German Christian Movement Research Articles

Identity, Belonging, and Christian Community in Protestant Responses to the Aryan Paragraph in Nazi Germany

Examining Christianity and its representative denominations and groups in Nazi Germany has led scholars to try to construct how these Christian groups interacted with a government which institutionalized the death of millions. The focus of past scholarship has centered on debates over the extent to which institutional Protestant Christianity and individual Protestants opposed Adolf Hitler’s regime and Nazism. The focus of this thesis examines how four Protestants or Protestant groups employed definitions of what made one a Jewish Christian, what being Jewish meant, and who was included within the larger Christian community in their 1933 responses to the Aryan paragraph. These responses originated from the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the General Synod of the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union, the faculty of theology at the University of Marburg, and the German Christian movement. Though each response to the Aryan paragraph utilized a unique definition of Jewish Christians and Christian community, they all reveal a Protestant church unprepared to answer the questions of belonging and identity posed by its society. In their search for a unified answer to the question of whether a baptized Jew belongs in the Protestant church, Protestants displayed that they had no unified answer. The consequences of not belonging in Nazi Germany could and did lead to discrimination, persecution, and genocide.

Zur Ambiguität von Religion und Politik in Deutschland: die Evangelische Kirche in der NS-Zeit

During the Nazi era, the Protestant Church in Germany was challenged by the so-called church struggle between the German Christian Movement and the Confessing Church. This article interprets the church struggle in a new way by taking up concepts from Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory and ambiguity research. It becomes clear that the church struggle was ultimately about the fundamental problem of the relationship between the religious and political system.

The Sermon on the Mount and Christian Ethics in the Nazi Bible

In 1939, scholars associated with the pro-Nazi Thüringian German Christian movement founded a research institute dedicated to the task of removing the legacy of Judaism from Christianity. The mission of the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life was to render Christianity acceptable within the antisemitic and militarized climate of National Socialism. This task required purging Christian theology of Jewish influence, a feature evident in the Institute's version of the New Testament titled The Message of God. This publication aimed to transform the religious experience of ordinary German believers and would eventually sell over 200,000 copies. This article examines material in this text as it relates to the Sermon on the Mount and concludes that, despite the apparent incongruity between Nazi ideology and New Testament ethics, the editors of the so-called ‘Nazi Bible’ believed their task to be guided by Christian ethical principles.

Die Luther-Gesellschaft 1918–2018. Beiträge zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum ed. by Johannes Schilling and Martin Treu

Reviewed by: Die Luther-Gesellschaft 1918–2018. Beiträge zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum ed. by Johannes Schilling and Martin Treu Robert Kolb Die Luther-Gesellschaft 1918–2018. Beiträge zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum. Edited by Johannes Schilling and Martin Treu. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018. 351 pp. For a century the Luther-Gesellschaft has served as an important institution for conveying Luther's life and thought among both professional and lay audiences. Writing a history of an institution is a delicate task, filled with the danger of external criticism in the service of an ulterior agenda or the weakness of internal bragging. This sober assessment of the Society's development avoids both dangers even though it is written by a team of insiders. The editors, the current president of the Society, Johannes Schilling, retired professor of Reformation history at the University of Kiel, and Martin Treu, the Society's business manager, retired from long years of service at the Luther House in Wittenberg, marshalled eleven others to assist them in reviewing the activities of the Society in the turbulent century since its founding in the last days of World War I. The authors render careful assessments of how scholarship and culture are interwoven in the practice of the scholarly task. Essays focused on the presidents of the Society provide a chronological thread that highlights how the general atmosphere of German culture shaped the agenda and activities of the Society at each stage. In addition, the current editors of the Society's scholarly periodical, the Lutherjahrbuch, Christopher Spehr, and its more popular journal, Luther, Helmut Zschoch, trace the development of their publications, revealing how cultural pressures from German nationalism, National Socialism, and the concerns of a divided Germany, with the necessity of taking Marxist Reformation scholarship seriously in the 1960s–1980s, stood in tension with the ever-present concern to preserve text-driven scholarship while providing aid for parish pastors and laypeople through exposition of Luther's way of thinking. [End Page 461] Further essays explore the vital work of regional groups organized to conduct seminars and conferences dedicated to fostering Luther's theology through good scholarship brought to the popular level. The regional groups have come and gone in various parts of Germany but have provided a forum for demonstrating the relevance of Wittenberg thought. Other essays treat recently developed prizes and the valuable Luther bibliography of the Lutherjahrbuch. Personal recollections of two presidents, Schilling and Bishop Gerhard Müller, provide insights into the challenges of fulfilling the goals of the Society, among which scholarship in its purest form sometimes took second place to bringing Luther's insights to the educated public. Müller's and Schilling's particular perspectives lend depth and color to reviews by others of other leading personalities, including Karl Holl, who served briefly as president; Paul Althaus, whose thirty-seven years as president (1927–1964) spanned the break in the Society's existence caused by National Socialist crackdown and the collapse of 1945; Walther von Löwenich; Reinhard Schwarz; and also the founder and organizer of the Society, Rudolf Eucken, a philosopher, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, and ardent German nationalist. Eucken devoted the Society to making his vision of the German Luther speak to contemporaries in the dreary days after the German defeat of 1918. Eucken soon abandoned the Society, but in the 1920s the concern for the German Volk and nation that drove Karl Holl into Luther scholarship continued to influence the activities of the Society. The long, dedicated service of Theodor Knolle, pastor in Wittenberg and Hamburg, as vice-president held the Society together from the 1920s to the 1950s. His rejection of his initial commitment to the German Christian movement sympathetic to National Socialism and his later activities in the Confessing Church embody the tensions that all Germans felt throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The post-war situation revived earlier desires to attract participation from those outside Germany, particularly the Nordic lands and North America. Details of the pressures placed upon Luther scholars and those who used his thinking in preaching and teaching enrich the feel of the book for the interaction of...

Toxic Masculinity and the Quest for Ecclesial Legitimation

This essay analyzes masculinity as an ecclesial strategy for maintaining cultural and political power. It begins by examining the masculine theology promoted by the German Christian Movement that gave religious justification for Nazism’s violence against those who did not conform to their masculine norms. Drawing on conceptions of ‘legitimation crisis’ and masculinities studies, it argues that the masculine theology of the German Christians, predicated on a desire for social and political relevancy, shares a similar logic with current American evangelical masculinity. In conclusion, it turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer for resources of ecclesial resistance to these masculine temptations for cultural relevancy and political power.

“One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism” in the Land ofein Volk,ein Reich,ein Führer: The Fifth Baptist World Congress (Berlin, 1934)

The interplay of religion, politics, and state in National Socialist Germany continues to defy facile characterizations. In 1934, mere weeks following the Röhm Putsch in which the Nazi regime committed dozens of political assassinations, Berlin hosted thousands of Baptists from across the globe who would unanimously decry nationalism and racialism and advocate for the separation of church and state. Held from August 4–10, 1934, the fifth Baptist World Congress marks the zenith of German Baptist publicity and international Baptist cooperation during the interwar period. The Congress thus provides a focal point for analyzing interwar British and German Baptist relations. This relationship reflected both international cooperation and the gradual divergence of doctrine along nationalistic lines. German Baptists experienced greater freedom of exercise under the Third Reich than under previous regimes, and they leveraged their international connections in order to further their mission. They refused to become involved in the well-documented “Church Struggle” of the Confessing Church and the “German Christian Movement,” and this refusal strained international partnerships. The German Baptist experience challenges many assumptions concerning the churches under the Third Reich as it illustrates the Nazi regime's permissive toleration of a biblicist Free Church group with propagandistically valuable international connections.

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

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.

Developing a Theologia Crucis: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Harlem Renaissance

In 1928–29, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an assistant pastor in Barcelona, Spain, where he delivered twenty sermons and three academic lectures. The last two of his Barcelona lectures demonstrate the intellectual acumen of a brilliant scholar, but some of the content of the lectures was not consistent with his legacy of prophetic resistance to the Nazis and their Christian supporters, the German Christian movement. In Barcelona Bonhoeffer spoke in favor of nationalism, which he later opposed. In a brief statement about the 1928–29 Barcelona lectures, Bonhoeffer’s best friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge said, simply “it was the theologia crucis that saved him from this line of thought.” This article argues that during his Sloane Fellowship year, 1930–31, Bonhoeffer was a student of New York’s Harlem Renaissance, where he was put in contact with a tradition that recognized Jesus as active and present in the daily lives of marginalized people, identifying with suffering and shame, as a redemptive presence in oppression. That tradition put Bonhoeffer in contact with his own German Lutheran theological tradition of the theologia crucis, helping him to see racist oppression as it is in this world, a problem that Christians must address, and to advocate solidarity with Jesus, who is hidden in the world, in suffering and shame.

The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945–1949

The two major Protestant churches in Saxony-Anhalt, the Church Province of Saxony(Evangelische Kirche der Kirchenprovinz Sachsens[KPS])and the State Church of Anhalt(Landeskirche Anhalts[LKA]), undertook denazification processes against “compromised” pastors and church hierarchs after 1945. Where the Church Province faced secular criticism about “lenient” denazification, the Anhalt Church enjoyed state support, largely because it admitted political representatives to its review commission. Hierarchs in the KPS explained their leniency with reference to the resistance of Christians in the Third Reich, a particular theology of church and state relations, and forgiveness. The verdicts handed down, nonetheless, were premised primarily on each clergyman's affiliation to the former German Christian movement and not on Nazi party membership; denazification was therefore “de-German-Christianization.” (The German Christian movement was a heterodox movement heavily influenced by Nazism.) However, quite apart from de-German-Christianization, there was also pragmatism within both(mutatis mutandis)the KPS and the LKA. Both desired a fully manned and unified pastorate in a time of acute need. Most churchmen withstood denazification as a result. One pastor in Anhalt exemplifies the process. Formerly a member, Erich Elster renounced the German Christian movement as a “false path” after 1945. He continued in his pastoral duties, albeit with an admonishment to preach orthodoxy. The general continuity of churchmen did not provide for unity in any case, and it even led to recrimination and in places a post-war perpetuation of the Third Reich “church struggle”(Kirchenkampf)that had pitted German Christians against members of the Confessing Church.

Conceptualizing Christianity and Christian Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials

Conceptualizing Christianity and Christian Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials Michael Lackey (bio) In the 2008 study The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel does a first-rate analysis of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, the Nazi-era think tank of the German Christian movement, which had a cozy relationship with the theology faculty at the University of Jena. Striking is the degree to which the institute’s Christian theology aligned with the Nazis’ political objectives, as Heschel so skillfully demonstrates. Through brief biographical sketches of institute leaders and members, careful analyses of the institute’s official program and conference proceedings, and insightful discussions of key publications and doctoral dissertations, Heschel gives readers a comprehensive and nuanced sense of the institute and its mission. And her conclusions are staggering. Put succinctly, the institute members were doing in the realm of the religious what the Nazis were doing in the realm of the political, which took the form of linking “the theological anti-Judaism that had long pervaded German Protestantism with the racist antisemitism promoted by the Nazis” (166). Despite the superior quality of Heschel’s research, striking is her failure to cite point 24 of the Nazi Party Program, which reads: “The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us” (qtd. in Steigmann-Gall, 14).1 Notice how the Nazis define their Christian agenda in opposition to Jewish materialism. The implication is this: the Nazis’ version of Christianity can only be realized insofar as it purges itself internally and externally of all that is Jewish (“Sie [the Party] bekämpft den jüdisch-materialistischen Geist in und außer uns”), a formulation that is similar [End Page 101] to the institute’s official mission statement, which is contained in the Godesberg Declaration. As Heschel claims, the centerpiece of the declaration is articulated through a question and answer: “‘Is Christianity derived from Judaism and is it its continuation and completion, or does Christianity stand in opposition to Judaism? We answer this question: Christianity is the unbridgeable religious opposition to Judaism’” (81). So that the institute’s theology reinforces the Nazis’ political agenda, the framers of the document define their objectives in a way that unmistakably echoes point 24: “‘The National Socialist worldview fights with all relentlessness against the political and spiritual influence of the Jewish race on our völkisch life’” (86). That these objectives in official programs are stunningly similar poses a significant challenge to one of the central claims of The Aryan Jesus, for according to Heschel, “Institute-sponsored research, by describing Jesus’s goal as the eradication of Judaism, effectively reframed Nazism as the very fulfillment of Christianity” (17). The implication is that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish agenda was not Christian in nature, which is why the institute’s Christian anti-Semitism is a reframing of Nazism. But given that the Nazi Party Program was penned in 1920 and that the Godesberg Declaration was written in 1939, it would make more sense to say that the institute was merely adopting the Nazis’ official version of Christianity rather than reframing Nazism as the fulfillment of Christianity. Indeed, many prominent Nazis argued that National Socialism was a decidedly Christian party well before the founding of the institute, as Richard Steigmann-Gall, Robert Michael, and I have demonstrated. How, then, are we to explain Heschel’s misstep? The answer, I contend, is certainly not shoddy scholarship. Her study of the institute is a model of intellectual precision and scholarly rigor. Rather, it has something to do with a conceptual framework regarding Christianity and the Nazis that has dominated since the Nuremberg Trials, specifically the trial of Julius Streicher, who likened himself at the trial to Martin Luther. In the following pages, I examine the conceptual framework that has led lawyers, judges, theologians, and scholars to dismiss the Nazis’ claims to be Christian as irrelevant or to overlook them altogether. To illustrate my point, I draw a clear line of connection between the approaches used at the Streicher Nuremberg Trial and in Heschel’s book...

CONCEPTUALIZING CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTIAN NAZIS AFTER THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

��� In the 2008 study The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel does a Wrstrate analysis of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish InXuence on German Church Life, the Nazi-era think tank of the German Christian movement, which had a cozy relationship with the theology faculty at the University of Jena. Striking is the degree to which the institute’s Christian theology aligned with the Nazis’ political objectives, as Heschel so skillfully demonstrates. Through brief biographical sketches of institute leaders and members, careful analyses of the institute’s ofWcial program and conference proceedings, and insightful discussions of key publications and doctoral dissertations, Heschel gives readers a comprehensive and nuanced sense of the institute and its mission. And her conclusions are staggering. Put succinctly, the institute members were doing in the realm of the religious what the Nazis were doing in the realm of the political, which took the form of linking “the theological anti-Judaism that had long pervaded German Protestantism with the racist antisemitism promoted by the Nazis” (166). Despite the superior quality of Heschel’s research, striking is her failure to cite point 24 of the Nazi Party Program, which reads: “The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession. It Wghts the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us” (qtd. in Steigmann-Gall, 14). 1 Notice how the Nazis deWne their Christian agenda in opposition to Jewish materialism. The implication is this: the Nazis’ version of Christianity can only be realized insofar as it purges itself internally and externally of all that is Jewish (“Sie [the Party] bekampft den judischmaterialistischen Geist in und auser uns”), a formulation that is similar

The German Christian Movement in the Nationalsocialist Period

The German Christian Movement in the Nationalsocialist Period

Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust Donald L. Niewyk Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, edited by Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. 223 pp. $22.00 (p). The German churches, once hailed for their “struggle” against control by the Nazi state, today are more commonly vilified for their capitulation to Nazi policies, including the persecution of racial minorities and political dissenters. The eight essays in this anthology document the intrusion of racial antisemitism into key Protestant and [End Page 147] Catholic institutions during the Third Reich, and they make it clear that this dogma was built upon traditional anti-Jewish sentiments that long predated Hitler. For the most part the authors summarize arguments that they have advanced previously at greater length. Hence this volume will prove valuable chiefly to readers approaching the subject for the first time, including undergraduates in religious history courses. The synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity advanced by the predom inantly Protestant “German Christian Movement” epitomizes church susceptibility to notions of blood racism. Doris L. Bergen shows that the Movement adopted an explicitly völkisch ideology in its efforts to establish a new, racially pure Volkskirche. Its members, styling themselves “the Storm Troopers of Christ” and asserting that Jesus was an Aryan, could neither dominate the entire structure of the Evangelical Church nor even maintain internal unity. And yet, Bergen argues, they were anything but marginal, since the state assured their control of most regional churches and theological faculties. Robert P. Ericksen explores the careers of three influential Protestant theologians who legitimized Nazism to the faithful. Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel may have differed among themselves about the place of the Old Testament in Christian thought, but all worked tirelessly to reconcile the churches with the Nazi state on the basis of an anti-Jewish theology. That was also the goal of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, founded at Eisenach in 1939 by the Thuringian Church and directed by Jena theologian Walter Grundmann. Susannah Heschel’s analysis of the Institute’s propaganda demonstrates a sustained attack on Jews and Judaism that far exceeded the demands of self defense and political opportunism. In fact, it may have been influenced by the need to establish the uniqueness of Jesus on a racial basis at a time when some theologians were beginning to acknowledge that his teachings were anything but unique. As for the Confessing Church, that segment of German Protestantism that opposed extreme racism, Shelly Baranowski maintains that it was, at best, ambivalent about the Jews. Traditional antisemitism combined with cultural pessimism to soften its responses to state policies and mute any open condemnation of racial persecution. Baranowski implies that Hitler’s desire for a harmonious Germany might have caused him to back off in the face of opposition from the churches, but there are reasons to doubt that this would have been true in the case of the deportations of the German Jews. In what many readers will find the most controversial essay in the anthology, Kenneth C. Barnes extends elements of this condemnation of the Confessing Church to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although Barnes acknowledges Bonhoeffer’s eventual break with the cautious policies of the Church, he judges his words and actions “small, tentative, restrained, and ambivalent” (p. 128). No examination of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany can ignore relations with the Vatican, and Günter Lewy reasserts his well-known indictment of Pius XII for indifference and passivity during the Holocaust. Lewy argues that the Pope’s attitude both reflected and reinforced the Church’s traditional hostility toward the Jews, and that [End Page 148] in Germany ordinary Catholics, accustomed to that hostility, would not have understood a defense of the Jews by their spiritual leaders even if one had been forthcoming, partic ularly once the war began. An appreciation of the power of nationalism among German Catholics likewise informs Michael B. Lukens’ exploration of churchmen who sought a positive accommodation with the Nazi regime because they shared elements of its ideology and wanted to avoid internal divisions and apostasy. His exemplar, the Church historian Joseph Lortz, was...

Hans Küng: Breaking Through. The Work and Legacy by Hermann Häring

144BOOK REVIEWS Ericksen, articulated the conservative, antidemocratic, and anticommunist views of tlieir contemporaries. AU of these "ordinary men" were willing to execute orders from the Nazi leadership. Doris Bergen's essay on the German Christian Movement and Heschel's essay on the 1939 establishment of the antiSemitic Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life support Ericksen's conclusion that many Christians were enthusiastically anti-Semitic and not merely latently attached to this corrupting bias. Shelley Baranowski's essay offers an analysis of the entrenched anti-Semitism in the ranks of the Confessing Church, which helps to clarify why these political resistors never rigorously questioned the racist axioms of the Nazis. These bystanders nurtured Nazi anti-Semitic policies. Additionally, to help illuminate the problem of Christian anti-Semitism, Kenneth Barnes has explored Dietrich Bonhoeffer's varied reactions to the persecution of theJews. Bonhoeffer's own family utterly disregarded racial origin as long as the Jewish person embraced Christian German culture, and that seems to be part of the general Christian problem during this era. Bonhoeffer initially in 1933 felt that the state had a right to enact measures dealing with the Jews within its political realm, thus seeming to condone the Nuremberg Laws.. From 1935 to 1939, he tried to persuade the Confessing Church to take a strong stand against the persecution of the Jews. Unsuccessful in this approach, Bonhoeffer returned to direct political resistance, but said little explicitly about the Jews. This collection of essays has been designed to illuminate the complexities of the relationship between the Christian churches and the Third Reich. In the process of focusing on their themes, each of the authors points to the problematic responses to Nazism of a Christianity that had deserted its original impetus and values. This book is also valuable, since the essays refuse to offer simplistic solutions to the problems of Christian responses to Nazism. Donald J. Dietrich Boston College Hans Kiing: Breaking Through. The Work and Legacy. By Hermann Häring. Translated by John Bowden. (New York: Continuum. 1998. Pp. xv, 377. $29.95 paperback.) The Swiss-born theologian Hans Küng has been a major figure in twentiethcentury theology since his appointment in I960 as professor of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen. He retired in 1996 and turned seventyone in 1999. An assessment of his theological contributions is welcome. Häring has undertaken a formidable task, however, since Küng has published some 12,000 pages of text over more than forty years on a wide variety of topics, and he is encyclopedic in his bibliographical references. BOOK REVIEWS145 The book begins with an introductory chapter that is a general orientation of the significant themes and influences in Küng's theology. The nine chapters that follow deal with Küng's major works in some detail. In each chapter Häring presents the main lines of Küng's position, comments on them, and points out the hermeneutical and methodological framework. He discreetly uses references and an occasional direct quotation. One chapter of special interest deals with Küng's "Roman troubles." The book ends with a brief conclusion and a bibliography. Häring divides Küng's theological career into three periods—with some inevitable overlapping—around which he organizes his chapters. The first or early period, from the late 1950's through the 1970's, deals with Kiing the ecclesiologist and ecumenist.At that time, Küng concentrated on intra-ecclesial or "domestic" issues: justification (Justification: The Doctrine ofKarl Barth and a Catholic Reflection, 1957);reform and reunion (The Council:Reform andReunion , I96I); the nature of the Church (The Church, 1967); and infallibility (Infallible ?An Inquiry, 1970). In addition, Küng also wrote two large works on the nature of Christianity (On Being a Christian, 1974) and on God (Does God Exist?, 1978). The second period, which began in the 1980's, was prompted by Rome's withdrawal of Küng's missio canónica in December, 1979, which meant that he could no longer teach in the Catholic faculty at Tübingen. As a result, Küng turned his attention to broader issues, namely, a dialogue...

Religion and Politics in Germany since 1945: The Evangelical and Catholic Churches

Examining the nature of political opposition on the part of Chris tian ecclessiastical bodies in the twentieth century demonstrates that while churches have adapted to a variety of political systems, no church can compromise with the state when its mission is at stake: those factors which are minimally essential for its survival. These would in clude the liberty of priests, nuns, and other clerics to carry out their sacerdotal tasks, the preservation under church control of its facilities, control of the contents of its own theology, and the ability to enforce adherence to the core sexual-marital ethics of the religious body. While everything else may be open to negotiation—as the case of Lu theran Church policy under Bishop Zoltan Kaldy in socialist Hungary makes clear1—when a state infringes on these core interests, church resistance is sharp, as the Nazis discovered in 1937 when Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge. The pontiff condemned the regime for the establishment of the German Christian Movement with its neo-pagan trappings and racist ideology, the wholesale arrest of Catholic priests, and the closure of Catholic schools, and declared: Whoever raises race or nation or state or state form or the agents of state authority or other values of human communal life—which within the terrestrial order have an essential and honorable place—to the highest norm of all, taking it out of the

Book ReviewsTwisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. By Doris L. Bergen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+341. $39.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Book Reviews<i>Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich</i>. By Doris L. Bergen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+341. $39.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Book Review: Twisted Cross. The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich

Book Review: Twisted Cross. The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich

Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich Doris L. Bergen Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xiii + 341 p

Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich Doris L. Bergen Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xiii + 341 p

Book Review: Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich

Book Review: Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich

Doris L. Bergen. &lt;italic&gt;Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich&lt;/italic&gt;. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 341. Cloth $39.95, paper $16.95

Journal Article Doris L. Bergen. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 341. Cloth $39.95, paper $16.95 Get access Bergen Doris L.. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 341. Cloth $39.95, paper $16.95. Shelley Baranowski Shelley Baranowski University of Akron Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 102, Issue 3, June 1997, Pages 842–843, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/102.3.842 Published: 01 June 1997