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Reinventing Protestant Germany
Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy
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Brandon Bloch
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
Brandon Bloch examines the remarkable transformation of German Protestantism after WWII. As avid nationalists and militarists, Protestant leaders had largely backed the Nazi regime. Yet after 1945, they reinvented themselves as champions of constitutional democracy and human rights—while also seeking to whitewash the Church’s past.
Reviews
Brandon Bloch’s carefully argued book illuminates the central role of Protestant pastors and theologians in twentieth-century German politics, from fervent nationalists to apologists for dictatorship, from central figures in the post-1945 peace movement to defenders of democracy. This volume reveals like no other the contradictions and continuities that defined these intellectuals so central to Germany’s turbulent modern history.
-- Peter C. Caldwell, author of Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989
-- Peter C. Caldwell, author of Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989
How did the German churches reconstitute themselves after the Third Reich, given the often-complicit role they played in the Holocaust? In this superb, detailed examination of the postwar years, Brandon Bloch presents the ambivalence of Protestants toward denazification, democracy, women’s rights, and their own ethical failures under Nazism.
-- Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany
-- Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany
Brandon Bloch offers compelling new insights into the ideological transformation of twentieth-century Protestantism, a process as essential to the establishment of West German democracy as it was complex and contradictory. By tracing Protestants' distinctive regard for the state, postwar denial of support for Nazism, and internal dissension, Bloch expertly elucidates the relationship of Christianity to nationalism in a country where their entanglement facilitated genocide.
-- Maria D. Mitchell, author of The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany
-- Maria D. Mitchell, author of The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany
An astonishing story, deeply researched and lucidly argued. Brandon Bloch reveals how a generation of German Protestant pastors and lay intellectuals, steeped in a tradition of illiberal nationalism and unwilling to confront their Church’s complicity with Nazism, nevertheless refashioned themselves as champions of West German democracy after the war. Masterfully reconstructing the legal, ideological, and moral debates that nurtured this transformation, he shows that Protestant contributions have left a complicated legacy for German society today.
-- Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
-- Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 5, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780674300538
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
400
eBook ISBN:
9780674300538
Keywords for this book
german protestantism; post-war germany; nazism; religious nationalism; democratic transition; denazification; religious complicity; historical memory; post-war democracy; political theology; religious politics; constitutional democracy; german history; human rights; historical whitewashing; religious transformation; protestant church; political change; religious identity; post-nazi germany; church politics; religious democracy; historical reconciliation; christian nationalism; religious reform; Victoria Barnett For the Soul of the People; Doris Bergen Twisted Cross; Susannah Heschel The Aryan Jesus; Michael Phayer The Catholic Church and the Holocaust; Robert Ericksen Complicity in the Holocaust; Matthew Hockenos A Church Divided
