Reinventing Protestant Germany
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Brandon Bloch
About this book
A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for their earlier complicity with Nazism.
Germany’s Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For many Protestant leaders, pastors, and activists, national and religious revival were one and the same. Even those who opposed the regime tended toward antidemocratic attitudes. By the 1950s, however, Church leaders in West Germany had repositioned themselves as prominent advocates for constitutional democracy and human rights.
Brandon Bloch reveals how this remarkable ideological shift came to pass, following the cohort of theologians, pastors, and lay intellectuals who spearheaded the postwar transformation of their church. Born around the turn of the twentieth century, these individuals came of age amid the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and were easily swayed to complicity with the Third Reich. They accommodated the state in hopes of protecting the Church’s independence from it, but they also embraced the Nazi regime’s antisemitic and anticommunist platform. After the war, under the pressures of Allied occupation, these Protestant intellectuals and their heirs creatively reimagined their tradition as a fount of democratic and humanitarian values. But while they campaigned for family law reform, conscientious objection to military service, and the protection of basic rights, they also promoted a narrative of Christian anti-Nazi resistance that whitewashed the Church’s complicity in dictatorship and genocide.
Examining the sources and limits of democratic transformation, Reinventing Protestant Germany sheds new light on the development of postwar European politics and the power of national myths.
Reviews
-- Philip Decker Tocqueville21
-- Peter C. Caldwell, author of Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989
-- Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany
-- Maria D. Mitchell, author of The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany
-- Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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CONTENTS
vii -
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ABBREVIATIONS
ix -
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INTRODUCTION
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chapter oneA CHURCH IN CRISIS
22 -
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chapter twoFROM THE TOTAL STATE TO THE LIMITS OF OBEDIENCE
48 -
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chapter threePOST-N AZI JUSTICE AND PROTESTANT HUMAN RIGHTS
81 -
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chapter fourFAMILIES, SCHOOLS, AND THE BA TTLE FOR THE BASIC LAW
119 -
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chapter fiveREARMAMENT AND THE MYTHSOFRESISTANCE
158 -
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chapter sixTHE EASTERN BORDER AND THE BOUNDS OF RECONCILIATION
197 -
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chapter sevenEMERGENCIES OF DEMOCRACY
234 -
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CONCLUSION
274 -
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NOTES
289 -
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
369 -
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INDEX
373
