Abstract
This article traces the German church struggle form 1933 to 1945 with particular emphasis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s role. Although Bonhoeffer’s status in the world today is that of a great theologian and courageous opponent of the Nazi regime, he did not have much of an impact on the direction of the Confessing Church during the church struggle. Bonhoeffer’s striking albeit marginal role in the German church struggle and his inability to affect significantly the direction of the Confessing Church was due to many factors, including his young age, his liberal-democratic politics, his absence from Germany from October 1933 to April 1935, his vacillating and at times contradictory positions on central issues, his radical theological critique of the Nazi state, his friendship with and family ties to Christians of Jewish descent, and ultimately his willingness to risk his life to destroy Hitler’s regime.
Highlights
Author’s note: Significant portions of this essay draw on the introduction and chapter 1 of my book, A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004)
In a recent review of the seventeen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, edited by Eberhard Bethge and others, church historian Andrew Chandler writes, “For in the socalled Church Struggle, Bonhoeffer was a striking but marginal figure. He could not often persuade his elders toward more decisive opinions and measures, he did not much affect events. . . . Historians have certainly not found Bonhoeffer standing at the heart of the circles of resistance with which he became associated after 1939.”1 And Victoria Barnett writes in an essay addressing Bonhoeffer’s ecumenical vision that “[Bonhoeffer’s] controversial stands prevented him from ever becoming a central figure in the Confessing Church
Even in the immediate postwar period when Confessing churchmen were safely ensconced in the leadership body of the Church, some continued to be dismissive of Bonhoeffer’s overt political resistance during the Nazi period and did not believe that they could learn anything from him
Summary
In 1933, approximately forty-one million Germans were officially registered as Evangelical (Protestant) and twentyone million as Catholic from a total population of sixty-five million.[4] In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church where the pope played the central role, the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche, DEK) had no single leader and was by no means monolithic. It was not a unified church in the doctrinal sense but rather a federation of independent regional churches (Landeskirchen). To complicate matters even further, the intensely antisemitic German Christians were divided amongst themselves, as were the pastors in the Confessing Church
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