German Protestant Research Articles

The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives (review)

Reviewed by: The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives Kenneth C. Barnes The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives, by Stephen R. Haynes. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. 224 pp. $22.00. Stephen R. Haynes was ideally prepared to write a book about the relationship of noted theologian and Protestant church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer to post-Holocaust Christianity. The associate professor of religion at Rhodes College had already authored, among other works, a book about Christian thinking about Jews, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (1995), and a more recent work in 2004, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon. This new book explores Bonhoeffer's thinking about Jews in relationship to his own actions and emerging theology. Professor Haynes demonstrates an impressive familiarity with the enormous corpus of English-language works about Bonhoeffer, including theological analyses, biographical writing, and popular material. He even quotes at one point President George W. Bush's line about Bonhoeffer uttered at a university commencement address. He is also conversant with Holocaust literature, especially the work on rescuers. His final analysis makes judgments about Bonhoeffer's life and thought from the vantage point of Christian theology. Haynes, like all who have tried to probe the theologian's thinking about Jews, devotes considerable attention to Bonhoeffer's essay, "The Church and the Jewish Question," written shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. In this essay Bonhoeffer makes his most explicit commentary about Jews. He distinguished between Christians of Jewish descent and religious Jews and held the old notion that the suffering through history resulted from the Jewish crucifixion of Christ. The solution to the Jewish "problem" then for Bonhoeffer was the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. While Bonhoeffer's later theological work showed much greater appreciation for the Jewish Bible and his words [End Page 182] and actions increasingly displayed sensitivity to the suffering of Jews, he never repudiated his positions of 1933. One of Bonhoeffer's most dangerous and courageous actions was his participation in 1942 in Operation Seven, a conspiracy to spirit fourteen German Jews to Switzerland by disguising them as agents of the Abwehr, the military intelligence office that was a hub of the German resistance movement. It was Bonhoeffer's role in this operation that brought his arrest by the Gestapo and ultimately his execution in 1945. Haynes notes that no consensus has emerged in Jewish understandings of Bonhoeffer's life and work. Perhaps because of his earlier words, the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has on repeated occasions since the mid-1980s refused to include Bonhoeffer on its list of righteous Gentiles, despite his role as a rescuer of Jews in Operation Seven. Christians, on the other hand, have tried to make Bonhoeffer's thought out to be a post-Holocaust theology for several reasons. Not least of these is the desperate need Christians have had after 1945 to find a hero among German Protestants in the Third Reich. This involved wishful thinking, anachronistically reading things into the spare words of a man who probably had never heard the word Auschwitz. Another explanation for the generous interpretation of Bonhoeffer is what Haynes calls the "Bethge effect," after Bonhoeffer's best friend and biographer, who so determined what Christians knew and thought about Bonhoeffer until Bethge's own death in 2000. Bethge himself came to a much greater awareness of the Holocaust in the 1970s, partly in relation to his sensitivity about the apartheid system of South Africa. Bethge's heightened awareness of the Holocaust, Haynes argues, became a prism through which Bonhoeffer has been interpreted in the last three decades. Haynes argues that the conundrum in evaluating Bonhoeffer's stance toward Jews comes from one's interpretive perspective—whether one looks at Bonhoeffer's words or his actions, whether one sees the glass as half full or half empty. But Haynes does much more than review the praise and criticisms in existing scholarship. Haynes believes Bonhoeffer throughout his life expressed ambivalence about Jews, and this consistent ambivalence is central to his understanding of the relationship of Jews to Christianity. Haynes says the ambivalence is not unique to Bonhoeffer, but is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Haynes calls this ambivalence the witness-people theological tradition, which...

Paulus Melissus and Jacobus Falckenburgius: Two German Protestant Humanists at the Court of Queen Elizabeth

Paulus Melissus and Jacobus Falckenburgius: Two German Protestant Humanists at the Court of Queen Elizabeth

Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (review)

Reviewed by: Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University Robert N. Matuozzi Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. By William Clark . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 662 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-226-10921-6. Using Max Weber to explain the role of rationalization, bureaucracy, and charisma in academic life, William Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University examines European universities in medieval society and their emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as modern state-administered research institutions. This transformation occurred largely in Protestant German lands and is now the model for the academic institutions throughout much of the world. Early modern academic regimes reflected the "juridico-ecclesiastical" power of medieval church and state. By contrast, modern institutions were reconfigured by the political-economic imperatives of the secular "policing" state—by the ministry and the market—or what is now managerial and bureaucratic capitalism. Clark describes these changes in the academic order through the material practices associated with an "armory of little tools—catalogues, charts, tables (of paper), reports, questionnaires, dossiers and so on" (6). The impact of the ministry and the market on academic practices was pronounced, although never total, as Jesuit universities and the Oxbridge colleges in England opted to retain certain medieval practices well into the modern period. [End Page 103] Clark traces the valorization of charismatic authority in academic life in a variety of contexts. In the traditional university, he says, authority inhered in the cloistered academic collective and was manifested in external signs and rituals. These consisted of clothing, collegial voting prerogatives, books and furniture, a static body of texts, and nepotism and patronage. Charisma and authority in the modern research university are split, with the individual professor seen as the embodiment of rationally administered authority that resides outside of the advisory collegial body. In the modern regime authority resides with the sovereign and his or her minister and later on with a provost and board of overseers who manage an administrative echelon. The professor in the modern academic collective thus achieves success and legitimacy according to meritocratic criteria; in theory, at least, this process endorses a degree of anonymity and objectivity in accordance with administrative imperatives and goals. The medieval academician operated in a relatively homogeneous cultural space in which public and private roles were fused. By contrast, the modern research university, a site of increased ideological and bureaucratic surveillance, intensifies the modern schizoid split between public and private roles. Charisma in the medieval academic regime was rooted in speech, tradition, and orthodoxy; in the modern order charisma inheres primarily in publishing, originality, and innovation. But real changes in academic life have taken hold. Regulations governing academic appointments, for example, have provided a check on the ancient practice of nepotism and its convoluted subterfuges. The institution of academic calendars and the replacement of private endowments by public funding have meant that professors can no longer take decades to give a public lecture on two or three texts. Clark's chapter on the evolution of the college library catalog neatly encapsulates his theme of the medieval university in transition. He observes that during the Baroque period universities "did not consistently distinguish between libraries, museums, cabinets, and often not between those and archives and treasuries" (298). As an aside, his description of early modern archives is enough to make today's archivists cringe. In medieval libraries books were chained to desks and referenced according to their donor (the collector's "juridical estate"), often housed in "treasure rooms" or cabinets, without further classification. Shelf lists simply described the physical locations of books that had been acquired in a haphazard manner. In the early modern library catalog an epistemic tension therefore developed between collector and academic discipline. In the Enlightenment catalog this tension in epistemic library regimes resurfaces, this time regarding the systematic catalog versus the author catalog, with nineteenth-century Romantic ideology privileging the author. Wilhelm von Humboldt's vision of a comprehensive, unified academic order at the University of Berlin (ca. 1810) had parallels in library theory and practice, culminating in the unified library catalog that was searchable by both academic discipline and author. Thus...

Walter Bauer's Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum

The following early review of Walter Bauer's book, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (1934), was by one of the most prominent Protestant patristic scholars of the era. Walter Völker was himself the author of important and still valuable studies on Philo, Gnosticism, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius Areopagita, and Maximus the Confessor. The significance of Völker's devastating critique of Walter Bauer's thesis and historical method is that it stemmed from a scholar whose stature in the field of patristic studies was not negligible and whose expertise was precisely focused on the material and time period covered in Bauer's work. Moreover, as a fellow German Protestant, Völker could hardly be suspected of "Roman" sympathies. It is certainly interesting to observe that the highest praise for Bauer's thesis has come from New Testament scholars, such as Bultmann and Koester; yet Bauer's work does not deal with the New Testament, but with second and third century Christianity.

Exoticism, Artifice and the Supernatural in the Brahmsian Lied

Perhaps as a consequence of the late-nineteenth-century tendency to differentiate Brahms from the Wagnerian coterie at all costs, his enduring interest in exoticism has received little attention. This is not unreasonable, since his untexted works show no evidence of any foreign links further than Hungary. In addition, for obvious reasons, the specific tropes associated with exoticism, or more specifically orientalism, manifested themselves most clearly through art-forms better equipped to portray specific verbal content, such as opera, literature and painting, none of which is strongly associated with Brahms. Biographically, it is even harder to reconcile Brahms with exoticism, since the connotations of sensuality sit oddly with the bürgerlich North German Protestant work ethic that generally defines perceptions of him. Still, the effect of over 30 years in cosmopolitan Vienna cannot be overlooked; also Brahms was a friend and supporter of artists as well as of musicians. Although Max Klinger and Adolf von Menzel spring primarily to mind, his interest in German painters dated from his early twenties, following his visit to the Schumanns in Düsseldorf. In particular, from the mid-1860s onwards he expressed constant interest in the works of the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Interestingly, both Brahms's and Feuerbach's concept of orientalism, specifically through the Persian poet Hafis, was mediated by the poetry of Georg Friedrich Daumer. This study will explore the simultaneous burgeoning of interest shown by Brahms in his Hafis settings and Feuerbach in his works Hafis vor der Schenke and Hafis am Brunnen in the mid-1860s, as well as the background of the poet who inspired them both.

The impact of Turkish military bands on European court festivals in the 17th and 18th centuries

Ever since Turkish forces first crossed the Bosporus, the threat of Ottoman domination in Europe was made real by almost 400 years of armed confrontation. The West viewed the Turkish empire with a mixture of curiosity and fear. A long series of cultural contacts by diplomats, businessmen, explorers, scientists, physicians, clergymen and artists brought back reports of the Turkish court military musical ensemble known as the mehter. Eager to emulate the powerful and exotic image of the Ottoman sultan, the courts of the German Protestant Union in particular appropriated the concept of the ‘Janissary’ band in their festivals of state. At first Turkish themes incorporated into these events featured musicians in Turkish dress, playing on conventional trumpets, shawms, drums and the like. Later, actual ensembles of Turkish musicians were imported. When tensions lessened during relatively long periods of peace, a ‘Turkish craze’ developed: anything Turkish was eagerly adopted by the Europeans. This was reflected not only in state celebrations, but in literature, opera and symphonic music. Finally the concept of the mehter spilled over into the military, with regiments being outfitted with Turkish-style bands, though by this time they were a poor imitation of the real thing, and in large part much westernized.

Protestantism as a Subject of Religious Studies

In the last 15 years, in the conditions of independent Ukraine, the study of Protestantism has taken on new qualitative dimensions. The scientific and objectivity of the study was ensured through the use of a source base (Protestant German and Polish-language literature of the 16th - 17th centuries), review and critical literature of the 19th - 20th centuries. (foreign and Ukrainian researchers of Protestantism), access to archival documentation (Russian, Polish, Soviet, including KGB archives, other state institutions on religious affairs). Over the same years, a new cohort of Ukrainian Protestantism scholars has been formed, which has had ample opportunity to use these benefits to unconventionally and truthfully treat Protestantism as a religious (not party ideologically or religiously biased) subject of study.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Repudiation of Protestant German War Theology

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a revolutionary in two senses. Obviously, his role in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, when it was discovered, stamped him as a political revolutionary. Beyond that, however, Bonhoeffer was a theological revolutionary in that he repudiated and refuted the prevailing Lutheran-Hegelian-Rankean Geschichtsbild, i.e., image of German history, that had become paradigmatic for his class, the so-called Bildungsburgertum, the highly educated upper middle class. Central to this image was the idea of the Creator God as essentially a warrior God who realized the history of salvation via the power struggles of nation states. Bonhoeffer, in his confrontation with the Third Reich, came to the conclusion that its evil triumph had a great deal to do with the image of history that underpinned it. This article traces the evolution of the doctrine of the Power State rooted as it was in Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms or realms, and shows how Bonhoeffer via his reflections expressed in the fragments known as Ethics, overturned that doctrine and thereby wrought an intellectual-historical achievement of immense significance not only for Germany, but also for the modern world.

French-Caribbean Refugees and Slavery in German Protestant Maryland

The late eighteenth century saw the immigration of thousands of French refugees from France and its Caribbean colonies to the United States. An examination of one family of these refugees, Jean Payen de Boisneuf and his relatives the Vincendieres, reveals that the values that the refugees imported, such as plantation slavery and Catholicism, could be antagonistic to social norms in the regions they chose to settle.

Matthew D. Hockenos: A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 30, Issue 2 p. 256-257 Matthew D. Hockenos: A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past John A. Moses, John A. Moses University of New EnglandSearch for more papers by this author John A. Moses, John A. Moses University of New EnglandSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 May 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2006.00472.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume30, Issue2June 2006Pages 256-257 RelatedInformation

A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (review)

A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (review)

A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past

In this useful and informative study, Matthew Hockenos examines German Protestants' confrontations with the Nazi past in the early postwar period. Following an entire series of recent studies on postwar memory, Hockenos, too, disproves the long-held assumption that postwar Germans simply repressed the past. Instead, Hockenos unearths a comprehensive and often controversial Protestant discourse about the Nazi past. To be sure, Protestant memory, as this study makes clear, did not entail an “honest, open postwar discussion of the church's complacency and complicity in the face of Nazis' illegal, inhumane, and unchristian policies” (p. 10). Yet the significance of this book does not primarily consist of exposing rather unsurprising deficiencies of Protestant memories. More importantly, it reveals the considerable internal disagreements of a “divided Church” about the Nazi past, and it demonstrates the crucial significance of long-standing theological and doctrinal differences for shaping Protestant responses to the Nazi past.

Europe and America: The Ties that Bind

Michael Naumann Europe and America The Ties that Bind HEARING WHAT THE NEW AM ERICANISM IS ALL ABOUT, I ALWAYS wonder what anti-Americanism is. Obviously, one has to know what Americanism is. And now Ihear it is basically almost a caricature ofhigh school teachings that I enjoyed in Missouri as a kid—those great days of Jamestown as re-imagined at Harvard University—which actually leads me to add one little tidbit of information to that fabulous view of what America is all about. In the 1850s, after a failed revolution in Germany in 1848, tens of thousands of people emigrated to the United States and by a quirk of newly discovered statistics, their habits were recorded. It turned out that these brave, good, new Americans had, unlike the majority of the Germans, the tendency to be left-handed. Actually, lefthanded German Protestant. German emigrants did make up a huge part of the American population. After 1917, they were the fourth larg­ est ethnic group—the second largest, actually, after the English—if you exclude the Welsh, the Scottish, and the Irish, which, of course, one should always do. They completely merged into the United States, perhaps because the United States does have that wonderful freedom to let kids write with their left hand. The European view of the United States at this very moment has to be totally separated from the European view of the American administration. There are statistics—mentioned by Lord Eatwell— that probably 68 percent of Europeans share the positions of the social research Voi 72 : No 4 : Winter 2005 799 American Democrats versus the Republicans. This means, if you would ascribe, as many of my German colleagues and American correspon­ dents in Europe do, anti-American attitudes to the Europeans, what they are actually describing is the anti-Republicanism of American Democrats. I am bothered by the argument that one’s position in the political discourse of the day, specifically since 9/11, is either pro- or anti-American. It is a conservative argument with which one wants to silence one’s opponent in Germany. If you are critical of the Bush administration, people who support it think that you are an antiAmerican . Now, if Americanism is nothing else than that great corpus of American political culture, where do you stop and where do you begin in describing anti-Americanism? Allow me some rem arks as we look toward Iraq and what is going to happen to all of us, and what we possibly should do. Up to one billion non-Americans will have watched the last Kerry-Bush debate on their television screens. One can only imagine if the Gauls or the ancient Greeks had been able to witness the power struggle and intrigues in the senate of the Roman Empire, the Roman Ceasars or emperors would have failed with their tried divide et impera strategy. Nothing, I think, characterizes the historically unique position of the American hegemony as notably as the political self-assurance with which the imperial democracy—or, as Iwould like to call it, the empire of goodness of the United States—is currently acting out its internal power struggles on the global stage. Just imagine if the Kremlin would have had its power struggles on television. Unbelievable, impossible. That, in fact, is one part of what I would call the positive aspect of Americanism—that is, an open democracy, able to share its conflicts with the rest of the world. And, indeed, the rest of the world is now very interested at this point in time. The Europeans, of whom 65 percent would prefer a President Kerry, are mistaken, however, in their hope that a Kerry presidency would automatically bring with it a new spirit of strategic self-imposed moderation, or a return to the good old transatlantic comfort-zone. 800 social research Washington’s disparaging tone vis-à-vis its old allies would no doubt lessen, and the Christian Democratic missionary zeal in Germany would also assume less of a salvation-imbued front-stage position. But the continuously saluting Kerry (well, it worries me a little) would not want to change the military supremacy of the superpower United States...

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

A Swiss Soldier In Ireland, 1689–90

In 1714 Jean Francois De Morsier wrote an account in French of his early years of soldiering. This ‘Journal’, a detailed record of the several campaigns in which De Morsier participated, written wi...

Beyond Comfort: German and English Military Chaplains and the Memory of the Great War, 1919-1929

How did German and English military chaplains commemorate the Great War? The established historiography broadly interprets war commemoration in the post-war period in two ways. One approach presents commemoration as a ritual of healing that soothed the bereft. The other emphasizes the political function of commemoration, interpreting it as a way of reshaping the war in collective memory to legitimize the status quo — by venerating sacrifices made for the nation, it put the nation beyond question to strengthen allegiance to the established order. Both interpretations treat the language of war commemoration as one of consolation and comfort. Military chaplains, however, espoused a more ambitious mission. For them, the purpose of war commemoration was to inculcate dissatisfaction, guilt, and discomfort. This was because they remembered the war as a contest of ideas embodied in the clash of nations, a contest that was still unsettled. Their purpose was therefore the antithesis to consolation and conventional patriotism: to mobilize the living to honour their “blood debt” to the dead through the language of agitation. They themselves had participated in a war regarded by the churches as a campaign of regeneration through blood, in which sacrifice and suffering would revitalize their nations by bringing them to repentance, piety, and social cohesion. Because they were implicated personally in that incomplete crusade, they were especially anxious to realize the mission and complete the sacrifices of the dead. Anglican ex-chaplains predominantly implored their congregations to ensure a permanent peace that had been purchased by blood, whereas German Protestants invoked a resurrected Volk reclaiming its status as a chosen people. Each articulated a politics of remembrance, one formed on the vision of a war to end all wars, the other on a vision of a war to resurrect the Reich as the Kingdom of God. While the political content of their memories was different, they shared an attitude to the function of remembrance, as a ritual to mobilize and arouse rather than console. Both groups preached that the peace was a continuation of an unfinished moral and spiritual struggle. Furthermore, while always honouring the dead, they stressed that the worth of their sacrifices was no longer guaranteed but contingent upon the conduct of living and future generations. Despite the divergences that emerged from their different confessional and national traditions, and from their respective circumstances, they shared a common moral language.

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 Doris L. Bergen The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. By Richard Steigmann-Gall. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 294.) As Richard Steigmann-Gall points out, "the insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years" (p. 266). In The Holy Reich, Steigmann-Gall seeks to correct that view. National Socialism had many connections to Christianity, as Steigmann-Gall demonstrates. There were personal ties—Nazi leaders who considered themselves good Christians and were active in their churches, including some, like Wilhelm Kube and Erich Koch, who held high offices in the Protestant Church. There were institutional links too, from Hitler's early attempts to unify German Protestants into a national, Nazified church, to women's organizations that used the rhetoric, methods, and even personnel of church groups to serve the Nazi state and its goals. Most important in Steigmann-Gall's analysis, there was ideological common ground. Members of the Nazi elite—even "paganists" like Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler—used biblical allusions in their private and public pronouncements; retained an affection for Jesus and found a place for him in their world views; and supported a Christian social ethic of sacrifice, service, and charity. We cannot understand the Nazi movement, Steigmann-Gall concludes, without admitting its close, if ambiguous, relationship to Christianity. [End Page 841] Steigmann-Gall's first chapter analyzes the Nazi concept of "positive Christianity" and introduces some of its key proponents within the Party, particularly in the years before Hitler came to power in 1933. Many scholars dismiss "positive Christianity" as an opportunistic slogan coined to conceal Nazism's intrinsic hostility toward the churches. Using the words of leading Nazis, Steigmann-Gall shows that, to the contrary, many Nazi spokesmen saw their movement as pred-icated on a specific kind of Christianity: anti-Semitic, socially engaged, and committed to German unity. These "Nazi elites" showed by their examples that it was not only possible but desirable to be both a loyal Christian and a devout follower of Adolf Hitler. This attempt to delineate Nazi views of Christianity is the most original part of Steigmann-Gall's book. A subsequent chapter describes Nazi efforts to bridge the confessional divide between Germany's Protestant majority and substantial Roman Catholic minority. Here Steigmann-Gall returns to well traveled ground to address relations between Hitler's new regime in 1933 and Germany's Protestant churches. Hitler's initial efforts to "co-ordinate" German Protestantism were not products of antagonism or precursors to an eventual destruction of Christianity in Germany, Steigmann-Gall argues. Instead such initiatives—from support of the "German Christian" movement in 1933 church elections to attacks on confessional schools—reflected the anti-doctrinal nature of "positive Christianity" and expressed Nazism's "clear ideological preference for Protestantism over Catholicism" (p. 84). Indeed, Steigmann-Gall contends, with their admiration for Martin Luther, their suspicion of Ultramontanism, and their anticlericalism, Nazi leaders built on liberal Protestantism in the preceding century. Even nominal Catholics such as Hitler and his propaganda master Joseph Goebbels revealed affinities for Protestantism that sharply contrasted their vituperations against their own faith tradition. Some readers may be pleased to see how easily Steigmann-Gall lets Catholicism off the hook—especially after recent, more critical studies of Catholic anti-Semitism, Catholics in the Third Reich, and the papacy and the Holocaust (by Olaf Blaschke, Michael Phayer, Oded Heilbronner, Kevin Spicer, Beth Griech-Pollele, Susan Zucotti, Daniel Goldhagen, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, and others). But before heaving a sigh of relief, one should note that Steigmann-Gall pays much more attention to German Protestantism than to Catholicism, as his notes and bibliography reveal. Engagement with Catholic issues would not explode the book's main argument, but it would add nuance to Steigmann-Gall's claims about Nazism and Christianity. The remaining chapters focus on neo-paganism within National Socialism, which Steigmann-Gall shows was neither as powerful nor as anti-Christian as outside observers have assumed; on the Party's turn away from Protestantism by 1937 after failure to create a national church...

A church divided: German Protestants confront the Nazi past

1. The Church Struggle: Ecclesiastical, Political, and Theological Disunity in the Third Reich 2. Representations of the Nazi Past in Early 1945 3. from Another World: Guilt, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Year Zero 4. The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt: Religious Confession, Freedom Charter, or Another Versailles? 5. The Guilt of Others: Bishop Wurm's Letter to English Christians 6. On the Political Course of Our People 7. The Church and Antisemitism 8. A Ray of Light in Their Darkness: The Church and Anti-Judaism

The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (review)

The Planting of Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 410. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $49.95.)The term New denoted an eighteenth-century geographic division between planter and small farm economies in the Old Dominion. For Warren R. Hofstra, the name reflects new cultural and directions that emerged in the West during the colonial era and the early republic. Hofstra probes that development by placing the scope of the study within the larger geographical and historical context of the Virginia backcountry. The Planting of Virginia investigates patterns of settlement and development as expressed in the of the northern Shenandoah Valley between the 173Os and the early 180Os. That area symbolized changes taking place in the entire valley as it evolved from a peripheral region to a forcountry (1) with an interconnecting and country landscape (2) based upon strong commercial ties to the Atlantic trade.Hofstra combines the terminology of cultural geography, studies, and history to argue that landscapes are the products of intricate forces that extend over several generations. By using this approach, he rejects Turnerian and eurocentric interpretations that fail to trace the intricate complexities of that development. Landscapes, Hofstra explains, are encoded with specific historic backgrounds that denote the impact of human groups as they negotiate their coexistence with arid manipulation of the environment. To trace the development of the lower Shenandoah Valley landscape, Hofstra extracts elements from models of development, including central place and strategic place theories. He then interweaves accounts of external forces and human agents that shaped the Shenandoah Valley: the natural environment, the presence of Native American and European immigrants, provincial and British imperial policies, and the impact of trade.Hofstra draws the reader into the work by employing a narrativebiographical approach to describe the phases of settlement. In Chapter 1, Hofstra creates a visual description of the fashioned by Native Americans and European immigrants. He transports the reader to 1742 by describing a hypothetical tour of the Shenandoah Valley based upon the journey of thirty Iroquois warriors. Hofstra strongly advocates the study of native accounts to provide a more accurate evaluation of native impact upon the and their reception to European changes. Hofstra then probes the text (113) of property and survey tracts made by European settlers in the lower valley during the 173Os and 174Os.The cadastre (112), or shape of the surveyed tracts made in the lower valley during the 173Os and 174Os, reflect the historical effort to settle the region and the impact of European immigration. The Virginia government sought quick occupation of the valley by populating it with Protestant German and Scots-Irish settlers to protect its western lands from French expansion. Provincial leaders authorized the dispersal of land through speculator-agents such as Jost Hite and his partner, Robert McKay, who allowed settlers to negotiate their selection of land. Settlers fashioned a landscape (138) consisting of small groups of dispersed homesteads and businesses. Such a development also was found in Tidewater Virginia. But the backcountry reflected cultural practices and pragmatic use of the natural environment to achieve economic competency (7). This vernacular remained generally free from outside forces that shaped landscapes in other backcountry regions during the 170Os-in spite of the imperial policies that populated the valley.First-generation immigrants did not operate isolated, subsistent farms, nor did they engage in a commercial, market town economy. Settlers conducted an exchange economy in which goods and services were transferred over a large area. …

Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (review)

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 253 pp. $29.95. Ever since he wrote his dissertation under Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, author of Zakhor, a meditation on Jewish history and historians, historian David N. Myers has been intrigued by this subject and tensions between modern history and its methodology (historicism) and faith. During nineteenth century, these tensions escalated as scientific study of past threatened to reduce historical to individual units linked in causal relationships that transformed human history into a long, undulating but ultimately chartable current...[rather than] a vast Divine terrain whose design eludes full human comprehension (p. 5). As Myers' book amply demonstrates, reactions to this reduction from super-naturalism to naturalism were swift. Though by no means limited to Jewish philosophers and theologians, this book focuses on German-Jewish thinkers who sought to reverse what they considered corrosive effects of historicism on modern life in general but in particular. Myers limits his study to late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany (1870-1933), a complex, dynamic milieu alive with articulate debates on what German Protestant historian Ernst Troeltsch called Crisis of Historicism. Myers' 1995 publication, Reinventing Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and Zionist Return to History, was dedicated to founders of Institute of Jewish Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a group of German Jews who after leaving Germany applied their historicist training and expertise to the nurture of a new Zionist collective memory rooted in soul of ancestral Jewish homeland (p. 6). Resisting History, its counterpart, explores German-Jewish anti-historicism, which has not yet received sustained scholarly attention. Together, lives of four German-Jewish scholars whose and/or objections to historicism Myers chose to examine span entire period of 1870-1933 and reflect its major spiritual, social, political, and intellectual currents, which together with each man's personal beliefs and experiences inform their anti-historicist positions. Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Professor of Philosophy in Marburg, launched his anti-historicist critique to reestablish primacy of philosophy, the science of reason, over history in hierarchy of liberal arts. His to Judaism in 1880 culminated in a vision of modern beyond grasp of historicism. Concluding that and his beloved neo-Kantian philosophy are both rational systems devoted to advancement of ethics, he constructed a grand ethical lineage of Judeo-German spirit over and through time, beginning with prophets and including Plato and Martin Luther as well as his most admired philosophers, Moses Maimonides and Immanuel Kant. His student Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) started out as a historian in historicist tradition of his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke but eventually also became intent on overthrowing reign of history in German-Jewish thought (p. 81). Myers places him into context of theological anti-historicism rather than philosophical anti-historicism epitomized by Rosenzweig's contemporary Martin Heidegger. Like Cohen, Rosenzweig had strong ties to Protestantism. Yet his radical return (teshuvah) to in midst of contemplating conversion did not produce an ecumenical theology akin to Cohen's, for he came to regard as separate from all other religions and Jewish people as existing outside normal flow of events (p. …