Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust.By George Faithful.

Abstract

I n December 1947 a group of Lutheran women founded the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary—the name was changed in 1965 to the Evangelical ( evangelisch ) Sisterhood. They were core members of a Bible study group. The central focus was dynamite—repentance for the guilt of all Germans for the Holocaust of the Jews. The founders were strong minded, somewhat authoritarian, and determined that Germany should face its guilt. The leader was Klara Schlink, who took the name Mother Basilea. She was convinced that the bombing of her home city, Darmstadt, was a sign of God’s displeasure. This book is their story, a product of George Faithful’s dissertation from Saint Louis University, and covers a wide range of issues. Church historians will note the assessment that acceptance by the Lutheran church of complicity in the Holocaust was very slow in emerging, and that reluctantly. Faithful points out that the two early Declarations of Guilt by the church (Stuttgart in 1945 and Darmstadt in 1947) were feeble, unpopular, and weak. Neither mentioned the Holocaust. So in terms of Germany coming to terms with the past, the Sisterhood was way out in front. Similarly the author uses the latest scholarship (with an excellent bibliography) to assert that the so-called ‘church struggle’ was actually an internal disagreement within the Lutheran church and not about resistance to the National Socialist programme. While the German Christian movement wanted close cooperation with the Party, the Confessing Church grouping thought their theology had gone awry, but had no fundamental disagreement with the government, and made no defence of the Jews.