politics.

In other words, the translation is a very misleading version of the original text. Taken as an isolated example this might be overlooked, but unfortunately there are examples throughout the book of mistranslation and misinterpreted (or misunderstood) information, particularly with respect to Marsh’s portrayal of the Bethge-Bonhoeffer relationship. Facts are given without the larger context that gives a more accurate picture. It is not news, for example, that Bonhoeffer and Bethge had a joint bank account; Bethge essentially managed Finkenwalde as well as the underground pastorates in Bonhoeffer’s absence and had to pay bills (and there was always uncertainty as to whether Bonhoeffer might be arrested, which made a joint account a necessity).

In Marsh’s telling the entire section devoted to Bonhoeffer’s brief 1939 stay in New York emphasizes his longing for his friend Bethge, but it must be said there is really no indication of that in either his 1939 New York diary and the letters he wrote during that period, which I translated and edited for Bonhoeffer Works volume 15.  What emerges from the actual texts is that Bonhoeffer’s sense of homesickness and remorse at having left Germany was shaped first and foremost by a deep connection and sense of responsibility for his students. He felt that he had left them in the lurch, and his letters to Bethge focused on these concerns.

Here again, the translations in the Marsh book are misleading. Throughout his 1939 diary (and even in some letters to Bethge) Bonhoeffer uses the second-person plural, which makes clear that he’s addressing the entire Finkenwalde community. In Marsh’s account these passages have been turned into the first-person singular and rendered incorrectly as personal notes to Bethge. For example, the quotation on page 280, “someday we will worship together in eternity” (which is not footnoted in Marsh) is from the June 11, 1939, entry in Bonhoeffer’s diary. The larger paragraph in which this passage occurs makes it abundantly clear that the “we” is the community (see the entire text on page 218-19 of Bonhoeffer Works, volume 15). Similarly, in the June 4 letter to Bethge in which Bonhoeffer writes “You will be tired and gone to bed now…” (Marsh, page 277) the “you” is plural and addresses the Finkenwalde community as a whole.

There are similar instances throughout the book of incorrect citations or historical errors that, while they make for a dramatic story, don’t reflect the actual record. For example, in his review of the book in Sojourners (http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/08/26/harlems-influence-bonhoeffer-underestimated-strange-glory), Reggie Williams noted the odd claim that Bonhoeffer broke ties with Abyssinian Baptist church in 1931 because the church was charging people admission to Easter Sunday services (Marsh, pp. 127-128). The source given is a letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his grandmother, but that letter says nothing about an admission charge or even Abyssinian; it’s only a mention of the common practice of major metropolitan U.S. churches to regulate the large Christmas and Easter crowds by issuing passes. Given the centrality of the Abyssinian experience for Bonhoeffer’s theology, a break with that church would be a dramatic development and worthy of further examination—yet there is no evidence of such a break. Indeed, as Clifford Green noted in his introduction to Bonhoeffer Works volume 10, there is some evidence that Bonhoeffer actually spoke at Abyssinian in 1939.

My review essay was titled “Interpreting Bonhoeffer.”  As I stressed in that review, the books I was reviewing are all interpretations and attempts to carve out new ground. There is certainly room for that in Bonhoeffer scholarship. There is also room for new interpretations of seminal events and relationships in Bonhoeffer’s life and for new theological interpretations of what he tried to do. But historians will know that interpretation of any kind must be grounded in fact and scrupulous attention to detail and correctness. Interpretation in history and biography (which, as the history of a life, deserves the same kind of faithfulness to accuracy) is only as sound as the accuracy of the account itself.

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Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 544 pages.

Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013). 272 pages.

Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).

In 2003 the British historian Andrew Chandler (one of the contributing editors to this journal) wrote “The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer,” a review essay of the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) that to my mind remains the best analysis of the challenges of contemporary Bonhoeffer interpretation that has been written.[1] One of his main points was that most of the authors who have written about Bonhoeffer come from a theological or religious background and interpret him, as well as his historical context, through that perspective. The dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage. For decades, the main source for that story has been Eberhard Bethge’s definitive biography of Bonhoeffer, but increasingly Bethge’s text is being augmented by the vast collection of documents now available in English in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE) (the final index volume will be published this fall).

When I edited the new unabridged English edition of the biography about 15 years ago, I was struck by the thoroughness of Bethge’s research and by how much of it was correct. Although not a historian, Bethge went to great pains to get the history right. He himself had been part of the Confessing Church, the battles about theological education, and the resistance circles before he was conscripted into the German Wehrmacht, and he reconstructed the parts of the story that he had not personally experienced (such as Bonhoeffer’s early ecumenical period and his year of study in the U.S.) by consulting with others who had known Bonhoeffer during those periods, obtaining copies of correspondence from others and relevant documents from other archives.

There was a just-the-facts modesty in Bethge’s approach to the historical story. There were other versions of certain events, of course, and after the biography appeared there were people who disagreed with him on certain points, and there were pieces of the historical puzzle he did not have. New insights into Bonhoeffer have emerged in recent years from other historical studies that remind us that Bonhoeffer was not nearly as central or prominent as the biography made it seem. Finally, there were issues—notably the centrality of the persecution of the Jews and the churches’ reactions to this—that became dominant in the historiography only after the biography had appeared. Yet it must be said that Bethge was markedly open to all these developments, questions, and new challenges, and in later writings and lectures he began to address these issues.

Nonetheless, a Bonhoeffer mythology developed early on; in fact, it predated the publication of the biography. Particularly because of The Cost of Discipleship and the Letters and Papers from Prison, both of which were available in English by the early 1950s, Bonhoeffer was already being read as a Christian martyr by the time the biography appeared, and the historical narrative that Bethge laid out was interpreted accordingly. Bethge was as surprised by this as anyone. When he arrived in this country during the 1950s to begin writing the biography he observed that “everyone has his own Bonhoeffer,” and once the biography was published he had to spend some of his time countering popular re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology, notably those from the “death of God” movement.

The mythology remains the crux of the problem in Bonhoeffer interpretation. As Chandler noted, the common portrayal of Bonhoeffer as martyr and hero goes “hand-in-hand with a number of historical arguments about the world he inhabited.” Those historical assumptions emerged during a period in which the history of the German churches under Nazism was largely a hagiographic account. Not only was Bonhoeffer’s actual role in the Kirchenkampf, the ecumenical circles, and the resistance overemphasized, the role played by these groups were portrayed far more heroically and clear-cut than it had actually been.

In the decades since, historical research on the German churches, especially the church struggle and the Confessing Church, has given us a very different picture, and yet the popular historical picture of Bonhoeffer and his context remains frozen in time. The historiography shows, for example, that the Nazi state did not try to impose the 1933 Aryan paragraph on the churches and that the attempted nazification of the churches was carried out largely from within. The ensuing internal debates were the focus and framework for most of Bonhoeffer’s theological writings between 1933 and 1939. A side effect of these debates was pervasive caution throughout the Confessing Church about directly confronting the state. As the documents in DBWE indicate, Bonhoeffer had such moments of caution himself, even advising his seminarians in 1939 to fill out Aryan certificates if the state demanded it.

Yet the dominant narrative in most books on Bonhoeffer continues to portray the church struggle as a clear battle that the Confessing Church bravely waged against the Nazi state, rather than the reality, which was an ongoing internal series of disputes within the German Evangelical Church between German Christians, Confessing Church leaders, and so-called “neutral” church leaders. Until the 1980s the persecution and genocide of the Jews was largely ignored in historical works on the churches (and it was not a central theme in the Bethge biography), but as attention to this topic grew, it was simply assumed that concern about the Jews was Bonhoeffer’s primary motivation in opposing Nazism and that Bonhoeffer was far more outspoken on the issue than in fact was the case. That assumption ignores a number of important nuances—notably the distinctions made at the time by church leaders inside and outside Nazi Germany between secular and observant Jews and so-called “non-Aryan Christians” (i.e., Christians of Jewish ancestry who after 1933 were affected by racial laws). As a result, in much of the Bonhoeffer literature the phrase “the Jews” is uniformly applied to everyone affected by the racial laws, including those (like Franz Hildebrandt) who adamantly did not consider themselves to be Jewish.

The purpose of critically engaging such issues is not to pull Bonhoeffer off the pedestal but to understand the complexities that he himself confronted and wrote about. Chandler concluded his review essay by warning that unless the theologians learned from the historians, the DBWE volumes might themselves simply “become an imposing obstacle to a more mature and profound historical understanding of many substantial questions.”

There is now an extensive and more critical body of historical literature (much of it by the editors of this journal) on the German churches and the Holocaust, especially with regard to the Jews, that has definitively repudiated the early hagiography on this topic. There are new studies of sermons, the influence of Luther’s thought during this era, and localized studies of parishes and pastors that give a nuanced portrait of the Confessing Church. There are new theological and historical examinations of the ideological nationalism and antisemitism that shaped many Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox leaders of the period. There are now studies that show a broader, continent-wide phenomenon in which ethnonationalist, explicitly antisemitic forms of Christianity were emerging in other parts of Europe and the Deutsche Christen were simply the German expression of this.

The documents published in DBWE are themselves another possible source of historical information about these larger events.  They give a rare close-up view not just of the individuals and events in the German church struggle as it unfolded, but of the theological debates inside and outside Germany.  Thus it is possible to arrive at new interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology from within the opus itself, and there are elements that I think Bethge himself overlooked.

This is precisely where the theologians have something to offer, and where a closer examination of Bonhoeffer’s thought would be fascinating: because Bonhoeffer, while certainly writing within the context of Nazi Germany, was addressing these larger issues.  From early on—partly through his travels, his ecumenical engagement, and his exposure to a variety of cultural and theological perspectives, partly through his dialectical approach, partly through his sheer erudition—he thought in terms of the grand sweep of Christian theology and its intersection and engagement with the world. By the late 1930s he understood what was happening in Nazi Germany as part of a much larger phenomenon, theologically and historically.

The question before us is whether, with the completion of DBWE, these volumes will open the door to that new kind of theological scholarship about Bonhoeffer that seriously engages the historical challenges he faced.

As examples of the new ways in which the DBWE are being used, the three books reviewed here show both the potential for breaking new theological ground as well as some of the aforementioned historical shortcomings. The authors come from theological backgrounds. Charles Marsh is professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1994), a study of the philosophical influences on him, as well as several books on the civil rights movement. Mark Thiessen Nation teaches at Eastern Mennonite University and has authored several works on ethics, pacifism, and the works of John Howard Yoder; Anthony Siegrist teaches at Prairie Bible College and Daniel Umbel, a graduate of Eastern Mennonite University, is a pastor. Reggie Williams teaches Christian ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary and has written a number of articles on race, ethics, black theology, and Bonhoeffer.

Each of these books marks an attempt to break new ground in very distinct genres. Marsh has written a popular biography that focuses both on conveying Bonhoeffer’s theological development as well as offering a more personal picture of him. Nation and his co-authors focus on the development of Bonhoeffer’s pacifist thought, and openly challenge Bethge’s version of Bonhoeffer’s role in the German resistance. Williams examines how Bonhoeffer’s encounter with black theology and the Harlem Renaissance during his 1930/31 study year in New York shaped his larger theological development. (Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with all three authors).

Marsh - StrangeCharles Marsh’s book is an eloquent, well-written portrayal of Bonhoeffer and his theological development from his young student days to the end of his life. Marsh offers two primary re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theological development: one concerns the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on Bonhoeffer during his year at Union as pushing Bonhoeffer to a more concrete and activist ethics once he returned to Germany. The other is an attempt to show the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s theology was influenced by Judaism, particularly the work of Martin Buber.

Both topics, of course, have implications for understanding Bonhoeffer historically. I found the Niebuhrian connection more convincing; the case for the influence of Judaism is much thinner and Marsh notably avoids the issues raised by Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question” entirely (he refers to it obliquely while discussing the Bethel confession). Although Bonhoeffer’s postdoctoral dissertation Act and Being makes striking use of the Ich-Du distinction that Buber employed in I and Thou, the interpretation of most Bonhoeffer scholars to date has been that Bonhoeffer meant something quite different than Martin Buber–and it’s worth noting that we don’t know whether Bonhoeffer even had read the book (he didn’t own a copy and nowhere in his writings does he actually cite Buber).  Because these are academic debates of little interest to general readers Marsh doesn’t develop these arguments in depth; on the other hand, precisely because he offers these as new readings of Bonhoeffer’s texts it would have been worth a footnote or two going into more detail to make his case.

Marsh’s primary aim, however, is to render a more personal portrait of Bonhoeffer. A combination of personal reserve and family considerations made Bethge remarkably circumspect about personal anecdotes, and the biography appeared before the era of tell-all biography. The only other sources for such personal glimpses have been Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann’s I knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer with its recollections by various contemporaries, Sabine Leizholz’s memoir of her family, and the published collection of Bonhoeffer’s letters to Maria von Wedemeyer, Love Letters from Cell 92, which did offer readers a completely different and often poignant glimpse of the man behind the theology. In addition to poring through the more personal letters in DBWE, Marsh went through Bethge’s personal papers that are now at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and he also gives some wonderful more personalized descriptions of the very different circles in which Bonhoeffer moved.

The results are somewhat uneven, although that may be because this is such an ambitious and difficult thing to do. In rearranging the figure-ground relationship of a biography, how does one know what to emphasize, and does the selection of more personal letters obscure the broader sense of the person that can be gotten from other letters?  Much of the early material Marsh cites makes Bonhoeffer seem surprisingly superficial, and yet there are other letters in DBWE (not cited) by the young Bonhoeffer that show a real gravitas, as well as a closeness and respect for his parents and his siblings that is quite moving; both those qualities seem lost here. But there are strong portrayals of his travels, particularly the trip he took through the Deep South at the end of his Union year and the impression made on him by seeing American racism.

The aspect of the book that has drawn the most attention is the portrayal of the friendship to Bethge as a homoerotic one that on Bonhoeffer’s part really was a romantic attachment. It must be said that there are a few letters in DBWE that can be read this way, and in Bethge’s papers Marsh discovered a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking. Ultimately, however, such an interpretation remains speculative. The love letters to Maria von Wedemeyer do indicate a real affection and certainly a hope in the possibility of a shared future, and in one of those letters Bonhoeffer actually wrote of his earlier love for Elisabeth Zinn. The relationship (and Bethge himself) can be seen in a broader context if one realizes where Bonhoeffer stood in life at the moment Bethge arrived in Finkenwalde: increasingly marginalized in his church as well as in the ecumenical movement, under growing pressure and surveillance, and tasked with overseeing one of the five Confessing seminaries that had been created in the wake of the 1934 Dahlem synod. Bethge–a steady, unflappable person if there ever was one–came along at the right time and Bonhoeffer soon turned to him for help with running Finkenwalde and increasingly leaned on him as pressures mounted. Reading some of the correspondence, it is possible to conclude that Bonhoeffer was often a demanding friend, but most of their exchanges were intellectual and theological.

The exercise itself is an interesting one that raises broader questions about how to interpret the DBWE texts; by highlighting the more personal and informal elements of some of these documents Marsh shows us a different and in many ways more modest Bonhoeffer. The book’s real contribution may be that by illustrating the personal turning points in Bonhoeffer’s life Marsh illustrates that these were theological turning points. Those theological turning points are often overlooked by historians, and yet as Marsh notes, they were the driving impulse in some of his decisions.

Nation - BonhoefferBonhoeffer the Assassin offers a theological examination of Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace from a pacifist perspective (the authors are Anabaptists). It offers a good summary of these texts, from the early period of the 1930s through the prison period, demonstrating the strong theological continuity from his ecumenical speeches to Discipleship to Ethics that shows the centrality of a peace ethic in Bonhoeffer’s thought. The analysis and insights of these texts from a peace tradition perspective is a genuine contribution to the literature.

The more problematic section of the book is the historical section and its contention that because Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist, he could not possibly have supported the conspiracy plans to kill Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and that his actual involvement and knowledge of such plans was peripheral.  This section of the book is an attack on Bethge’s historiography. The authors claim that the “myth” of Bonhoeffer as stated in the provocative title emerged directly from Bethge’s portrayal of this period of Bonhoeffer’s life in the biography and that there is actually no evidence in the DBWE documentation to support this version. The authors argue that Bonhoeffer remained opposed to the planned murders of Adolf Hitler and leading Nazis, and that far from playing an actual role in the resistance activities, Bonhoeffer primarily served as pastoral counselor to the conspirators.

They base their argument in part on Sabine Dramm’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance (reviewed in this journal in 2008), but much of their methodology draws directly on the documents in DBWE—as the authors put it, by going directly to Bonhoeffer’s own words and not relying on what they describe as the secondary and erroneous account by Bethge. Dramm did something similar, it should be noted: drawing primarily on the documents in DBWE 16, she argued correctly for a more modest understanding of Bonhoeffer’s entry into and role in the July resistance circles.

Dramm’s outline of events does not contradict Bethge’s account in the biography, but Bethge did emphasize Bonhoeffer’s early knowledge of and support for the conspiracy aims, and this is one of the issues Nation and his co-authors focus on. While it is correct that Bonhoeffer did not write down information about the related discussions in the Bonhoeffer home that took place as early as 1938 (he would have been a fool to do so), there is substantial evidence to support Bethge’s version of things, both in the later accounts of people who knew Bonhoeffer and most particularly in Winfried Meyer’s recent studies of Hans von Dohnanyi and the Abwehr resistance circles, as well as in Marijke Smid’s study of Hans and Christine von Dohnanyi.  By these accounts, Bonhoeffer was Dohnanyi’s most trusted confidant and was informed quite early both about the regime’s atrocities as well as the emerging plans to overthrow the regime.

Moreover there is much evidence in Bonhoeffer’s own writings that contradicts the book’s claims.  Bonhoeffer did in fact speak about “tyrannicide”–in a 1935 study of the Augsburg Confession at Finkenwalde–and he also argued against a simple principled adherence to strict pacifism. Reconciling Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace with his role in the resistance is a challenge that requires an exploration of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism not only through his writings on that topic, but through his writings on ethics and the church/state relationship, with a recognition of the complexity of the circumstances he faced and the decisions he made as a result. Beginning with his deconstruction of the legitimacy of Nazi authority in 1933 and going through to his wartime writings, in fact, the church/state writings offer deep insights into Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the pacifist question.

In his July 1945 eulogy for Bonhoeffer, George Bell said that “deeply committed as he was to the plan for elimination, he was not altogether at ease as a Christian about such a solution.” Bell was in a position to know, since Bonhoeffer had given him information about the intended coup (including the plans to kill Hitler) in 1942 to convey to Anthony Eden. The second part of Bell’s sentence addresses the very dilemma that troubles the authors of this book: how did Bonhoeffer reconcile the conspiracy’s aims with Christian principles? The answer is that he didn’t, and he accepted the full responsibility demanded by such a “boundary situation.” Eberhard Bethge gave a similar reply to Bell’s when I interviewed him about this in 1985, saying that while Bonhoeffer believed that the killing of Hitler and others was necessary he deliberately refused to claim the sanction of the church for this action, saying that this was his personal choice and involved taking a certain guilt upon himself. Bethge’s version was also confirmed by Klaus Bonhoeffer’s widow Emmi when I interviewed her in 1986; she told me that the entire family was unanimous in support of the coup attempt. That might not satisfy doctrinaire thinkers, but I think it is difficult to understand Bonhoeffer fully if we insist on a version of him that ignores such contradictions and complexities.

Here there are insights to be gained from the perspective of contemporaries who were active in pacifist circles and were in fact consistent on the issue– Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, Corder Catchpool, George Bell’s sister-in-law Laura Livingston, many of the people in the Gruber office, and Andre Trocme in Le Chambon. One of Bonhoeffer’s closest friends before Bethge came on the scene was Herbert Jehle, who strongly championed Bonhoeffer’s pacifism in postwar debates about it. So this is an especially complex area where–as with the issue of Bonhoeffer’s engagement in helping for Jews–much could still be written.

Another such area is Bonhoeffer’s encounter with the African-American church and the realities of American racism during his year in New York in 1930-31. Bonhoeffer himself acknowledged the tremendous impact of this experience, writing, “I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches,” and taking recordings of Negro spirituals back to Germany, where he played them for the somewhat baffled Finkenwalde seminarians. Josiah Young’s 1998 book No Difference in the Fare explored this period, particularly in terms of how it shaped Bonhoeffer’s critique of Nazi ideology.

Williams - BonhoeffersReggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus builds on Young’s insights but breaks new ground in offering a detailed and vibrant portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that was in full blossom during Bonhoeffer’s time in New York. The course syllabi and reading lists for Bonhoeffer during this time (published in DBWE 10) show that Bonhoeffer read a number of books by black authors like Countee Cullen, and Williams talks about what it was the Bonhoeffer was actually reading, how authors like Cullen and W. E. B. Du Bois thought about racism in the broader sense, and what he would have encountered in the culture at Abyssinian Baptist Church and beyond.

William makes the case that these encounters shaped Bonhoeffer’s subsequent thought about the theological questions that were so central for him: what is church?  And who is Christ today? The breakthrough sections of the book are those that explore the influence of the black theology of the day on Bonhoeffer’s notion of Stellvertretung (“vicarious representative action,” in DBWE) and his ecumenism. Williams argues that the theological insights that emerged from Bonhoeffer’s exposure to the black church shaped his further exploration of ecumenical theological identity beyond strictly European concerns and actually included some of the concerns expressed by African-American thinkers at the time.

Historically, Williams offers new information about Bonhoeffer’s seminary friend Albert Franklin Fisher, the son of a prominent Baptist minister in Birmingham who became Bonhoeffer’s guide to this new world. The book also gives an evocative description of the Harlem Renaissance in its full radicality and rawness (similar to some of Marsh’s descriptions of the south). As in each of these books, there are places here where the historical understanding of Bonhoeffer’s immediate context and the issues he confronted falls short. Williams’s use of colonialization theory in particular sometimes leads him to make sweeping claims about the German church struggle and Bonhoeffer’s theological background. The ethnocentric theology of the German Christians, while it definitely has analogies in some aspects of American racism, included a complex mix of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and certain interpretations of Lutheran tradition that led to some distinctive challenges.

The strengths of all three books rest in the theological sections: Marsh’s tracing of the different influences on Bonhoeffer’s theology and where he took them; Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel in the exploration of the development of his pacifism; Williams’ discussion of how the larger context of the Harlem renaissance inspired both Bonhoeffer’s personal spirituality and broader ecumenism.

The other strength, especially in the books by Marsh and Williams, is the vivid portrait of the worlds in which Bonhoeffer wrote and lived: the travels to Spain and Italy, the time in New York, and the theological debates that shaped Bonhoeffer and his circles. Each author has made a serious attempt to go beyond Bethge–through new information, new interpretations of the documents and the history itself, and in the case of Nation, actually challenging Bethge’s version of the history. All three draw heavily on the lesser-known material that is now available in the new DBWE edition, including material that is less familiar to English-language readers. As one of the general editors of DBWE, I welcome this as the necessary step to bring Bonhoeffer scholarship to a new level.

There is important information in each of these works for historians to consider. Nonetheless, Chandler’s warning that theologians need to consider more recent historical literature remains true; in their historical sections these books reveal the inherent limitations of constructing a historical narrative primarily from within the DBWE opus.

Notes:

[1] Published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Jan 2003), 54:1, pp. 89-97.

 

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Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism,” 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference, Princeton Theological Seminary, June 15-18, 2014.

Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition

The connections and tensions between Karl Barth’s theological approach to Judaism, his stands on the Aryan paragraph in the early period of the German Kirchenkampf, and their greater implication for the entire period of Nazism and the Holocaust have been explored by theologians and historians alike. Barth is often compared unfavorably with Bonhoeffer on this point, primarily because of the different position he took in September 1933 as to whether the time had come to break with the German Evangelical Church, which at the its General Synod had just passed an Aryan paragraph that would apply to clergy. In a letter to Barth, Bonhoeffer urged such a break; Barth’s reply of September 11, 1933, urged caution at that particular moment, arguing that the best tactic was to fight from within (“we must be among the last actually to leave the sinking ship”). That position has been strongly criticized, particularly in Wolfgang Gerlach’s work on the Confessing Church, and has led to a general assumption that Bonhoeffer was clearer than Barth on this issue not only in the Kirchenkampf  but in his general political critique of Nazism. At the same time, the theological centrality of Israel in Barth’s thought made it foundational in his opposition to the German Christians and Nazism. Eberhard Busch, the dean of Barth scholars, as well as theologians like Mark Lindsay have long argued that Barth’s theological approach to Israel needs to be taken into account in any analysis and conclusions about his role between 1933-1945.

This issue was the theme for this year’s annual Barth conference at Princeton Theological Seminary. While the focus of many of the plenary and session papers was on Barth’s theology, there were several historical papers, including my own plenary remarks. Other plenary presentations included remarks by leading Barthians Eberhard Busch, Mark Lindsay, and George Hunsinger, and papers by Ellen Charry (Professor of Theology at Princeton), who has done much work in this area, as well as two leading Jewish scholars, David Novak (Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Toronto) and Peter Ochs (Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at The University of Virginia).

The result was a far-reaching discussion that covered a great deal of theological and historical territory. In my own paper I focused on Barth’s significance for the early postwar interfaith circles. Barth’s theology of Israel influenced several of the early interfaith pioneers of Jewish-Christian relations. People like Karl Thieme and John Oesterreicher began to incorporate this theology into their thought during the 1930s, and Barth was invited to attend the 1947 Seelisberg meeting of the International Conference of Christians and Jews (Barth was unable to attend). Barth’s student Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt brought Barthian theology to bear on postwar Jewish-Christian dialogues in Germany. In addition, Barth’s outspoken support for the war against Nazi Germany and his connections to Swiss refugee and German resistance groups (not only his Bonhoeffer connection, but his active support for the activities of Gertrud Staewen and the Kaufmann resistance circle, and the cover letter he signed with Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, Emil Brunner, and Paul Vogt for the Auschwitz Protocol, a 1944 document with details about the death camps that was sent to international leaders) led to postwar invitations to dialogue with Jewish groups.

Eberhard Busch traced Barth’s development both historically and theologically, noting that Barth was incorporating the theology of scholars like Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber during the 1920s; in turn German Jewish thinkers like Emil Bernhard Cohn and Leo Baeck read and engaged Barth in conversation. Even before 1933 Barth was critical of the strong anti-Judaism in German Protestant theology. His attack on völkisch theology was based on three points that were central in his own theology: the notion that Christianity constituted a completely new religion, the rejection of Judaism as a result, and the “orders of creation” theological understanding of God’s law. Busch argued that this led to a theological clarity about Judaism that went beyond that of Bonhoeffer.

David Novak offered an overview of some of the key elements of Barth’s theology that have opened the door to Jewish-Christian conversation, notably his understanding of the law and his emphasis on Christianity’s continuities with Israel. Novak observed that Barth demands that Jews address Christians precisely as Jews, which changes the conversation and makes it possible for Jewish thinkers to engage with Barth’s work in a deeper way. Peter Ochs explored Barth’s interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures and Judaism, noting both the ways in which a Christian (particularly a Christocentric) interpretation of these texts is necessarily supersessionist and yet because Barth affirms the Tanakh there are ways to engage. Nonetheless, the interpretation of these texts from within Judaism itself will always differ from the Christian approach, which references and interprets them retrospectively from the theological standpoint of the Christian gospels.

Ellen Charry offered a much more critical analysis of Barth’s understanding of Christianity, both in light of his Christology and particularly his interpretation of Romans. In viewing the Jews as a people essentially “elected for rejection,” she noted, Barth’s support for modern Judaism was grounded in the supersessionist notion that their existence served the church and the Christian understanding of salvation. Mark Lindsay, author of the recent Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology, acknowledged some of these elements in Barth’s thought, yet argued that because of the continuities he draws from Judaism to Christianity, there are opportunities for post-Holocaust theologians to engage with Barth.

There were several other conference papers of particular interest to historians, including a presentation on the Baptists responses to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particular the statements that emerged from the 1934 International Baptist Congress held in Berlin by Lee B. Spitzer (an American Baptist scholar in New Jersey); a study of Confessing Church pastor and postwar theologian Helmut Gollwitzer’s understanding of Judaism by W. Travis McMaken (who teaches religion at Lindenwood University); a paper on Hans-Joachim Schoeps by David Dessin (University of Antwerp); and an overview of Barth’s encounters with Judaism in America (Jessica DeCou, University of Basel). In the concluding conference remarks, George Hunsinger (Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton and director of the Barth Center there) stated that the influence of Barth’s theology has shaped Christian understandings of Judaism in a way that does not undo the damage of Christian antisemitism but opens the way for other conversations. The publication of the conference presentations is being planned.

 

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Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Historical Perspectives/Emerging Issues (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013),  Pp. xvi + 258,  ISBN 978-4514-6541-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The time has come, the editors said, for a synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s theology and witness. So Clifford Green and Guy Carter invited an international gathering of theologians, translators and historians for a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in November 2011. The papers from that meeting have now been published in this book. But since they were presumably prepared in advance, it is not clear how much resulted from this meeting. The reader is left to make his or her own synopsis.

greencarter-interpretingbonhoefferThe tone is of course laudatory, rather than critical. But at least these papers help to set the boundaries within which Bonhoeffer scholarship can flourish today, and thus exclude some of the more exaggerated theories. For example, in recent years, Bonhoeffer has been characterized as a revolutionary, an assassin and an American Evangelical. None of these authors was invited. On the other hand, it is also clear that the theologians and the historians are not always talking on the same wave-length. The latter’s approach is empirical, concrete and historical, whereas the former seem often to engage in highly theoretical, even metaphysical interpretations, which rarely touch down on the solid earth of Nazi Germany. So this book should help to encourage some cross-fertilization in the debates about Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

Victoria Barnett leads off for the historians, along with three other members of our CCHQ team. She has been the general editor of the English translations of the sixteen volumes of Bonhoeffer’s papers, but still feels that this is only a work-in-progress. And just because the epoch in which he lived is gone, so the challenge is to try and understand the church and faith which shaped him and his students. In the thousands of pages which survived–his biographer Bethge collected everything–it is easy to get lost in the forest and not to see the trees. His life and work remain fragmentary and unfinished. And, as he himself admitted, he was never completely clear about his motives. Barnett rightly states that, contrary to his later fame, Bonhoeffer was a marginal figure in the German Church and the Resistance Movement. For the most part, as he himself admitted, he was amongst those who were “silent witnesses to evil deeds.” His life was cruelly cut short at an early age. His theological enterprise was barely begun. Yet his contribution–at a time when European Christianity suffered drastic blows–was an authentic witness to a world come of age.

Doris Bergen takes up the question of why the churches made so few protests against the Nazis’ crimes. Their silence in face of the Nazi persecutions and outrages has been a charge frequently leveled against Christianity. The question, she thinks, is inadequate. It is not the silence, but the noisy and enthusiastic support for the Nazi regime which concerns her most. Much more pertinent would be to question why the churches so readily backed the Nazi state. Why did they engage in pro-Nazi ceremonies, lend their religious support to Hitler’s wars of aggression, indulge in antisemitic propaganda, and even expel Jewish-Christian members from their parishes? She gives numerous and shocking examples of how the majority of churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, subordinated or distorted Christian teachings in order to provide ringing and voluntary endorsements as loyal Germans, and genuine Nazis. This was the very opposite of silence. She clearly does not have much time for those who were later to argue that churchmen were intimidated by the ruthless police state tactics of the regime, and were fearful lest they be taken off to be imprisoned in one or other concentration camp. As she rightly points out, silence or martyrdom were not the hallmarks of the majority of German Christians, though all honour is due to those who chose this latter path. But she might have considered more fully the principal reason for what seems to us now as widespread apostasy. In my view, the root cause lies in the churches’ shattering loss of credibility in the years after 1918 when their strident preaching of an imminent German victory with God’s blessing was proved false, and their proclamation of God’s beneficence had to come to terms with the millions of corpses lying in Flanders Fields. In the subsequent years, the attempt to regain the allegiance of those they had so grievously misled was their principal concern. Enthusiastic support for a popular political movement seemed to be the avenue to make the church relevant again. For Catholics, who had for so long been regarded as second-class citizens, the opportunity to upgrade their status by joining the Nazi bandwagon seemed to secure their institutional position in the wider society. Protestants too were eager to celebrate their national loyalties and to swallow their reservations about the tactics employed by their new rulers. Their complicity in the regime’s crimes cannot be doubted, even if many of them deluded themselves as to its true nature or intentions. The silence of the churches after 1945 was all the more obvious when, for the most part, they showed no remorse or repentance.

Bob Ericksen echoes the same themes in his short chapter, in which he too strongly criticizes the readiness of so many church people to concur with Nazism, including the majority of the Confessing Church, at least on national grounds. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few pastors of his generation who differed from the majority. This only led to his isolation both during his life, and even more so afterwards. For many years after 1945 the majority of nationally-minded churchmen took exception to his political or to his theological views, or to both. It was at least twenty years before the impact of his “new theology” and the prodigious efforts of his biographer, Eberhard Bethge, paid off. Ericksen has more recently written extensively about the complicity of both the pastors and the professors in serving the Nazi regime, mainly for nationalistic reasons. In this essay he correctly criticizes the churches’ readiness to praise Hitler’s brutal imposition of repressive measures, especially against the Jews, for whom churchmen showed relatively little or no empathy, and all too readily accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews were a threat to German values. Their predisposition to anti-Judaic theological biases rendered them, even Bonhoeffer, incapable of changing to a much more positive evaluation of their Jewish heritage.

Matthew Hockenos gives an excellent summary of how the Protestant churches eventually came to terms with this deficient legacy. He rightly questions the extent to which Bonhoeffer himself changed his theology about the Jews, since we lack any substantial evidence after his very tradition-bound statement of supersessionist theology from 1933. Hockenos points out that the leaders of the Evangelical Church after 1945 were all survivors of the Confessing Church struggle, and still politically and theologically nationalistic. When it came to addressing the church’ share of responsibility for the policies of the Third Reich, these leaders “demonstrated more trepidation than courage, more equivocation than clarity, and more obstruction than determination.” Most of them were shocked by Bonhoeffer’s readiness to take part in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and regarded him as a national traitor not a Christian martyr. They stressed the post-war indignities and sufferings of their own people at the hands of the occupying powers, rather than the far greater sufferings their countrymen had imposed on so many other nations and peoples. It took years before Bonhoeffer’s reforming ideas could take hold. Similarly, years were to pass before a new climate of repentance for Christian prejudice against the Jews could emerge. Hockenos provides a notable if brief description of the slow and often reluctant process of “metanoia” in the Evangelical Churches on the subject of attitudes towards the Jews, and contrasts this with the much more vibrant contributions of such Catholics as John Oesterreicher and Gertrud Luckner, whose pioneer efforts were to find fruition in the Second Vatican Council. But thanks to Bonhoeffer’s biographer, Eberhard Bethge, the same route was finally taken by the German Protestants too.

Keith Clements’ fine contribution focuses on Bonhoeffer’s postwar reception in Britain, which was much more friendly and sympathetic than in his homeland. This was largely due to the friendships he had established with the ecumenically-minded community during his earlier visits to England. Principally it was the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, with whom Bonhoeffer had collaborated in the Life and Work Movement, and who warmly welcomed him on his arrival to look after the German-speaking churches in London. Bell found Bonhoeffer a most valuable source of information about the German Evangelical Church, and resolutely backed the Confessing Church in its struggle to block the Nazi plans. It was also Bell, who most courageously defied public opinion and organized the first memorial service for Bonhoeffer–a dead German–in a large London church in July 1945. So too Bonhoeffer found an ally in Joe Oldham, one of the chief architects of the future World Council of Churches, and in Ronald Gregor Smith, the Editor of the Student Christian Movement Press, which was the first to publish Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in English translation. Its impact caused sensational reactions in the early 1950s. All of these men had a deep sense of the crisis facing Western Civilization, and the need for new visions, not just for the church, but for the world and humanity. Bonhoeffer’s message from his prison cell exactly matched their hopes, and gave a pragmatic concreteness to their witness in those years.

Other essays in this collection explore the impact of Bonhoeffer’s theology in such far distant societies as Japan and Brazil, thus giving a world-wide dimension to his legacy. Of course, this global appearance of his ideas and life-story owed much to the successes of his translators, especially into English. Several papers in this book show how this task was undertaken, and how the translators had to wrestle with Bonhoeffer’s cultivated, upper-class, but somewhat dated German, and to find up-to-date and more colloquial expressions in English for his much wider audiences. A very good instance of their dilemmas comes in trying to translate the well-known poem Christen und Heiden. They were also perplexed by Bonhoeffer’s continual use of masculine pronouns for “God” or “Man”, and wondered how appropriate it would be to turn these gendered expressions into some more modern form of inclusive language. It was a delicate course to steer between the Scylla of Bonhoeffer the proto-feminist and the Charybdis of Bonhoeffer the hopeless chauvinist.

The theologians’ contributions focus very largely on Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “public ministry” and are drawn from close studies of his Ethics. As the epoch of European-centered Christianity is increasingly replaced by global diversification, and as his homeland Germany, like other parts of historic Christian Europe, becomes more and more pluralistic in its religious allegiances, so Bonhoeffer’s insights will undoubtedly continue to be of value in guiding us forward in fashioning new forms of discipleship for the years ahead.

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Conference Report: Reassessing Contemporary Church History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-27, 2013

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Conference Report: Reassessing Contemporary Church History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-27, 2013

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

This three-day conference brought twenty scholars from Canada, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany to the campus of the University of British Columbia on the shores of Vancouver Bay to take stock of the current state of German church history in the 20th century, plot out the future direction for the new electronic journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly and to honor the eighty-three year old Anglo-Canadian scholar and pioneer in the field, John Conway.

The keynote address from Thursday evening, “The Future of World Christianity” was delivered by Mark Noll, Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. In his hour-long presentation, Noll contrasted the situation of Christianity in the Western and non-Western worlds for the years 1910 and 2010. Christianity has exploded numerically in Africa, Asia and Latin America, eclipsing its presence in what had at just a century earlier had been its European heartland. Noll began by highlighting the dramatic scope of recent changes. In 1970, there had been no legally open churches in China in 1970;  China may now have more active believers attending church regularly than does Europe.  Noll  argued that it was raw life-and-death struggles of poverty, disease, tribal warfare, social dislocation, and economic transformation that help explain this surge in religiosity outside of the western world.  He urged historians of Christianity to learn more about the work of African prophet-evangelists of the early 20th century like William Wadé Harris and Simon Kimbangu instead of focusing exclusively on better-known western theologians and churchmen.

Friday’s proceedings were divided into three distinct panels. The first, “The Changing Historiography of the Church Struggle, 1945 – 2013” highlighted the changing hermeneutics, value-systems, theological categories and historical methodologies that have been employed to instill meaning into the struggles of the churches against the National Socialist state. Mark Edward Ruff’s paper, “The Reception of John Conway’s, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches” analyzed why Conway’s pioneering work evoked profoundly different reactions in the English-speaking world and in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Anglo-American world, it garnered praise; in Germany, it was largely met with criticism or indifference. Ruff argued that the very factors that ensured its mostly positive appraisals in the United States guaranteed its harvest of criticism and silence in Germany from those professional historians or churchmen charged with compiling the history of the churches under Nazi rule. Three dynamics contributed to the divided response to the work of a practicing Anglican – a confessional divide, a national divide and a methodological divide. Reflecting ongoing confessional fissures, non-Catholic politicians, churchmen, journalists, playwrights and scholars had shown a consistent willingness to enter into or launch public discussions about the Catholic past in the Third Reich, while their Roman Catholic counterparts in the press, ecclesia, intelligensia and academy rarely, if ever, spoke out openly about the Protestant past.  Negative reviews in Germany, moreover, reflected a heightened sensitivity to criticism not just from non-Catholics but from the Anglo-Saxon world, from where the majority of the non-German critical accounts of the recent past had come. And finally, Conway’s German critics assailed him for what they regarded as deficient methodologies, and in particular, his unwillingness to show the necessary empathy for his subjects and to employ what can be described as a Quellenpositivismus and refrain from making larger moral and historical judgments not born directly out of the sources he used.

Ruff’s account of the confessional dynamics in the German historical profession of the 1960s set the stage for Robert Ericksen’s paper, “Church Historians, “Profane” Historians, and our Odyssey Since Wilhelm Niemöller.” Wilhelm Niemöller was the younger brother to Martin Niemöller, an important leader of the Confessing Church during the Nazi era and a widely known prisoner of the regime after his arrest in 1937. Martin went on to serve in various church leadership positions after 1945, while Wilhelm emerged as the most important historian of the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or “Church Struggle,” in the first postwar decades. He quite consciously styled himself a “church historian,” separating himself from those historians designated “profane” in the German usage. In the 1960s he wrote, “It almost seems as if one could be satisfied with the rather shortsighted conclusion that church history and ‘profane’ history do not differ from one another.” Ericksen argued that Wilhelm Niemöller, in his effort to bring his faith to the task of writing history, distorted the history of the German Protestant Church under Hitler. He described the history of the Confessing Church, representing approximately 20% of Protestants, as if it were the history of the entire church. He also ignored those within the Confessing Church who supported Adolf Hitler and those who shared the antisemitic prejudices of the regime. Finally, Wilhelm Niemöller ignored the fact that both he and Martin had voted for the Nazi Party, and that he had joined the Party as early as 1923. Ericksen concluded by insisting that historians of churches must work as “profane” or secular historians, if they are to create a more usable and reliable history.

Manfred Gailus’ paper,  “Ist die “Aufarbeitung” der NS-Zeit beendet? Anmerkungen zur kirchlichen Erinnerungskultur seit der Wende von 1989/90,” examined how the Protestant church dealt with its own past from the Third Reich.  Focusing on the state church of Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische-Oberlausitz (EKBO), Gailus focused on how Bishop Wolfgang Huber, one of the leaders of the Protestant church, practiced a politics of the past that can be regarded as representative for the Protestant church as a whole. In November 2002, Huber delivered a  committed and self-critical sermon for the annual  „day of repentance,“ a sermon which he dedicated to the memory of those Christians of Jewish heritage who had suffered and died in the Third Reich. This sermon can be regarded as a sign of Huber’s committed engagement with the past, one comparable with his efforts to compensate church slave laborers from the Second World War.  But his subsequent efforts to come to terms with the past began to flag almost immediately thereafter. In 2005, he chose to take up the theme of the „church and the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s“ – and not the church struggle of the 1930s – as the major theme for the fiftieth anniversary of the „Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.“ He also stayed out of the longstanding debates about the future of the Martin-Luther-Memorial- Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a church that had been built during the Third Reich, decorated with sundry Nazi symbols and now enjoyed the protective status as a „historical landmark.“  The church under Huber, Gailus concluded, has certainly come a long way forward in its approach to the Nazi past but still lags behind the standards set not only by professional historians but by the larger public. It remains in urgent need of powerful initiatives to kick-start its reassessment of the past.

The second panel, „Theology, Theological Changes and the Ecumenical Movement“ brought to the table the fruits of recent research. Victoria Barnett’s paper, “Track Two Diplomacy, 1933-1939: International Responses from Catholics, Jews, and Ecumenical Protestants to Events in Nazi Germany,” showed how events that unfolded in Nazi Germany and Europe between 1933 – 1939 sparked a number of significant and ongoing initiatives among international religious leaders. This was particularly true of religious bodies whose scope was international and touched on ecumenical or interfaith issues; such bodies included the Holy See in Rome, ecumenical offices in Geneva and New York, and the conferences of Christians and Jews in the UK and the United States.  Such initiatives were also driven by individual Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were committed to fighting against National Socialism and helping its victims.  Many of these individuals, Barnett pointed out, became involved early in refugee-related issues.  Other issues of common concern included the ideological and political pressures on both Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany and the desire to prevent another European war.  After the war began, many of these same circles had contacts with different German resistance circles, and some of these leaders wrote “think pieces” on the necessary moral foundations for a postwar peace.  Although the Catholics and Protestants involved in these activities represented a distinct minority within their respective churches, an examination of their interactions, including their contacts with representatives of Jewish organizations, offers a much fuller picture of the international religious responses to Nazism and show the extent of interreligious communication even before 1939 as an attempt at “track two diplomacy.”

Matthew Hockenos’ paper “‘Blessed are the Peacemakers, for They Shall be called Sons of God’: Martin Niemöller’s Embrace of Pacifism, 1945-55”  focused on the theological transformations in the decade from 1945 to 1955 for the former Confessing Church leader and hero, Martin Niemöller. Niemöller, Hockenos showed, jettisoned the ZweiReicheLehre (Doctrine of Two Kingdoms) and championed a political role for the Church.  He abandoned German nationalism and became a leader of the ecumenical movement. He denounced war and the remilitarization of Germany and gradually came to adopt pacifism. Hockenos, however, made clear that Niemöller’s embrace of pacifism did not occur over night, as Niemöller had implied in his own account of his meeting with the German scientist Dr. Otto Hahn. It was a gradual process that one can trace from the time of his liberation to 1955. It appears to have been the result of a number of factors and events. These included including his own reflection on the destructiveness of WWII and the imminent danger that the Cold War posed to Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, contact with ecumenical-minded church leaders abroad, and the deliberate efforts of pacifists in the United States and in Europe to convince Niemöller that the only position a true Christian could take on war was to be against because it was inimical to the message of Christ.  From 1954 on Niemöller made it his primary goal to expand the circle of pacifists person by person through education and example. Just as his pacifist colleagues had slowly reeled him in through conversations and dialogue, he traveled the globe, frequently visiting Communist nations, preaching the way of non-violence and extolling the teachings and example of Mahatma Gandhi.

Wilhelm Damberg’s paper, „Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Theologie nach dem Konzil:  J.B. Metz, die politische Theologie und die Würzburger Synode (1971-1975),” drew the attention of conference participants to a major theological paradigm shift in how the Roman Catholic Church in Germany came to terms with its past under National Socialism. Ironically, Damberg noted, this seismic shift has largely remained unknown to historians. It took place during the Würzburg Synod of 1971 to 1975, which was charged with implementing the resolutions and decrees of the Second Vatican Council in Germany. The central document for these changes was one bearing the name „Our Hope: A Commitment to Faith in our time.“ It prepared by the renowned German theologian, Johann Baptist Metz, and bore the hallmarks of Metz’s own so-called „Political Theology.“ This document met with the overwhelming approval of the synod.  Metz shaped its content around the concept of a collective „examination of conscience,“ which confessed the guilt and failure of „a sinful church“ particularly towards the Jews of the Third Reich. In the formal debates about this document, disagreements broke out about the appropriate way to understand history. Metz defended himself against criticism of his historical judgments by insisting that historical consciousness and actual reconstructions of the past remained two separate things. For the church of the present, it was the former that matter. Metz, Damberg argued, was deconstructing historical narratives that Metz himself saw as being in direct opposition to the epochal theological change of „theology after Auschwitz.“

The third panel on Friday, “Expanding the Borders: Inter and Intra-National, Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Narratives” pointed out new directions for historical research. Thomas Großbölting led off with his paper„‚Kirchenkampf gibt es immer‘: Memory Politics as a Point of Reference for an inner-ecclesiastical Counter-culture.” Großbölting made his focus those moments in the 1960s and 1970s when special groups within the churches and individual Christians referred to the Nazi past.  How, he asked, did they draw connections between themselves and the church struggle from the 1930s?  He argued that the silence of the 1950s regarding the Nazi past was replaced in the second half of the 1960s by greater openness – and even bluntness. For the new social movements and special interest groups within the churches, in particular,  the politics of remembrance became a major point of orientation and mobilization. Organizations as disparate as Una voce, Unum et semper, the confessional movement “No other gospel”, the German branch of Opus Dei and “Christians for socialism” all sought to find new ways of living the personal faith and to radicalize the Christian Gospel.  For conservatives, radicalization meant bring the Christian Gospel back to its roots; for left-wingers, it meant rediscovering the communist ideals of the early church. Großbölting, in turn, showed how such groups like Catholic student parishes and Protestant confessional movements referred to the Nazi-past in general and to the Church struggle, in particular, as a way to realize these aims.  In spite of the enormous attention they found from the media at the end of the 1960s, the impact of these movements remained limited. The Protestant counter-movement took up the battle cry, “Kirche muss Kirche bleiben” –Church must remain the Church.” But even these stirring words, Großbölting concluded, never found much resonance among the ordinary members of the Protestant and the Catholic Church.

In his paper, “Conflict and Post-Conflict Representations: Autobiographical Writings of German Theologians after 1945,” Björn Krondorfer showed how the questions of gender, and male gender in particular, and of retrospective historical representatives, are central to our analyses of the postwar church. Krondorfer argued that gendered roles and identifications allowed German men in institutions like the church to adjust to a new environment after 1945. His paper critically analyzed the autobiographies of two Protestant German male theologians published after 1945, and in particular, those of  Walter Künneth ( Lebensführungen: Der Wahrheit verpflichtet; 1979) and Helmut Thielicke (Zu Gast auf einem schönen Stern; 1984.) Realizing that their autobiographical act of remembering placed them into a morally and politically charged historical context, these two theologians carefully crafted their memoirs, employing apologetic and eluding strategies when accounting for their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The theme of “German suffering” often looms largely in these memoirs, while Jews are mostly absent; hence, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator are constantly blurred. As “helpless victims,” these men might run the risk of being effeminized, as “acting subjects” they might run the risk of being accused of moral failure. Versions of this mental split, Krondorfer argued, are to be found in almost all post-1945 autobiographies of German male theologians.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s paper, “Real-Time Narrative Responses to Nazism: March/ April 1933 in Germany and Rome” focused on the Catholic diplomatic response to the earliest antisemitic measures of the Nazis. On April 1, the Nazis ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses, department stores, lawyers and physicians on April 1, 1933, the first centrally directed action by the National Socialists against Jews after the Seizure of Power.  The Civil Service Law of 7 April was the first to contain the so-called “Aryan Paragraph,” stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service.  Brown-Fleming Using drew upon the recently-released records of the Vatican nunciature in Munich and Berlin during the tenure of Pope Pius XI. She discussed the exchanges between Pope Pius XI, then-Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII, 1939-1958), his diplomat in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, German bishops, and ordinary Catholics and Jews. The elections of March 5, 1933, she argued, revealed a dissonance between the Nazi party, Catholic Center Party voters, and Catholics who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. That dissonance, she concluded, affected the response of the Vatican Secretariat of State and German bishops to the first anti-Jewish laws in April 1933 in ways that still need to be further explored.

The third day of the conference was devoted to a discussion of the future direction of the electronic journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This journal had its origins in the electronic brainchild of John Conway, what he upon his retirement from the University of British Columbia in 1995, modestly called “The Newsletter.”  This was an eclectic mixture of book reviews and notices about events dealing with contemporary international and ecumenical church history. A recipient of a Humboldt Research fellowship in 1963-4 and a founding member of the Scholars’ Conference on the German Church and the Holocaust in 1970, Conway was best known for his masterwork from 1968, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945, the first extensive history in English of the National Socialists’ campaign against the German churches and the responses of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. He developed this free monthly electronic newsletter to provide a speedier flow of information on new publications on the history of the churches in the 20th century. Traditional quarterly journals were far too slow in informing readers of new publications and works in progress. In addition, they tended to reach only specialized academic audiences – and not the lay and religious audiences just as keenly interested in the highly charged topic of the churches’ conduct during the Nazi era such as the conduct of Pope Pius XII and the responses of the churches to the Holocaust.  Sent out by email to a list-serve of subscribers, Conway’s newsletter went by the name of the Association of Contemporary Church Historians (ACCH), or Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler.

In 2009, Conway turned over the helm of the Newsletter to an editorial board, which now includes sixteen theologians and historians based in Germany, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. The editorial board members, almost all of whom were gathered in Vancouver, discussed future directions for the journal, and in particular, how to further transatlantic cooperation. Kyle Jantzen, who almost single-handedly engineered the journal’s technical transformation from a newsletter sent out by an email list-serve to a web-based presence, gave an overview of the journal’s new features and the number of hits recent issues and articles have been receiving. Members also discussed the possibility of developing a continuously updated on-line data base that will compile the new publications in the field – journal articles, articles in edited volumes, edited volumes and monograph – from both sides of the Atlantic.

Last and most significantly, the concluding evening of the conference honored the pioneering work of John Conway, who has distinguished himself not only through his scholarly work but in his tireless efforts to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and nations. Doris Bergen, Robert Ericksen, Steven Schroeder, Kyle Jantzen, and Gerhard Besier offered formal tributes in the course of Saturday evening.

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Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

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 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940

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

Review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 15 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 726 pp. ISBN 978-8006-9815-7.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In October 1937 the Gestapo ordered the closure of the Preachers Seminary for Confessing Church ordinands at Finkenwalde, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer had led for two and a half years. He now began a critical period of his life and ministry which was marked by much self-doubt and questioning about where his true discipleship lay. The letters, bible studies and essays contained in this volume give a vivid picture of his personal problems and choices, culminating in his visit to the United States in June-July 1939, but also in his well-known decision to return to Germany without delay to share his country’s fate since war looked inevitably close.

The central point of interest in this volume can be seen in the very full record of Bonhoeffer’s brief stay in New York, along with the evident disappointment of his American hosts, who thought they were offering him a valuable asylum from Europe’s turmoil. Essentially this visit revealed to Bonhoeffer the strength of his attachment to his home country and to the group of seminarians he had been training. It was this attachment which drew him back to Germany only weeks before the outbreak of hostilities. It was a decision he never regretted, even though the consequences for his career were to be so fateful. These dilemmas were to be well illustrated, particularly in the circular letters which he wrote to the now dispersed seminarians, most of whom were soon to be called up for military service, and of whom a horrendously large proportion were to lose their lives. By such means Bonhoeffer tried to maintain their theological education underground, which the Gestapo was seeking to stamp out. Despite this harassment, Bonhoeffer firmly upheld his theological stance of resolute opposition to any measures designed to enforce obedience to the Nazi ideology.

It is however notable that this concentration of effort involved a reticence about the traumatic political events of those years, from the seizure of Austria, the Munich crisis of September 1938, the notorious pogrom against Germany’s Jews in November, and the various steps which led to the outbreak of war in September 1939. It is not clear from the documents here printed whether this abstention from political comment was due to the heavy hand of Nazi intimidation and censorship, or whether Bonhoeffer was giving all his concentration to the pastoral and counselling needs of his students. He certainly undertook numerous visits to see them both before his American visit and after, until forbidden by the Gestapo to travel to Berlin and the surrounding districts of Brandenburg. Yet, as the editor of the English edition, Victoria Barnett, rightly points out, this restraint, whether self-imposed or indicative of his precarious political situation, serves as a corrective to any easy assumptions that Bonhoeffer was always in the forefront of resistance to Nazism or loudly protested its increasingly oppressive measures. For example, the only sign of his referring to the outbursts of violence against the Jews in 1938 was a reference to the biblical passages which “lead deeply into prayer.”

By the beginning of 1939, his personal dilemmas grew more acute. He could foresee that, at the age of thirty-three, he would likely be called up for military service, which he was determined to avoid. So in April he paid a quick visit to London, meeting with various leaders of the ecumenical movement, including Reinhold Niebuhr, who vigourously pressed him to return to New York and to the Union Theological Seminary so that he could undertake a number of engagements for both the church and university. Nieburhr’s advocacy pulled all the rights strings. So Bonhoeffer sailed across the Atlantic, having delegated his responsibilities at home to a chosen group of pupils.

Much of his subsequent correspondence during the crucial month of June 1939, both to his German relatives and partners, as well as to his American contacts, is by now well known and is often quoted. But the full texts show that Bonhoeffer’s rejection of the American offers was not in any way due to an aversion to the church situation in the United States. Indeed his insightful comments on the American churches during his brief stay show that he was much more appreciative of their situation than he had been during his earlier visit in 1931. The text of his thirty-page essay on “Protestantism without Reformation” commenting with remarkable perception on the state of the United States Protestant churches, which was composed during the final days of his stay, is here reprinted in full.

There is however no reason to question the version that it was the intensity of his attachment to Germany and to his coterie of friends there which drew him back, even though as he admitted: “in all my decisions, I am never completely clear about my motives. Is that a lack of clarity, inner dishonesty, or is it a sign that we are led beyond that which we can discern, or is it both?” The clearest statement of his position is contained in his letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, outlining the terrible alternatives facing Christians in Germany. “I know which of these alternatives I must choose: but I cannot make that choice in security”.

Bonhoeffer’ return to Germany was followed almost immediately by Hitler’s ruthless aggression against Poland. The efforts of church leaders, including the Pope, to prevent the outbreak of hostilities had proved fruitless. But, even thereafter, during the period of the so-called “phoney war,” several of Bonhoeffer’s close associates in the ecumenical movement still tried to find some basis on which peace might be restored. But Bonhoeffer himself no longer indulged in such illusions. Instead he was to become persuaded that the only way ahead lay in the forcible overthrow of Hitler’s regime. Needless to say, no surviving documents attest to this dramatic change from his earlier fervent advocacy of pacifism. The present volume therefore gives no hints, which are only spelled out in the subsequent and final volume dedicated to “Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940-1945.”

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Conference Report: Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics

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

Conference Report: “Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, November 13-15, 2011.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition

This conference was an unusual symbiosis of two longstanding cooperative international projects: the biennial Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics and the English publication of the 16-volume Bonhoeffer Works. With the imminent conclusion of the Bonhoeffer Works series (two volumes have yet to appear: volume 11 will be published next spring; volume 14 will appear in early 2013) the combination of these two events was a logical move. The conference in New York provided a retrospective of Bonhoeffer’s influence in the theological world in recent decades as well as a look at the promising future of Bonhoeffer scholarship.

The opening Bonhoeffer Lecture in Public Ethics was held by Sam Wells, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and set the tone for the predominantly theological reflections of the first day, which explored Bonhoeffer’s international interpretation by theologians and church activists as well as some new directions in the scholarship. Bishop Emeritus Wolfgang Huber of Germany, a Bonhoeffer scholar in his own right and the chair of the editorial board of the German Bonhoeffer Werke, offered an analysis of Bonhoeffer’s legacy after 1945 in the Federal and German Democratic Republics as well as in unified Germany after 1990. An international panel of Bonhoeffer scholars from South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil and Japan explored the different issues that have influenced the interpretation of the Bonhoeffer legacy in those countries. The afternoon presentations included a panel on “new research related to Bonhoeffer and public life,” with panelists exploring the influences of Harlem Renaissance literature and theology on Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought and activism (these were strong influences on Bonhoeffer during his fellowship year at Union from 1930-31), the theological continuities between Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship and his later Ethics manuscripts, and the development and consequences of Bonhoeffer’s concept of the “church for others.” The day concluded with an analysis of the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s Christology, which is such a central motif throughout this theological writings, can be understood in today’s pluralistic societies.

The second day was devoted to celebrating the publication of the Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, and speakers continued to explore his historical and theological context. Some background about the content and publication history of this series is in order. (Full disclosure: I have served since 2004 as general editor of the new English Edition, having edited volumes 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. I also worked as associate general editor on volume 6 [Ethics] and served both as volume editor and one of the translators on the recently published volume 15. Wayne Floyd, who resigned as general editor in 2004, edited volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9; the third general editor, Barbara Wojhoski, is a professional copyeditor who joined the project in 2004 and has overseen the copyediting and production phases since then. This arrangement means that I’ve overseen the work on the more historical volumes, although even these volumes contain a great deal of theological material.)

The German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke consists of 16 annotated volumes (plus a 17th index volume). The first eight volumes are his theological writings (Creation and FallDiscipleship, etc.) plus one volume of his fiction; the last eight volumes are arranged chronologically and contain his correspondence and some correspondence by others, university lectures, bible studies, sermons and various other documents from his life between 1918 and 1945. Much of the material in these last eight volumes has either never been translated into English or has appeared only in abridged form.

In 1990 the English Language Section of the International Bonhoeffer Society signed an agreement with the German Bonhoeffer Society and Augsburg Fortress Press for the translation and publication of the German volumes. The translations have been undertaken by a team of translators—some of them native German speakers, some of them Bonhoeffer experts, and some of them professional translators. Each volume was assigned to an individual editor who worked with the translator(s) for that volume and upon completion sent it along to the series general editor for review before publication. As part of the agreement with the German Bonhoeffer Society, the German editors of the respective volumes reviewed and commented on the translation.

Hence, the approaching conclusion of Bonhoeffer Works English Edition marks over 20 years of collaborative work by an international team. If the discussions at the New York conference are any indication, this body of work will open new avenues for research about both his theological and his historical legacy. Bonhoeffer interpretation to date has generally fallen into one of these two categories, with relatively few works that masterfully combine the two narratives (the Bethge biography, I think, is one such success).

Bonhoeffer himself was one of the most brilliant and provocative theologians of his generation. He cannot be understood without an understanding of his theological training, the influence of thinkers like Karl Barth, and the larger theological conversations—notably in the context of the Church Struggle and the international ecumenical movement—in which he was a key participant. At the same time, the historical locus of his life and work in Nazi Germany and at the heart of the German Church Struggle—and naturally his role in the German resistance and his execution by the Nazi regime—means that he has always been a figure of great interest to historians.

These very different aspects of his life and thought make him an unusually complex figure, and this is a challenge both to the theologians and the historians. Hence many of us found it particularly important at this conference that participants could hear from both disciplines and I believe that the second day, devoted to the series, successfully highlighted many of the important theological and historical issues. I introduced the day with some remarks about the series, its potential contribution to the field, and the research areas that still remain. This was followed by a panel of seven of the translators who have worked on the series, discussing the particular translation issues that arose in trying to convey the history, the theology, and the person of Bonhoeffer. A paper by the German project liaison Hans Pfeifer explored “the impact of translation on cultural elements in theology,” giving the German perspective on these challenges. An afternoon panel featuring Union Seminary professor Gary Dorrien and several editors of this newsletter (Doris Bergen, Andrew Chandler, Robert Ericksen, and Matthew Hockenos) discussed Bonhoeffer’s place on the historical landscape. The day concluded with a summary of Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions—with some significant new insights for further research—by Clifford Green, executive director of the Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and Michael DeJonge, author of a forthcoming book on the theological interaction between Bonhoeffer and Barth.

The conference—particularly the contributions by younger scholars—illustrated that there is still much to do, both in understanding the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology and in situating him in the history of his era and his church. The new English edition of the Bonhoeffer Works offers the big picture as well as all the minute details. The theological works in the first eight volumes and the theological/historical final eight volumes inform each other, because they will enable future scholars to trace the emergence of Bonhoeffer’s theology, follow its development throughout his life, and better understand the impact of the times in which he lived and wrote.

 

 

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Review of Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Review of Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), ISBN: 978-3525550083.

By Victoria Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The individuals in Nazi Germany who acted with moral clarity, simple decency, and straightforward courage are in such short supply that they are worthy not only of honor but of serious study. As we know all too well, between 1933 and 1945 the vast majority of German citizens lived their lives in the grey zones of compromise, silence, and complicity. Those who resisted were outsiders in virtually every respect, and they remained so after 1945, when most Germans were quite uncomfortable with those in their midst who had opposed and resisted Nazism or been its victims. And by the time people became eager to uncover these stories, many of the traces had become buried.

Elisabeth Schmitz is a poignant and powerful example of one such individual. In 1999 a short study by one of her students, Dietgard Meyer, appeared as an appendix in Katharina Staritz, 1903-1953. Mit einem Exkurs Elisabeth Schmitz (Neukirchener, 1999). The 1999 essay included the startling discovery that Schmitz (not the Berlin social worker Marga Meusel) was the author of the 23-page memorandum, “Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier,” submitted to the September 1935 Prussian Confessing Church synod in Berlin-Steglitz. Meyer’s portrait of Schmitz proved that she had been one of the rare Germans who had consistently and at great personal cost chosen to stand by their Jewish neighbors.

As Gailus notes in this new biography, several historians were already looking more closely at the history of the memorandum; the historian Hartmut Ludwig had already confirmed that Schmitz was indeed the author. It was Gailus, however, who began to compile and document a much more comprehensive picture of Schmitz’s activities during the Third Reich and the subsequent historiography that had omitted her. The author of several fine studies on the Kirchenkampf, Gailus organized a 2007 conference in Berlin on Schmitz’s life and work; papers from this conference were published as Elisabeth Schmitz und ihre Denkschrift gegen die Judenverfolgung. Konturen einer vergessenen Biografie (1893-1977). Gailus also served as the key consultant for the film Elisabeth of Berlin produced by U. S. filmmaker Steve Martin, who produced the documentary several years ago on Robert Ericksen’s work Theologians under Hitler; both films are available from Vital Visions (www.vitalvisions.org).

Gailus has now written a biography of Schmitz that does justice both to her courage and to the troubling questions that her story raises about how historical narratives are created. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this biography is its dual narrative, which combines the story of a remarkably courageous and self-effacing woman with what Gailus calls the “Erinnerungskultur”—the culture in which the narratives of memory in postwar Germany distorted the truth and obscured those individuals who had actually spoken it during the Nazi era.

As Gailus shows us, Schmitz was an Aussenseiterin in a number of ways, both before and after 1945. She was a trained historian (she did her doctoral work under Friedrich Meinecke), Confessing Church member, and teacher at a girls’ Lyceum. Her 1935 memorandum, written shortly before the passage of the Nuremberg laws, was a painfully detailed account of what everyday life for German Jews had become and a devastating indictment of what had happened to German society. But it was directed particularly at Confessing Church leaders. “The Germans have a new god,” she wrote, “which is race.” Schmitz wrote of her hope that the Confessing Church at the Steglitz synod would speak out, “late, much too late, but nonetheless better too late than not at all … Because for the church this does not concern a tragedy that is unfolding but a sin of our people, and because we are members of this people and responsible before God for this our people, it is our sin.” She subsequently added a postscript to the memorandum after the passage of the Nuremberg laws. In addition to sending it to the synod, Schmitz personally made about 200 copies of the memorandum and circulated them among friends and people whom she hoped would have influence.

For years the author of this memorandum was believed to be Marga Meusel, a Berlin church social worker who had written another memorandum about the Confessing Church’s responsibility for its “non-Aryan” members that was submitted to the Augsburg Confessing synod in October 1934. It was, I think, an honest mistake for many of us. Copies of both documents were in the same file folder in the Günther Harder collection of Kirchenkampf documents in the Berlin Evangelische Zentralarchiv, and because Meusel’s name was written on the one memorandum (and there was no name on the other) most historians concluded that Meusel was also the author of “Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier” – even though a February 1947 affidavit signed by Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling had actually confirmed Schmitz as the author (a copy of the affidavit was published in Meyer’s 1999 essay). But that affidavit wasn’t in an archive, but in Schmitz’s private papers—and Schmitz, as Manfred Gailus shows, was not a self-promoter. In 1948 Wilhelm Niemoeller attributed the Steglitz memorandum to Meusel, and in the years to follow the error was repeated wherever the memo was discussed (I repeated the error in my discussion of the memorandum in For the Soul of the People).

But the story is more complicated, because as Mir aber zerriss es das Herz shows, Schmitz did far more than write the one memorandum. From the beginning to the end, she tried to help Jewish friends and colleagues and convince her church to speak out in protest. In the summer of 1933 she wrote and then met with Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, hoping to move him to speak out about the persecution of the Jews. (Her summary of his reply in an Aktennotiz in the Bethel archives begins: “For the time being, only work in silence possible.”) In the years that followed she sought out and wrote many of the leading figures in the Confessing Church—all with the hope that she could convince the Confessing Church to take a clear stand. After the November 1938 pogroms, she wrote an impassioned letter to Helmut Gollwitzer, Martin Niemoeller’s successor at the Annenkirche in Dahlem, urging him to preach openly about what had happened and to include the German Jews in the prayers of the congregation. As Wolfgang Gerlach noted in And the Witnesses were Silent, Gollwitzer’s sermon was one of the few in the aftermath of November 9, 1938, that can be considered a protest.

Then, in a remarkable act of integrity and courage, Schmitz drew the consequence that so few within the Confessing Church (or anywhere) were willing to take: she resigned her position as Studienrätin on December 31, 1938, requesting an immediate leave of absence and early retirement. “I decided to give up school service and no longer be a civil servant of a government that permitted the synagogues to be set afire,” she later wrote. In her letter to the director of the Berlin schools she told him exactly why she was doing it: “It has become increasingly doubtful to me whether I can offer instruction … in the way that the National Socialist state expects and requires of me …. I have finally come to the conviction that this is not the case.” She then quietly did volunteer work for the Confessing Church until the 1943 bombing of Berlin compelled her to return to Hanau, where she had grown up. In 1946 she returned to teaching, at a Gymnasium in Hanau.

Gailus includes several documents that give the closest glimpse of Schmitz. In addition to the text of her 1935 memorandum and the 1938 letter to Gollwitzer he has included a speech that Schmitz delivered in Hanau on September 7, 1950, at a ceremony commemorating “the victims of fascism and the war.” By 1950 German speeches on such occasions could easily slide into rationalization and alibis. Not surprisingly, Schmitz’s words summoned her audience to the responsibility of remembering and remembering accurately, not just for political reasons, but because, in her words, “otherwise we would be defrauding ourselves of our human dignity.” She concluded her remarks with references to Jochen Klepper, Hildegard Schaeder, Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—and yet said not a word about her own acts of courage and integrity.

Outside of a very small circle of acquaintances—including several Jewish colleagues whom Schmitz had helped and who wrote affidavits for her after 1945—Schmitz remained unknown and unrecognized. One reason that emerges very clearly in this biography was her modesty. The memorandum was unsigned and, with Niemoeller’s early attribution of it to Meusel, the historical record seemed to have been established. But Schmitz lived long enough that she could have corrected it (Meusel was in ill health after the war and died in 1953). And as Meyer’s 1999 essay showed, Schmitz did assemble documentation after 1945—affidavits from people she had helped as well as the affidavit from Wibbeling. She had clarified the record, at least for herself—but in the decades that followed she didn’t tell her story. Even Dietgard Meyer later told Gailus that she had never learned about the memorandum directly from Schmitz.

And no one asked her. For a very long time the women of the church struggle and resistance circles were forgotten and on the margins of the historiography. Extensive documentation emerged from the work during the 1980s of Göttingen systematic theology professor Hannelore Erhart and a group of former Confessing Church Theologinnen and doctoral students, leading to several volumes, including the 1999 one with the essay on Schmitz. My own work (For the Soul of the People, 1992) included a study of the role of women in the Confessing Church based upon of my oral histories with about 25 of the Theologinnen and women who had been in the resistance. More recently, biographies of women like Schmitz and Gertrud Staewen (Marlies Flesch-Thebesius, Zu den Aussenseitern gestellt: Die Geschichte der Gertrud Staewen, 1894-1987, 2004) have appeared.

Yet another question arises, and Gailus addresses it bluntly in this volume: why didn’t any of those who had known her and worked with her during the Nazi era come forward in the postwar era to acknowledge her courage and the role she had played? Why is it that the leading figures in the Kirchenkampf who had known her during the 1930s (Gollwitzer, Niesel, and Barth, among others)—and who eventually wrote and spoke so extensively about the events of the church struggle—failed to tell the story of Elisabeth Schmitz? The portrait of her in this biography shows a woman driven by outrage at the Nazi persecution of the Jews, someone who was active in the most prominent Confessing Church circles Berlin: in the Gossen Mission, in Dahlem, in Charlottenburg, at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. As yet, as Gailus notes, when Schmitz died in 1977 only seven people attended her funeral.

In any case, we now have this fine biography of Schmitz. It is among the recent German books that I wish could be published in English; it would be a strong addition to any course on the Third Reich. Her story is so compelling that I think it would find wider interest, and the chapters on Erinnerungskultur and the emergence of the historiography of the Kirchenkampf—and the emergence of her own story and the correction of the historical record—could stand alone as studies in the creation of historical narrative.

 

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