Die Stunde der Volksmission. Rechristianisierungsbestrebungen im deutschen Protestantismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit by Henning Bühmann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die Stunde der Volksmission. Rechristianisierungsbestrebungen im deutschen Protestantismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit by Henning Bühmann Robert Kolb Die Stunde der Volksmission. Rechristianisierungsbestrebungen im deutschen Protestantismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit. By Henning Bühmann. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. 527 pp. In the period of German industrialization, 1860–1900, thousands of German farm boys and girls chose to find a future in the mines, factories, and industrialists’ homes of the Ruhr valley, Silesia, or Saxony rather than follow siblings to Australia or the Americas. Despite the efforts of a few, especially those involved in the “Inner Mission” movement initiated in the 1840s by Johann Hin-rich Wichern, the church largely failed to meet their needs and provide support and welcome amid the profound changes this new laboring class experienced in a new environment. Social Democrats and Marxist ideologues provided substitute community and ideals. By the 1910s some church leaders, ever more discouraged by the number of those renouncing church membership, resolved to dedicate special resources to reclaiming lapsed members and active opponents among the Marxists and general “free-thinkers,” heirs of the Enlightenment. Būhmann’s exhaustive research into the records of the “Volk mission” (“mission to the German nation”) movement goes into great detail assessing the several groups in which it found institutional form and their message of a gospel centered on Christ’s atoning death and resurrection. Along with this central message, the movement was caught up—from its initiation in 1916 through its dissipation and dissolution—in the ecclesiastical tensions and battles of the Third Reich and its precursors. The preachers of Volk mission tended to one degree or another to combine their biblical proclamation with elements of nationalistic and finally even National Socialist ideology. From the several calls issued in 1916 for organized action to reclaim those fallen away from active practice of the faith, whether in the church or exited, and the subsequent founding of several groups to supervise the mission to the German Volk, to its end in 1945, representatives of the movement were unable to imagine a German church that did not strive to reverse the nation’s defeat and disadvantage. Their fears of the moral excesses of the Weimar period added to their longing for the old days of imperial rule and [End Page 468] a Constantinian-privileged ecclesiastical establishment. Some tried hard to address the working class that the mission wished to bring back to the church. But they failed to formulate answers to the challenge issued to one preacher by a worker: “on your desk in your quiet study lie your Bible and all your books that strengthen your faith, and then you stand Sunday in the pulpit and speak only to people who breath the same air. But go in the morning to my factory. You are an honest man. Come to us in the factory, and I guarantee you, in one year you will join the [Social Democratic] party, in two years you will renounce membership in the church, and in three years you will be an atheist” (122). This volume’s fruitful examination of the movement cannot be briefly encapsulated as well as it deserves. Bühmann carefully traces the organization of the “Central Committee for Inner Mission” that formally directed much of the actual work of the Volksmission. He also presents the thinking of its leaders. They included Gerhard Hilbert, who issued a strong appeal for such a mission in 1916, and Gerhard Fellkrüg, whose Handbook of the Volksmission appeared in 1919. Bühmann assesses the roles these two played along with other prominent figures. Among these was Heinrich Rendtorff, bishop of Mecklenburg after serving as a domestic missionary and as professor of practical theology at the University of Kiel. Rendtorff illustrates how some of those whose concern for a nationalistic restoration of German pride and might led them first to sympathy with the rising National Socialist movement later moved into the Confessing Church and its critique of the government’s attempts to manipulate the faith and micro-manage the church. Bühmann analyzes the work of missionaries, sifting through reports and reactions as they conducted one or two week-long visits to parishes across...