German Protestant Research Articles

The British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons and the Cultures of the Cold War, 1957–64

This article compares the ways in which Cold War culture in general and ‘nuclear culture’ in particular framed British and West German anti-nuclear-weapons campaigns in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rather than interpreting the movements as protests against nuclear weapons only, this article suggests that the movements mounted a more fundamental resistance against the Cold War's effects on international relations, politics and society. In order to express this resistance, the protesters in both countries revitalised very specific national protest traditions. In exploring the relationship between Cold War culture and political traditions, the article highlights the ambiguities of Cold War culture in Britain and West Germany.

The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: The Universities of the Italian Renaissance Michael Wyatt (bio) Paul F. Grendler. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance Johns Hopkins University Press 2002. xx, 593. US $55.00 The early Italian university was a far cry from its modern counterpart. There was no library collection or, initially, any fixed university building; the faculty was relatively small; and its curriculum was narrowly focused. But as Paul Grendler's authoritative study The Universities of the Italian [End Page 393] Renaissance shows, the template for many of the most important subsequent innovations in Western intellectual culture was worked out in a remarkably fertile period for the Italian university between about 1450 and 1600. Grendler's history lucidly maps out the emergence of sixteen institutions of higher education throughout the Italian peninsula and Sicily between 1150 and 1596. Universities forms a sequel to Grendler's earlier and equally significant examination of Italian pre-university education, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600. The first section of Grendler's study explores the creation, administration, and functioning of each of the Italian universities. Bologna and Padua were the largest, but several of the others compensated for their modest size with the superior quality of their faculties. A university could only take root where there was an infrastructure capable of sustaining (and dealing with) a male student population. Above and beyond educational fees, the cost of room and board was always a considerable issue for students, but the presence of extra-urban lodgers had a notable impact on the economies of their host cities, a heavy factor in the Venetian Republic's continuing to allow German Protestants (as well as Jews and the Greek Orthodox) to study in Padua in the wake of the Reformation and after the Council of Trent. The attention Grendler devotes to faculty compensation demonstrates that the star system is no recent invention of the elite universities of the United States: while the average salary at Bologna in 1526-27 was about 306 Bolognese lire, the superstar legist Mariano Sozzini the Younger earned 5200 lire (1300 scudi) in 1552, one-sixth of the university's budget! Grendler elsewhere discusses a Pavian document from 1547 that gives a figure of 192 lire (28 Venetian ducats) for the rent of a house and meals for five students, including salary and board for two servants - the equivalent of two-thirds of a Venetian bricklayer's annual salary - but this is the only information in the book which renders possible a comparison of the actual value of university-related economic data for the reader unacquainted with the bewildering maze of Italian currencies in the sixteenth century; a subsequent edition would do a great service by including some sort of contextual economic apparatus. Even when they did not begin as such, all Italian universities came to be administered by the communes in which they were located, and doctoral degrees (the norm, as the baccalaureate never gained a foothold in Italy) were granted through the territorial political authority after a course of study involving several years of regular attendance at lectures and a final comprehensive examination. Exceptions to this pattern were the doctorate in canon law, which was granted locally but authorized by the papacy (a privilege revoked after the Council of Trent); degrees granted by Counts [End Page 394] Palatine, a curious extension of the authority invested in them by the Holy Roman Emperor; and the degrees granted by what Grendler refers to as 'partial' and 'paper' universities. These unusual arrangements permitted the awarding of the doctorate upon examination, with little or no time spent in the lecture hall. Erasmus earned his much-ridiculed doctorate in Turin in this way, after a period of only a few weeks there in the summer of 1506. Grendler's enormously useful second section, dedicated to each of the disciplines taught in the early Italian university, spells out the creative tension in curricula which had been defined by the medieval intellectual tradition's investment in Aristotle. In every area but theology - a relatively late, and singularly static, entrant into the curricular mix - humanist developments, particularly in terms of philology, had a tremendous impact on the continuing relevance of...

Discarding the Barthian Spectacles: Part I, Recent Scholarship on the History of Early 20th Century German Protestant Theology

Abstract: This essay introduces “the veritable renaissance” of scholarly attention devoted to the theologies of the early twentieth century. This “renaissance” challenges us to discard the “Barthian spectacles” through which we have been reading the theological history of this time and to examine more closely the complex context—social, political, churchly, cultural—in which theology was done.

A Sermon by Robert Barnes, c. 1535

Robert Barnes is a name well known to historians of the English Reformation. He receives brief mention in most historical surveys, being variously discussed as Coverdale's prior, Luther's friend, Cromwell's protégé, or Henry VIII's martyr. Among scholars whose interests lie primarily with the theology of the Reformation, Barnes has at times received further, more focused attention, his written works being examined in some detail and he himself being painted as a rare English Lutheran. Those interested in the politics of the Henrician Reformation have also found reason to assign Barnes a place of some importance, giving particular attention to his later role as royal ambassador to the princes and theologians of the German Protestant League of Schmalkalden. In contrast to these portraits of Barnes as a theologian and diplomat, and in spite of the fact that Barnes regularly mounted the pulpit while in England, there has been no comparable emphasis on Robert Barnes the preacher. The reason for this lacuna is quite simply that, despite the amount of contemporary commentary on his preaching, none of Barnes's actual sermons has been preserved. This is a fact all the more lamentable since, as those friends and foes who did comment upon his preaching make clear, he was known by contemporaries to be an extraordinarily zealous and effective preacher.

Die Proteste gegen Atomwaffen in der Bundesrepublik und Großbritannien, 1957-1964 - ein Vergleich zweier sozialer Bewegungen

This article seeks to illuminate the connection between processes of social change and political protests by examining the British and West German protests against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the most important movements of their kind at the time. By using an approach which combines an awareness of social structures with a sensitivity to the use of language, this article claims that protests and social change are not as clearly related as recent historical and sociological research has argued. While it does not dispute the 'modern' character of the movements, the article highlights the importance of political and social traditions for the formation and maintenance of the movements. This is shown with respect to the ways in which the movements were organised, the social structure of the movements' supporters, their relationship with the respective social-democratic party, and the forms of protest. These findings have implications for the debate on social change during the 1960s. They show, firstly, that these changes started earlier than previously assumed, often hidden by the traditional forms they took. Second, it suggests that the role social and political conditions played in the protests of the 1960s needs to be examined in more detail.

Oswald Spenglers „Der Untergang des Abendlandes” als Katalysator theologischer Kriseninterpretationen zum Verhältnis von Christentum und Kultur

This essay concentrates on the reception of Oswald Spengler's book, „Der Untergang des Abendlandes” by German Protestant theologians in the early 1920s, who were more susceptible to the influence of this book than were philosophers. Just after the First World War, for example, Werner Elert, Karl Heim and Ernst Troeltsch – not to mention Emanuel Hirsch, Friedrich Gogarten and others – had to cope with deeply interconnected crises in faith, church, theology and nation. Spengler's idea of cycles in history seemed to help them understand Germany's 1918 defeat not as due to military exhaustion but to a sort of divine destiny. But it also gave hope that this destiny would help to overcome the crisis. The authors drew epon certain aspects of Spengler's thinking to establish their theory of Christianity. However, the influence of Spengler vanished soon enough. As a result, the story of his reception is an example of the struggle to locate Christianity within post-war German society.

Changing Ideas, Changing Texts: First-Person Novels in the Early Modern Period by Reinhard Uhrig (review)

1076 Reviews thinking of the relation between words and things in the Renaissance as a possible topic, as well as for putting together a team that could engage with the subject in an interesting and scholarly way. The resulting volume consists of fifteenpapers, one in French, four in German, and ten in English, by scholars in fields that include English literature and the history of philosophy, language, religion, and science. The Renaissance is defined broadly to include the intellectual history of most of Europe between 1450 and 1650, the end of the period being marked by Grotius, Hobbes, and the logic of Port-Royal. Among the disciplines with a place in the Renaissance university, logic, rhetoric, theology (including German Protestant theo? logy), law, medicine, and astronomy receive particular attention. The main themes discussed by contributors include nominalism, scepticism, fiction, metaphor, proof, exempla, signs, and interpretation. As for individual thinkers, it is no surprise to find that the ideas of Aristotle and Plato and their commentators receive more attention than those of anyone else, followed by Cicero, Aquinas, and, in the Renaissance itself, by Valla, Ficino, Erasmus, and Bacon. It is a pity, though, that the editors did not wish or were unable to include a paper on Comenius, whose views on education paid so much attention to the relation between res et verba. The focus of most contributions is on the sources, leaving disagreements with colleagues implicit rather than explicit, but Anna De Pace defines her interpretation of Copernicus's view of the discipline of astronomy against that of Nicholas Jardine, while Brian Vickers launches a frontal assault on Richard Waswo and other schol? ars who view the Renaissance, he suggests, through twentieth-century spectacles. It would be going too far to speak of a consensus among the contributors, but the thrust of the volume is to emphasize the importance and even the continuity of the classical tradition until the middle of the seventeenth century. Readers of The Modern Language Review will find much to interest them here. All the contributions are concerned with linguistic problems and three (Ullrich Langer, Marie-Luce Demonet, and Brian Vickers) with literature. A number of contributions are rather technical, written for specialists not so much in the intellectual history of the Renaissance as in the history of specific disciplines. However, a few chapters deserve to be singled out because they are particularly ambitious, accessible, or original. Ian Maclean on legal fictions and Nancy Siraisi on the problem of the 'symptom' in medicine make their points both intelligible and interesting to lay readers. MarieLuce Demonet draws on the history of logic but focuses on what she calls 'the status of literary objects' in the Renaissance. In a wide-ranging contribution that might have served to open the volume, Brian Vickers focuses on concepts as an indispensable middle term between words and things. Emmanuel College, Cambridge Peter Burke Changing Ideas, Changing Texts: First-Person Novels in theEarly Modern Period. By Reinhard Uhrig. (Mikrokosmos: Beitrage zur Literaturwissenschaft und Bedeutungsforschung , 60) Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, and Bern: Lang. 2001. 286 pp. ?29. ISBN 3-631-36919-0 (pbk). This study breaks new ground, but its very range may limit its appeal in much ofthe English-speaking world. Uhrig's literary awareness and command of his subject are cosmopolitan in the best sense of that term, but these qualities may not be appreciated in all quarters. First and foremost one is struck by his appreciative insistence on the intrinsic value of differenteditions of the specific works he discusses and by his recognition of the crucial, yet often underrated or even disregarded, role played by translations in the evolution and spread of what is and always was an interna? tional phenomenon. This corpus of texts, as Chapter 2 of his study demonstrates, MLRy 98.4, 2003 1077 was constantly in a state of textual flux as for one reason or another the texts were manipulated by generations of editors, publishers, adapters, and translators. One ex? ample of central importance in this wide-ranging study is the Golden Ass of Apuleius, another, the Confessions of Augustine: unlikely bedfellows, one might think, though not when it comes to the 'interrelatedness of autobiography...

Georg Fabricius and inscriptions as a source of law

In 1549 the German Protestant Georg Fabricius (1516–71) edited the first short selection of Roman inscriptions specifically to focus on legal texts. This was a key moment in the history of classical epigraphy: for the first time in print a humanist explicitly demonstrated the value of such archaeological remains for the discipline of law, and implicitly accorded texts written on stone the same status of those recorded in manuscripts. This article situates Fabricius’ work within the antiquarian scholarship of his time. (pp. 96–107)

The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569-1772 by Karin s> Friedrich (review)

REVIEWS I35 Friedrich,Karin. TheOther Prussia.RoyalPrussia, Poland andLiberty, I569-I 772. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. xix + 280 pp. Glossary. Maps. Notes. Bibliography .Index. /40.0: $64.95. 'DEUTSCHER Geist und standische Freiheitim Weichsellande'was the title of Theodor Schieder's vehemently anti-Polish 'Habilitationsschrift' on the historyof political ideasin Royal Prussiabetween I569 and I 772 submittedat the universityof Konigsberg in I940. Like many German historians before and after him, Schieder presented historical Prussia's history as that of a genuinely, and exclusively, German region, and his study of the political writingsof German-speakingPrussianburgherswas to prove that, over three centuriesof 'foreign'Polishrule,the province neverceased to 'feel'and 'think' German. As he argues in the preface to his study, his task as a scholar had been to highlight the historical legitimacy of German territorialclaims in a generation-long 'Volkstumskampf'that now, with Poland defeated by the glorious Wehrmacht and territoriallydismembered, had found its historically 'necessary' outcome. Precisely sixty years later, Karin Friedrichonce again addressestheproblematicof collectiveidentityin Royal Prussiain an excellent book that, in turn, not only thoroughly deconstructs the historiographical concept of Prussia's Germanness but also offers an admiringly well documented , and most convincing, alternativeinterpretation. Her study is, of course, not the firstattempt at criticallyre-examining the German historiographic tradition and developing a more adequate understanding of early modern discourses of political, confessional and cultural identityin the region. Since WorldWarII, PolishhistoriansStanislawHerbst, Janusz Mallek, Stanislaw Salmonowicz and Jerzy Serczyk have produced most valuable studies of individual aspects and segments of the intellectual and scholarly life in Royal Prussia and suggested new approaches to conceptualizing pre-modern territorial identity in a post-nationalistic perspective . More recently, German historiansof the younger generation, such asJorg Hackmann or Hans-JurgenBomelburg,joined such efforts.Nevertheless , Karin Friedrich'sbook marks a breakthroughin the debate over premodern Prussianidentity in at least two respects. It is, on the one hand, the firstcomprehensive studyof the political and scholarlyself-representationsof Royal Prussia'surban elites over three centuries covering the widest possible range of relevant sources -from the well-known and frequentlycited works of Reinhold Curicke, Christoph Hartknoch, and Gottfried Legnich down to the level of political and legal documents, letters,unpublishedpamphlets and scholarly writings, and poetry. On the other hand, by focusing on the discoursesof urbanand regionalpatriotismand, more specifically,by reading her sources as expressions of a pre-modern Prussiannation-buildingprocess in its own right, the author develops an interpretative framework that represents the hitherto most convincing solution to the problem of how to bring together, in the case of Royal Prussia, the complex phenomena of competing loyalties and alliances, social and culturalcleavages, political and religiousrivalryin a consistentanalysisof urbanelite identity.The notion of a specifically Prussian identity, even of a Prussian proto-nation, had as such 136 SEER, 8i I, I, 2003 been introduced to the discussion earlier by Herbst and Mallek however only as subsidiaryconcepts that help to explain why the allegedly prevailing process of polarization between 'Polish' and 'German' witnessed certain delays and 'set-backs'. Friedrich instead rejects the idea of categorically distinguishingbetween national allegiance and regional or local patriotism, and she provides ample evidence for her assumption that, if there was a leitmotifin urban discoursesof identity over time, it consisted in the memory of, and loyaltytowards,a Prussiannation of estatesunderthe common roof of the multi-national Polish-LithuanianRepublic. This does not imply closing one's eyes to the factthat, asthe authorstresses,'nationalantagonismbetween Germans and Poles was not invented in 1772' (p. 217). Throughout the period, the German language of the Prussian burghers was perceived, and politicallyinstrumentalizedon eitherside, as a markerof'otherness', liketheir protestantconfessionand urbanlife-style.Inparticular,theeighteenthcentury witnessed a rapid politicization of such cultural cleavages, and a mutual alienation of German protestants and Polish Catholics. But never did the Prussian patriots view their identity as essentially defined by linguistic, let alone ethnic Germanity. Instead, they 'imagined a community, albeit small, whose historyand sense of origin, constitutions,privilegesand parliamentary institutions connected the Prussian province with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a harbourformany nations'(p. 9). The book is divided into nine chapters constructed according to a combination of chronological and systematiccriteria.Followingthe introduction , two chapters outline the provinces' political and constitutional history...

Brahms's Opus 45 and German Protestant Funeral Music

Brahms's German Requiem stands at the end of a long line of Lutheran funerary music. Luther reworked funeral responsories into a new, totally Biblical form, and later Lutherans collected anthologies of Biblical texts on death and dying. Such sources were used by later composers, including Schütz and Bach, to compose funeral pieces on Biblical texts together with appropriate chorales. Brahms's opus 45 is similar in that its text is made up of Biblical verses assembled by the composer, and connections may be drawn between chorale usage in this work and the composer's Protestant upbringing in Hamburg on one hand, and in his knowledge of two cantatas by Bach (BWV 21 and 27), on the other. The text and structure of the work accord with general, north German Protestantism, and the famous letter to Reinthaler, which many have taken as a demonstration of Brahms's general humanistic tendencies, shows Brahms to be standing aloof from the theological controversies of his day in favor of a basic understanding of Biblical authors. Part of the problem was that the first performance was scheduled for Good Friday in Bremen cathedral; Reinthaler, the organist, and the cathedral clergy would have preferred passion music of some kind and what Brahms gave them was something different. Brahms surely knew of the distinctive Lutheran observance of "Totensonntag," the commemoration of the dead on the last Sunday in the church year (the Sunday before Advent). There are many similarities between Brahms's Requiem and Friedrich Wilhelm Markull's Das Gedächtnis der Entschlafen (The Remembrance of those Who Sleep) of ca. 1847. Since Markull's work is subtitled Oratorium für die Todtenfeier am letzten Sonntage des Kirchenjahres (Oratorio for the Celebration of the Dead on the Last Sunday of the Church Year), it is possible that Brahms had the same occasion in mind when composing his German Requiem.

Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Ein Schrei ins Leere? , and: Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Deutschen Kaiserreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des deutschen Bürger-tums in der Krise der Moderne (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XClI, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 306-311 Christian Wiese. Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Ein Schrei ins Leere? Preface by Susannah Heschel. New York: Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1999. Pp. xxv + 507. Wolfgang E. Heinrichs. Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Deutschen Kaiserreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des deutschen Bürger-tums in der Krise der Moderne. Köln: Rhineland-Verlag, 2000. Pp. xiii +851. Despite the works of Leonore Siegel-Wenschkewitz, Christhard Hoffman, Walter Homolka, Karl Hoheisel, and Ulrich Kusche, it could be claimed that scholarship on Protestantism and its relationship to Judaism in the period of the Kaiserreich has lagged. To be sure, studies on Stoecker and the origins of the German Christians have certainly given us a better picture of antisemitic individuals and movements on the periphery. The pointed observations of George Foot Moore regarding unfair presentations of pharisaic Judaism have been expanded and sharpened by E. P. Sanders, Charlotte Klein, and others. Nevertheless, in comparison with the enormous attention given to the German Church's role in the Holocaust, the historical debate over the Kaissereich as a preparatory stage for Nazism, and interest in Jewish-Christian relations, there has been no fundamental advance over the picture offered by Uriel Tal's Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich 1870-1914, written a quartercentury ago—until now. The works reviewed here, along with Susannah Heschel's Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998), offer a picture of Protestant-Jewish relations at once more hostile and more imbricated than Tal's. Christian Wiese's work can rightly claim to be the first analysis of German Lutheran Protestantism's contest and collaboration with the world of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Wilhelmine Germany. Wolfgang Heinrichs, a minister in the Freie evangelischer Bund, has compiled an erudite, encyclopedic catalogue of the views held by German Protestants about Jews and Judaism. The subtitle of Heinrich's book accurately describes the scholarly focus. Drawing on a distinction borrowed from Volker Seilin, Heinrichs sets out to illuminate a fluid mentalité, not an already arrived at and ready to be propagated ideology. Central to Heinrichs' conclusion is the assertion that Jews played a significant role in the German Protestant crisis of modernity. This interpretation of the ebb and flow of antisemitism in the Imperial period as a function of a series of crises is not new—it can be found in the works of Werner Jochman, Hans Rosenberg , Reinhard Rürup, and others. But Heinrichs, to my knowledge, is the first to apply this thesis to the field of religion. Heinrichs combines this GERMAN PROTESTANT VIEWS OF JUDAISM—LEVENSON 307 sensitivity to the malleable nature of the Judenbilder (on this point, his work could be compared to that of Bryan Cheyette in English Jewry), with a pronounced and acknowledged debt to Fritz Stern and other scholars who have focused on the cultural pessimists and their hostility to modernity. The longest section of the book is devoted to the organs of the Church and theological faculties. I found the discussion of the important journal Freunde der Christlichen Welt (CW) particularly helpful. This important liberal journal became the sounding board of the framers of Kulturprotestantismus , a view that evangelical Christianity ought to pervade and inform all facets of national life, yet stay clear of the clericalism and governmental compulsion that liberal Protestants associated with Catholics and their more conservative Protestant opponents. I found Heinrichs' discussions of Martin Rade, Otto Baumgarten, and Friedrich Naumann particularly illuminating . All three opposed antisemitism. Rade, the editor of CW, criticized the Russian Church and all Christianity for its anti-Jewish violence; Baumgarten was a very active member in the Abwehrverein-, Naumann opened his "Christlich-sozialen Bewegung" to Jews, earning the opprobrium of the Christian right. Yet Rade spoke of Jews as the bearers of "negative influences," and attacked antisémites principally because it was the response of "natürlichen Menschen" not "Christians." Baumgarten agreed with Wagner's view that Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's creative oeuvre was compromised by his ultimately "Jewish" qualities (p. 458). Naumann called on the more cultivated members of the Jewish community ". . . Beweis...

Reviews

Books reviewed:Linda Woodhead (ed.), Peter Berger and the Study of ReligionJacob Neusner, Dual Discourse, Single Judaism: The Category‐Formations of the Halakhah and the Aggadah Defined, Compared, and ContrastedThomas L. Brodie, Genesis as Dialogue: A Literary, Historical and Theological CommentaryAnthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament CommentaryPaul B. Duff, Who Rides the Beast? Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of Crisis in the Churches of the ApocalypseDavid R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian ApocryphaJeffrey A. Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non‐Christians in Early ChristianityMark Hill, Ecclesiastical LawK. Hannah Holtschneider, German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective MemoryCatherine Cookson, Regulating Religion: The Courts and the Free Exercise ClauseAmanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth‐Century AwakeningColin Gunton, Stephen Holmes and Murray Rae, (eds.) The Practice of Theology: A ReaderJohn Polkinghorne, (ed.) The Work of Love: Creation as KenosisFrancesca Aran Murphy, The Comedy of Revelation: Paradise Lost and Regained in Biblical NarrativeDonald A. Hay and Alan Kreider, (eds.) Christianity and the Culture of EconomicsRichard H. Roberts, Religion, Theology and the Human SciencesCelia E. Deane‐Drummond, Biology and Theology Today: Exploring the BoundariesJorn Henrik Olsen, Kristus i tropisk Afrika – i spaendingsfeltet mellem identitet og relevans (Christ in Tropical Africa – in the tension between identity and relevance)

The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future (review)

Reviewed by: The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future Zev Garber The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future, edited by Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Stein; consulting editor: Yehuda Bauer. New York: Continuum, 2000. 278 pp. $49.95. Although historians agree that the Endlösung, proclaimed at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, was the goal of the mass extermination of European Jewry and was [End Page 121] linked to the attempts by the Nazi German state to destroy Europeans during World War II, they differ in how to interpret the event. “Functionalists” credit major responsibility in the murder of Jews and other innocents to the structure of the Nazi Party and the regime’s search for policy in meeting events as they unfolded. “Intentionalists” argue that Hitler’s personal contribution to suffering, tragedy, and genocide was not con ditioned by factors beyond his control; the near-successful extermination of European Jewry was set within the chain of command that began and ended in he phrase, Es ist des Führers Wunsch—“It is the Fuhrer’s wish.” A serious lacuna in both schools of thought, however, is a meaningful discussion of the role played by certain core New Testament beliefs and Church teachings in contributing to Nazi ideology and tolerating state-sponsored, technologically administrated mass death.1 For example, “Third Reich” is used to denote the Nazi regime in Germany. It comes from the idea that the medieval German Empire was the First Empire and the united German Empire of 1871–1918 was the Second. The Third Reich was established by the Nazis and lasted from 1933 to 1945. Religiously, however, Drittes Reich means “Third Kingdom” and is rooted in German Trinitarian pietism: “Kingdoms of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” Shortly after his election as Reichkanzler in 1933, Hitler with a worn-copy of the New Testament of Martin Luther in hand proclaimed before a group of Methodist deaconesses that he received his power “from God’s word.”2 Arguably, the twin meanings of Third Reich (Empire and Kingdom) became one: Hitler regarded himself as sent by Providence to establish the German Reich for “a thousand years,” and his divine mandate was to disenfranchise, ghettoize, expel, and ultimately murder the Jews. How to explain and learn the lessons from this banality of evil in the heartland of Christianity is the focus of this book. [End Page 122] In the spirit of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s God-struggle,3 German Protestant theologian Dorothee Sölle painfully bares her Christian soul and asks where was I when Jewish children were humiliated in school classes, deported, and finally gassed, and observes that God had no friends in Germany. Her words in the Foreword are meant to grapple with the horns of a Christian dilemma and set the mood for the chapters that follow: Hitler’s war against the Jews was made possible in part by nearly two millennia of mean-spirited theology against the Jews and Judaism, and though the contemporary Christian is frightened by the results of that hatred, s/he is spiritually bankrupt because of it. Structurally, The Holocaust and the Christian World is divided into nine parts: confronting the Holocaust; chronology, 1932–1998; antisemitism; the churches and Nazi persecution; the reaction of the churches in Nazi-occupied Europe; the Vatican, the Pope, and the persecution of the Jews; the challenge of the exception; after the Holocaust: how have Christians responded; and afterword. From maps, tables, biographical sketches, select documents and videography to moderately sized articles on Christian accountability and responsibility, Vatican policy during World War II, Christian rescuers, and so on, most pieces contain a mixture of known and less- understood facts. For example, a number of Christian divines, who spoke unreasonably about Judaism, denounced the persecution of the Jews and insisted that prayer and preaching should be the militia of Christian witness (St. Bernard of Clairvaux) or recanted completely (the later Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller). Combined with objective information gathering, side-pieces of reflective thought and further reading, the result is a semi-popular guide to what we can...

Für Glaube und Volkstum: Die katholische Wochenzeitung “Der Deutsche in Polen” (1934-1939) in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (review)

Far Glaube and Volkstum: Die katholische Wochenzeitung Deutsche in (1934-1939) in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus. By Pia Nordblom. [Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 87.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh. 2000. Pp. 758.168.00 DM.) In the large and multi-national Polish state of the 1930's, Catholics constituted a minority of about 15% within a German minority of about 4%, and outspoken opponents of National Socialism made up an even smaller portion of this minority-in-a-minority. This relatively small population included, however, at least one individual who, though scarcely known even to professional students of National Socialism, deserves to be counted among its most dogged and principled German opponents: Eduard Pant (1887-1938). While this very substantial monograph, based on a 1995 Heidelberg dissertation, treats many other issues, and does so with impressive skill and thoroughness, its primary virtue may be to have rescued Pant himself from undeserved obscurity. Pant's background was Austrian rather than Reich-German: he took up a teaching position in the Galician (albeit majority-German) town of Bielitz/ Bielsko shortly before it was ceded to Poland, and then combined with Poland's share of German Upper Silesia (following the post-plebiscite division of that region in 1922) to form the new Polish province of Silesia. Pant was a pious Catholic whose political views had been shaped by Austria's Christian-Social movement; he was also an energetic administrator and effective public speaker. In a province where most of the Germans as well as the Poles were Catholic, he soon rose to head of the Union of German Catholics (in served as leader of the German-Catholic Peoples Party in the Silesian parliament, and functioned as de facto editor of Oberschlesischer Kurier (Kattowitz/Katowice), the largest-circulation German newspaper in interwar Poland. All this changed, however, with Hitler's acquisition of power in Germany in 1933. While most leaders of the German minority in Poland, their organizations and activities heavily dependent upon financial subsidies from Germany itself, accepted at least formal ideological Gleichschaltung, Pant insisted almost from the start on the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and National Socialism and was unrelenting in his criticism of the compromises and opportunism of most of the minority's other leaders. Nor was he reluctant to criticize the hierarchy of his own Church on those too-numerous occasions when it too demonstrated a lack of political foresight and/or moral courage with respect to the Nazi challenge. By mid-1934, however, a campaign orchestrated by agencies in Berlin had deprived Pant of most of his positions of influence among the German minority in Poland. He responded by founding a weekly newspaper, Der Deutsche in Polen (The German in Poland), with which he continued his struggle with National Socialism until his death in 1938. He was capably assisted (and succeeded) by the equally steadfast Johannes Maier-Hultschin, a German Upper Silesian. While the first 200 pages of this massive but clearly organized study are devoted to the lives and times of Pant, Maier-Hultschin, and their journal, and to the general situation of Germans in interwar Poland, the remainder consists of an exhaustive analysis and deconstruction of Der Deutsche in Polen and its commentary over the course of its five-year life span (1934-1939). Basically, Nordblom analyzes five years of political and ideological controversy, above all Church-state issues involving German Protestants as well as Catholics but also questions of foreign policy and anti-Semitism, through the prism of the DiP. …

Putting Old Wine into New Bottles: The East German Protestant Church's Desire to Reform State Socialism, 1989-90

Journal Article Putting Old Wine into New Bottles: The East German Protestant Church's Desire to Reform State Socialism, 1989–90 Get access Michael Kellogg Michael Kellogg Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 43, Issue 4, Autumn 2001, Pages 747–772, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/43.4.747 Published: 01 October 2001

A 'guiding culture' for immigrants? Integration and diversity in Germany

The Christian Democratic Union's (CDU's) recent proposal for a national 'guiding culture' as the basis for immigrant integration has aroused considerable controversy in Germany. This paper examines the underlying assumptions and framework of this approach to integration. It argues that this approach rests on a Romantic understanding of culture that obscures fundamental internal differences within majority cultures and further marginalises minorities. In postulating a unitary, homogeneous vision of German national culture, the CDU has forgotten the sharp conflicts that long divided German Protestants and Catholics, and which reached their apex during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s. Moreover, focussing on immigrant integration as primarily a cultural matter ignores the relationships of power that shape any integration process. The importance of looking at the institutional and structural dimensions of such a process is made clear by comparing the Federal Republic's experiences with integrating the expellees/refugees of the 1950s and the East Germans after 1990. The CDU's notion of a 'guiding culture' for immigrants should be understood as illustrative of a broader pattern among elites in modern liberal-democratic states to invoke cultural and other ascriptive characteristics as a rationale in order to deny full and equal membership to minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

A 'guiding culture' for immigrants? Integration and diversity in Germany

The Christian Democratic Union's (CDU's) recent proposal for a national 'guiding culture' as the basis for immigrant integration has aroused considerable controversy in Germany. This paper examines the underlying assumptions and framework of this approach to integration. It argues that this approach rests on a Romantic understanding of culture that obscures fundamental internal differences within majority cultures and further marginalises minorities. In postulating a unitary, homogeneous vision of German national culture, the CDU has forgotten the sharp conflicts that long divided German Protestants and Catholics, and which reached their apex during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s. Moreover, focussing on immigrant integration as primarily a cultural matter ignores the relationships of power that shape any integration process. The importance of looking at the institutional and structural dimensions of such a process is made clear by comparing the Federal Republic's experiences with integrating the expellees/refugees of the 1950s and the East Germans after 1990. The CDU's notion of a 'guiding culture' for immigrants should be understood as illustrative of a broader pattern among elites in modern liberal-democratic states to invoke cultural and other ascriptive characteristics as a rationale in order to deny full and equal membership to minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

Totalitarianism: Propaganda, Perseverance, and Protest: Strategies for Clerical Survival Amid the German Church Struggle

The Protestant historiography of the German Church Struggle has been shaped largely by its attention to two fundamental issues. The first has been the intrachurch struggle dominated by two churchpolitical factions: the Faith Movement of the German Christians and the Confessing Church. German Christians whole-heartedly endorsed the government of Adolf Hitler, campaigned to align the organization, theology, and practice of the twenty-eight German Protestant Land Churches with the racial and authoritarian values of the National Socialist regime and worked to create a centralized Reich church under a powerful Reich bishop. The Confessing Church stood for theological orthodoxy and ecclesiastical independence, rejected the authority of the Land Church governments that had fallen under the control of German Christians, and asserted itself as the uniquely legitimate church government in Germany.

Opposing "Victors' Justice": German Protestant Churchmen and Convicted War Criminals in Western Europe after 19451

Opposing "Victors' Justice": German Protestant Churchmen and Convicted War Criminals in Western Europe after 19451

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Prioritization of Church Unity (Oekumene)

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, following Karl Barth, broke with the “liberal school” of German Protestant theology, led by the famous Adolf von Harnack, he discovered that the Ecumenical Movement could be an agency for bringing about world peace, and he argued energetically for this in the various forums of the then ecumenical movement. However, to only partial avail. With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, the urgency for the ecumenical movement to declare solidarity with the Confessing Church in Germany became acute. This was because the Nazi-supported Reich Church and the so-called German Christians were trying to align Christianity with Nazi ideology. Bonhoeffer proclaimed forcefully that the latter group were acting in the service of the Antichrist, driven by entirely worldly ambitions. He argued that this situation made it doubly incumbent on the churches associated in the ecumenical movement to support the Confessing Church. Indeed, he made such a declaration of solidarity the touchstone of the credibility of the ecumenical movement. This paper seeks to trace the course of Bonhoeffer’s campaign, for which he only had the limited support of men such as Bishop Bell of Chichester. But he failed not only to persuade the Ecumenical Movement; he was also unable to convince the majority of the Confessing Church to declare unequivocally for peace against the Nazi leadership. The article concludes with the observation that the present-day ecumenical movement has remembered Bonhoeffer’s original plea for an Ecumenical Peace Council, and that it now recognizes that Bonhoeffer confronted the Churches with a challenge that will remain on its agenda for the foreseeable future.