Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

Brandon Bloch

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Reinventing Protestant Germany

Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

Brandon Bloch

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2025

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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

A superb new history of Germany’s twentieth century.
-- Philip Decker Tocqueville21

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

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

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

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

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ABBREVIATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	1
chapter oneA CHURCH IN CRISIS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	22
chapter twoFROM THE TOTAL STATE TO THE LIMITS OF OBEDIENCE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	48
chapter threePOST-N AZI JUSTICE AND PROTESTANT HUMAN RIGHTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	81
chapter fourFAMILIES, SCHOOLS, AND THE BA TTLE FOR THE BASIC LAW Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	119
chapter fiveREARMAMENT AND THE MYTHSOFRESISTANCE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	158
chapter sixTHE EASTERN BORDER AND THE BOUNDS OF RECONCILIATION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	197
chapter sevenEMERGENCIES OF DEMOCRACY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	234
CONCLUSION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	274
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	289
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	369
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	373

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

August 26, 2025

eBook ISBN:

9780674300538

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674300538

eBook ISBN: 9780674300538

Reinventing Protestant Germany

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About this book

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