Could a practising Christian, here a Lutheran Bavarian, invest his trust in a modern republican constitution designed to be inert in religious matters? In 1919 this was the disturbing question for the aristocratic Munich merchant banker Pechmann (b.1859), and his royalist generation, notably his friend, Cardinal Faulhaber (b.1869). If he did not share Faulhaber's bitter outburst at the 1922 Munich Katholikentag bracketing the Weimar constitution with November 1918 as the embodiment of ‘perjury and high treason’ and therefore tainted ‘with the [inherited] mark of Cain’, he found it likewise far from easy in the new republic to share Adenauer's more tolerant reply as chairman. To this gathering, which Adenauer felt had really met to honour the house of Wittelsbach, he emphasised in constitutional affairs that the heat of the moment, however worthy of respect, should never be permitted to play a decisive role. To try and understand Pechmann today, the voice of the old customary deferential Lutheran and Roman Catholic order of Bavaria well before 1914 – he was seventy-four in 1933 – which equated Weimar democracy with Socialist party rule and secularity, Sommer argues, requires a journey back to the revivalist neo-Lutheran world of his youth. It stood for an unquestioning devotion and loyalty (Treue) to ‘Heimat’, its customary law, prince and his writ. Pechmann's layman's essay in the grand semi-official folio survey, Der Protestantismus der Gegenwart (Stuttgart 1926), edited by Gottfried Schenkel, repays reading both as a spiritual testament and as an insight into a banker's lifelong commitment to Christian lay action: telling today – arguing for the need to raise private sector awareness that postwar high profits, stocks and shares, must serve the common good – mortgage bonds could help the small investor. One cannot help sensing too the ghost of Döllinger, a mentor with a soft irenic touch whom Pechmann admired. In this spirit Pechmann, as chairman of the Protestant Kirchentage (1921–30), warmly supported Söderblom's ecumenical Stockholm ‘Life and Work’ initiative and all of the follow-up conferences. There followed his remarkable transition in April 1933 to almost lone senior Protestant public voice standing up for Germany's Jews. Here his family's closeness to the Jewish community in his home town of Memmingen – his father as Bavarian home office minister was responsible for the act emancipating Bavaria's Jews in February 1867, and Pechmann himself was invited from Munich to be the main speaker at the consecration of Memmingen's new synagogue in 1909 – played its part. On Easter Monday, 2 April 1934, he resigned in protest from the national German Church Federation (since 1922). In acute depression under a new Nazi state which claimed ‘totality’, set aside the rule of law suddenly, and passed the Aryan Paragraph, Pechmann felt that he had at least to make clear to a silent Protestant church leadership (read Lutheran especially) which seemed to have no sense of responsibility for their fellow Jewish citizens in their deep trouble that it was a Protestant Church no longer worth belonging to. Joining the Confessing Church in 1936 brought little further hope to an old man, who saw in wartime the continuance of Protestant squabbling rather than what seemed to be an apparent emergence of a more concerted stand by Germany's Catholic bishops like Galen and Preysing in their pastorals against Nazi religious persecution of the young and old. His despairing journey ended on 12 June 1946 in his being received back into the Roman Catholic Church of his forefathers by Faulhaber in his private chapel in Munich. The reader senses a similar despair curve followed by another new friend, Niemöller, and the latter's misgivings in 1941 Dachau that his Protestant Church spent too much time theologising and squabbling. Niemöller turned there to the consolation of the Breviary, the Book of Common Prayer, and the ‘Imitation of Christ’. In the absence of a biography, Sommer gives us a refreshingly concise update of Pechmann's opposition documented a while ago by his Neuendettelsau predecessor, Friedrich Kantzenbach (Widerstand und Solidarität der Christen in Deutschland. 1933–1945: eine Dokumentation zum Kirchenkampf aus den Papieren des D.Wilhelm Freiherrn von Pechmann, Neustadt/Aisch 1971, rev. Dieter Haack, 2000). A simple chronology would have made the steps taken here easier to follow, as would an analytical listing of Pechmann's Jewish, Protestant and Roman Catholic ecumenical correspondents. It remains to be said that the Pechmann family, in keeping with several other south German Protestant aristocratic families, acted as safe houses for young Confessing Church ordinands in a similar way to their north German counterparts – think of the Kleist-Retzows and Bonhoeffer.