Brandon Bloch's ambitious study of mid-twentieth-century German Protestant intellectuals untangles the dramatic and uneven postwar ideological shifts in German Protestant views on nationalism, democracy, and the role of the church in modern society. The early-twentieth-century German Protestant churches were nationalistic, militaristic, and skeptical of democracy. Having largely backed the Nazi dictatorship, the deeply divided and morally compromised church leaders emerged from the Nazi period promoting a narrative of suffering and resistance. By the 1950s and 60s, however, German Protestant elites understood themselves and their institutions as advocates and protectors of democracy and human rights. It is this radical reorientation, forged in a number of high-profile West German political debates, that Bloch seeks to explain.
As an intellectual and political history, the book follows the careers of a number of Protestant leaders, pastors, theologians, and public intellectuals, including Karl Barth, Martin Niemöller, Helmut Gollwitzer, Gustav Heinemann, Hans Joachim Iwand, Rudolf Smend, Helmut Thielicke, and Ernst Wolfe. Bloch is especially interested in the cohort of men who came of age in the Weimar Republic, played a role in the “Church Struggle” of the Nazi period, and emerged in influential leadership positions in postwar West Germany. The participation of women in Protestant discourse mostly shows up in the wartime Confessing Church, and Bloch is attuned to the power dynamics that often marginalized the voices of women and Christians of Jewish heritage. Bloch acknowledges that his methodology and sources do not allow for a wide-lens view of German Protestants. The group of educated elites who participated in church synods, conferences, Protestant academies, and a network of print media was not representative of the majority of German Protestants (not to mention the smaller Protestant denominations such as Baptists, Methodists, and Mennonites, which are not discussed at all). Yet, as Bloch explains, it was this group that “constructed the discourse of Protestant national identity, and who sought to translate ideas produced within the Protestant public sphere into political and legal decisions” (15).
In order to understand the circumstances that shaped these historical actors, the book begins with the German defeat in World War I. The end of monarchy, the experiment of Weimar democracy (whose constitution declared that there was no state church), and declining church memberships challenged the churches’ role in public life. Protestants of varying theological persuasions tried to address the rupture of 1918, feeling the political shifts more acutely than their German Catholic counterparts, who had never enjoyed the same level of symbiosis with the state and who had a strong tradition of Catholic social theory with which to engage (36). Whether advocating a retreat from earthly politics, an embrace of an authoritarian Christian state, or integrated state undergirded by Protestant values, Protestant thinkers of this era shared an ambivalence, if not hostility to Weimar democracy.
The second chapter narrates the well-trod subject of the German Protestant churches in the Nazi period. Bloch brings clarity and a fresh perspective to several aspects of this narrative. Many accounts of the “Church Struggle” focus on the rift between the pro-Nazi German Christian movement and the Confessing Church and do not have much to say about the majority of Protestants who did not join either of these factions. Because of Bloch's longer chronological view, he is especially interested in the roles of the radical wing of the Confessing Church (the Dahlemites, named for Martin Niemöller's church in the suburbs of Berlin) and the “intact” Lutheran churches (in Bavaria, Hanover, and Württemberg), which resisted takeover by the German Christian movement but parted ways with the more radical wing of the Confessing Church after 1936. Crucial to understanding the postwar church, this chapter traces the Confessing Church's development of a new conception of a church that restrained state power over the individual.
The following five chapters address the postwar transformation of German Protestant self-understanding and orientation toward the state. Chapter 3 examines the discourse of re-Christianization at the end of World War II, which blamed the destruction of the war on secular modernity and sought to re-establish Christian values as the source of societal moral renewal. German Protestants’ narrative of wartime resistance gave this idea legitimacy—and was encouraged by international ecumenical Protestants eager to reintegrate German Protestants into the fold. It was in this context, Bloch argues, that German Protestants embraced the popular vocabulary of human rights, even if their first application of the concept was on behalf of former Nazis convicted in Allied war crimes trials.
Both the conservative Lutherans and the Dahlemites engaged in debates about West Germany's Basic Law, particularly as it concerned issues like family law and educational reform. As Chapter 4 explains, the new demographics of the divided Germany, in which Protestants made up only a slim majority of West Germany, revealed the longstanding antagonism between Protestants and Catholics. Thus, when Catholic politicians defended patriarchal marriage and confessional schools, Protestant intellectuals advocated for religious toleration and limited state power.
Chapter 5 turns to the mid-1950s debates over German rearmament and the issue of conscientious objection to military service. Like many of these debates, German Protestant elites held a range of views; conservatives emphasized the duty of military service, whereas the Dahlemites invoked the importance of resistance. Both positions, argues Bloch, drew upon older ideologies of Protestant nationalism and were not particularly oriented toward democratic principles, despite Protestants experiencing significant legal victories on the issue of conscientious objection.
By the early 1960s, German Protestant intellectuals were articulating an identification with constitutional democracy, “insofar as democracy could be defined as an expression of Protestant values” (20). A watershed moment, and the focus of Chapter 6, was the release of the Eastern Memorandum by the EKD (Protestant Church in Germany) Council in 1965, weighing in on the status of the former German territories lost to Poland and the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The memorandum challenged the prevailing consensus and urged Germans to accept the territorial losses in the name of peace and reconciliation. Yet Bloch argues that the Memorandum did not represent an abandoning of older nationalist traditions but rather a reimagining of them (232). It was a self-understanding of German Protestantism as the source of shared political and moral values.
Chapter 7 moves chronologically into the late 1960s, the student protest movement, and debates about the use of emergency laws to expand government power and limit basic rights in cases of state-declared emergencies. Some Protestants who had lived through the Nazi era saw uncomfortable resonances in the emergency measures used by Hitler in 1933 to dismantle democracy. Others supported the emergency laws as necessary tools to protect constitutional democracy. Both now understood the church as the protector of democracy. Yet, as Bloch reminds us, this ideological shift to embrace democracy did not necessitate a reckoning over the churches’ collaboration with the Nazi government nor its antisemitism.
Reinventing Protestant Germany will surely reinvigorate the field concerned with the Protestant churches in twentieth-century Germany, as well as the history of human rights and transnational approaches to modern German history.
