Gläubige Zeiten: Religiosität im Dritten Reich

Abstract

Over the past two decades, nobody has done more to transform our understanding of German Protestantism during the Nazi era than the Berlin-based historian Manfred Gailus. Beginning with his 2001 study, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus, and continuing through a number of monographs and edited volumes, Gailus has systematically revised traditional understandings of German Protestantism in the Nazi period as defined by religious resistance against the regime. Instead, Gailus has directed our attention to influential areas of consensus between church and state, such as common opposition to the political Left and Weimar liberalism, and mutual commitment to German nationalism. He is thus well placed to have written this short and thought-provoking survey summarizing the findings of recent scholarship on religious belief and identity in Nazi Germany. Unlike much of Gailus’s previous work, Gläubige Zeiten represents an effort to write history at the macro rather than the micro level. Eschewing the regional and biographical approaches taken in earlier monographs, Gailus examines the entire territory of the German Reich, analysing not only both major Christian confessions, but also the contested and ambiguous worlds of Nazi religiosity, in addition to minor ethnic-national (völkisch) religious groups such as German Faith Movement. Gläubige Zeiten covers the twelve years of the Nazi dictatorship, devoting the final of its four sections to discussion of the war years and the Holocaust. Its thematic focus specifically addresses the theme of religiosity, privileging belief and mentality over the institutional church-state relations traditionally central to much scholarship in this field.