What is German “Theology after Auschwitz”?

Generally, the term “theology after Auschwitz” refers to theological writings that have been published in West Germany since the 1970s. Faced with the legacy of Nazi Germany's and its collaborators' systematic attempt at annihilating all European Jews, the work of some German theologians has foregrounded the need for Jewish-Christian dialogue in order to resist the cultural forces of forgetting and evading.

Despite shared motivations, “theologies after Auschwitz” differ in their methodological approaches and specific content areas. One tendency has been to focus on systematic and ethical questions. Perhaps the best-known concept to have emerged is the “new political theology” developed by Johann Baptist Metz, Dorothee Soelle and Jürgen Moltmann. They problematize the issue of theodicy, pondering the meaning and meaninglessness of the massively experienced suffering during the Shoah. The other tendency of studies on biblical, historical, and systematic theology has been to address Christianity's anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic traditions, aiming at revising and reformulating the Christian faith. Here, we can mention the work of, among others, Peter von der Osten Sacken, Bertold Klappert, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Clemens Thoma, and Martin Stöhr.¹

“Auschwitz” may not always be the explicit subject of their inquiries, but they nevertheless need to be counted among Germany's “after Auschwitz” theologies because they implicitly presume that any theology after 1945 has to confront the ideological, conceptual and historical links between the age-old Christian Jew-hatred on the one hand and, on the other, the racist and genocidal anti-Semitism of the National Socialists. Those who were engaged in revitalizing Jewish-Christian relations could no longer withdraw to a position of theological and ecclesiastical innocence.

Generational Differences

In Germany, “after Auschwitz” theologies have been marginalized in university and church settings and are often derided or ignored by mainstream theology. Yet, since the 1970s, “after Auschwitz” theologians have been able to influence new generations of students who, in turn, have begun to articulate their own thoughts on what it means to do theology in Germany in the face of the Shoah.²

But little attention has been paid to generational differences between the founding fathers and mothers of “after Auschwitz” theology (such as Metz, Moltmann, Soelle, and Marquardt), who belong to a particular political cohort, and those who grew up in the very different social setting of a post-1945 West Germany. Whereas the intellectual founders of the Theologie nach Auschwitz belong to the “1948er cohort” (born between 1926 and 1936) and have been referred to as the “second generation,” the postwar cohorts born after the early 1950s are often called the “third generation.”³ Different experiences have shaped their ways of articulating their relation to National Socialism and the Holocaust; to become aware of these generational differences allows us to draw comparisons between diverse types of experiences that have shaped (and have been shaped by) public discourse about Germany's past.

Members of the second generation include those born during the Third Reich. They have been called the “Hitler Youth generation.” It was their parents who were morally and legally responsible agents during the twelve-year-long Nazi regime. They themselves came of legal age only during the very last years, sometimes months, of the war. Within the discipline of theology, they are the scholars who actively participated in the memory discourse of the German second generation of the late 1960s, and their Theologie nach Auschwitz must be credited for its untiring efforts to remember the victims, and by doing so, to resist the general avoidance and denial of the National Socialist past in postwar West Germany.⁴

The third generation, in contrast, encountered the events of the 1930s and 1940s as stories, memories, and history lessons. Generally speaking, it was their grandparents who were adults during the Hitler dictatorship. The recently published volume Von Gott reden im Land der Täter: Theologische Stimmen der dritten Generation seit der Shoah⁵

presents voices of this new generation of scholars and theologians committed to understanding the legacy of Auschwitz. These voices have begun to question and contextualize second-generation “after Auschwitz” theologies. At the same time, they build upon the second generation's main objective: to sensitize non-Jewish Germans to the fates and lives of the Jewish victims of the Shoah.

“After Auschwitz” theologies usually react to a perceived lack of compassion among the general population toward victims of Nazi racial and political persecution. The Mitscherlichs have characterized this attitude, common among Germans especially during the 1950s, when they were engaged in the economic recovery of their war-ravaged country, as an “inability to mourn.” More recently, this characterization has been revised and enlarged to include the observation that Germans were not incapable of mourning in general but rather were unable to mourn specific groups of people. American historian Robert Moeller and German historian Norbert Frei have shown that Germans were quite capable of mourning, not for the victims of Nazi persecution and of the concentration camps, but for the German refugees and expellees, for German prisoners-of-war, and for German civilians who had suffered from the relentless Allied bombing raids.⁶

With the war's end, a memory discourse developed that portrayed Germans as a suffering people, victimized first by Hitler's fascist regime, then by the Allied war campaign and denazification program. Their fate was recalled with self-pity and compassion, and the church fostered and partook in these sentiments, extending its sympathies even to NS criminals who, in the trivializing parlance of politicians and church leaders, were called Kriegsverbrecher (“war criminals”) or Kriegsverurteilte (“those accused of war crimes”).⁷ Until 1986, the Evangelical Church of Germany employed a delegate responsible solely for the pastoral counseling of German Kriegsverurteilte, but there was no comparative church delegate for the victims of Nazi persecution.⁸ Until the late 1960s, there was hardly any critical awareness about the fact that it might be problematic to portray Germans first and foremost as victims of the war. At the same token, compassion for the victims of the Shoah and of the NS persecutions remained underdeveloped.

The initial contribution of “after Auschwitz” theologians in the 1970s must be placed in this discursive context of “cultural amnesia,”⁹

a forgetfulness that could be traced in mainstream German theology as well. Catholic theologian Metz criticized the “obvious apathy” of Christian theology and its “remarkable stubbornness in the face of the Shoah” (“die erstaunliche Verblüffungsfestigkeit angesichts der Shoah”).¹⁰ “Why is it,” he asked, “that theology seems to be touched so little or not at all by this catastrophe—or generally by the suffering of humanity?”¹¹ “After Auschwitz” theologians counteracted such apathy by revealing the roots of anti-Semitism and by turning the focus of their theological inquiry onto the problem of suffering.¹² They saw themselves in solidarity with the victims and searched for ways of connecting with contemporary Judaism. They tried to disrupt the language of self-pity—and by doing so, to upset the emotional self-referencing of a perpetrator culture—and to replace it with a theology of compassion for the suffering “Other.”

Why did it take German theologians so long to develop a compassionate sensitivity toward the victims? One important reason is the resistance of the mainstream theological establishment against the particularities of a theology after Auschwitz. It took the second generation almost two decades after the collapse of the Nazi regime before they were able to articulate a new theological consciousness. “Only late, very late, did we as a postwar generation become aware of the changed situation of theology ‘after Auschwitz,’” writes Moltmann, summing up his discontent. “And until today there are only a few, too few, people in the Protestant and Catholic tradition, who seek to amend this situation in Germany.”¹³

In a similar vein, Metz writes: “I belong to a generation of Germans who—much too slowly—had to learn to conceive of itself as a generation ‘after Auschwitz,’ and to deal with that fact theologically.”¹⁴

These retrospective assessments by Moltmann and Metz are enlightening for two reasons. For one, both theologians acknowledge that they have participated in a societal and theological discourse that has veiled from view the importance of the Shoah. “Regrettably, in Germany we have taken the second step before the first,” writes Moltmann self-critically. “We have started with Jewish-Christian dialogue … and have left Holocaust conferences to the Americans, where victims speak.”¹⁵

Second, their statements reveal how strongly they are related to a common generational experience. As part of the Hitler Youth generation, both Moltmann and Metz lived through the last months of the war in uniform. Only slowly did they become aware of the rupture left by National Socialism and the Shoah. Acknowledging the difficulties of putting forth a Christian theology that imposes meaning on the Shoah,¹⁶ they nevertheless created coherent dogmatic and systematic models (e.g., Marquardt and Moltmann) and new theologies (e.g., Soelle and Metz) that continued to cling to Christian messages of hope, healing, and salvation.

For the third generation, the situation has changed. Norbert Reck articulates this difference well when he writes: “The rupture that the second generation was able to realize only over time has manifested itself irrevocably for the third generation…. Hence, I see it as the task of my generation to focus on this rupture, to examine it, but never to evade it. The tradition is shattered, destroyed.”¹⁷

Confronted with a traumatic past, the third generation faces the task of examining differences between generation-specific experiences and learning that their own theological language is located in specific family histories and (auto)biographical contexts.

The third generation has the advantage of a larger temporal and hence emotional distance from the events themselves, whereas Metz, Moltmann, and Soelle experienced them directly. The third generation does not know a time “before the rupture.”¹⁸

For many, this rupture has eroded trust that theology still possesses strong explanatory power. “I can no longer imagine an unburdened religious life,” writes Reck.¹⁹ Feelings of alienation have led some to rethink radically their religious traditions and to look for new forms of religiosity, sometimes in idiosyncratic terms, while others have abandoned theology proper but remain broadly interested in theological questions. Some—like this author—have left Germany to take up residence in other countries, though they remain occupied with issues of German history and identity. A few have left the church and Christianity altogether; they understand themselves as “post-denominational” or have converted to Judaism. Whatever the specific case, the transgenerational effects of this rupture have colored the third generation's biographical development and theological thinking.²⁰

The fact that members of the third generation may experience the Christian tradition as spiritually bankrupt and beyond rescue should not be blamed exclusively on the Holocaust. It would be shortsighted to reduce modernity's skepticism toward the credibility of Christian theology to the history of the Shoah. It would distort an analysis of rather complex cultural developments. After all, the loss of an unburdened religiosity is the consequence also of other societal changes with which the German Protestant and Catholic churches are struggling. Yet, the longlasting effects of the Shoah cannot be underestimated or laid aside as an obsession of a small group of professional commemorationalists. A number of recent studies from disciplines outside of theology demonstrates the transgenerational effects of a traumatic past and how these are mirrored and reproduced in families, the media, literature, and politics.²¹

Theology's Concealment of Subjectivity

There is another aspect that differentiates the two generations: members of the third generation, insofar as they confront honestly their theological inheritance, grow increasingly suspicious of theology's inclination to conceal one's identity (Subjektverbergung).²²

In general, it is difficult within German academic theology to break with the unwritten rule of not including any references to the writing self. And the founding fathers and mothers of “after Auschwitz” theology, like their mainstream colleagues, have mostly remained silent about their specific cultural location and family history as well. The implicit subject, the writing “I” or “we” in the text, remains obscured. Increasingly, however, there is an awareness that a theological model that does not identify the writing subject but pretends to speak in a universalizing language for all is problematic. With respect to the Holocaust, such a model remains bound to a hermeneutics that tends to impose coherent theological meaning on Auschwitz and fails to differentiate between the perspectives of victims and of victimizers.

For the third generation, and especially for those who have exposed themselves to the testimony of victims and have established personal relations to survivor families, it is difficult to accept theologies that make such impositions. I can speak from my own experience: the more I learned about Judaism and befriended Jewish survivors and their children in the United States, the less relevant became Christian theology, including German “after Auschwitz” theology. Trapped in a subjunctive and imperative mode, such theologies seemed largely estranged from reality.

Later, when I reread select theologians, I wondered whether my dissatisfaction was related to a lack of a clear cultural and social positioning. This absence, I observed, often resulted in a loss of differentiation between victim and perpetrator perspectives.²³

I believe that this is a hermeneutical problem in need of our attention: If a writer's identity is not subject to further reflection and analysis, his or her identification with specific perspectives remains obscured. For example, when German postwar theologians claim political solidarity with the Jewish victims, do they also identify with them emotionally? And if so, what does it say about their own national identity vis-à-vis the past? Why do they speak almost exclusively as Christian theologians with a universal appeal rather than as German theologians within a context-specific situation? When German theologians make use of testimony of Jewish victims for purposes of their own theologizing, who are they representing: the victims and their descendants, or the experiences of a specific postwar German generation? Does a political identification with the victims prevent them from questioning their own family history? Does such a lack of self-interrogation result, albeit unintentionally, in the protection of the perpetrators? It seems as if German “after Auschwitz” theology has unconsciously claimed innocence by asserting closeness to the experience of Jewish victims and by simultaneously dodging the history and legacy of perpetrators.

I think that it is crucial for any theological conversation after the Shoah to be consciously positioned within its cultural context. If the Theologie nach Auschwitz neglected this task, it becomes the task for members of the new generation—a task that requires to be vigilant about one's own hermeneutic approaches. For example, younger theologians may have already succumbed to the unwritten rule of German academic theology not to reveal the writing self. If so, are they inadvertently hiding what needs to be seen? Can this unwritten rule be interpreted as part of the legacy of the Shoah because it serves to conceal the history of bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators? Does the concealment of subjectivity correspond to the concealment of continuities of Weltanschauungen before, during, and after the Nazi regime? Recent studies demonstrate that theological views and church attitudes which developed during the 1930s and 1940s lived on in “new clothes” in the 1950s and 1960s.²⁴

Furthermore, we can ask how widespread a habit it is among the new generation not to differentiate between the experiences of victims, survivors, bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators when examining aspects of Germany's contemporary memory and memorial culture. Nonspecificity usually serves to protect the families and social networks of bystanders and perpetrators. How meaningful is it to talk about God if we choose not to name our family origin and cultural location?

Theological Innocence and Family History

Johann Baptist Metz has repeatedly declared that a “political theology” that takes seriously the suffering of humanity must abandon a “(mis)understood idealistic theological position” and bid farewell to three types of innocence: Political theology must depart “first, from its societal and political innocence”; “second, from its historical innocence”; third, “from its Eurocentricism,” that is, from its “alleged ethnic innocence.”²⁵

In all three cases, what is important is to overcome an idealism “without subjects and without contexts” in order to commit oneself unconditionally to the suffering subjects now and in history. Metz has arrived at this position through his encounter with Latin American liberation theology as well as with his growing sensibility toward the significance of Auschwitz. Auschwitz, he writes, signals a kind of terror that “renders empty and blind any talk about God that is not contextualized.”²⁶

Metz's commitment to give no credibility to noncontextualized God-talk is evident in his explicit statements on behalf of victims and in his acknowledgment of “the authoritative voice of those who suffer.”²⁷

His critique of the cultural amnesia of German society and theology has been informed by a willingness to weave his own subjective position into an analysis of the contemporary situation. Metz is among the few German theologians who have affirmed the need to “say ‘I’ as a Christian theologian in the face of Auschwitz: this does not mean stylization of theological individuality, but a sensitivization for a concrete crisis situation.”²⁸ However, even in his writings we find only a few moments of self-reflectivity that locate him within a particular generation and a particular family history as regards NS history and postwar Germany. For example, in an autobiographical essay, Metz reduces his experiences as a sixteen-year-old boy in the Wehrmacht (German army) to only one incident, and he does so in a short but emotionally charged paragraph: People born after the war have been spared such tragic events. Instead, the post-1945 German generations have grown up with stories—and only a few stories at that—from their grandparents and parents about the war and the postwar years. They are dependent on narrated, mediated, and transmitted memory. Acknowledging this dependency, they need to ask Metz (and with him, all theologians who have cloaked their past in silence): Why did he tell this personal story? Why only this story? Why did he choose to share this particular memory with the public?³⁰

No doubt, for Metz, the confrontation with the death of his comrades and friends must have been traumatic, so much so that it may have necessitated its retelling. But we also know that his childhood and teenage years during the National Socialist regime cannot be reduced to this one episode toward the end of the war. Does not his story follow a rather typical pattern of how the past is remembered and retold in German families? A story in which Germans seem to figure primarily as victims?

Taking a look at Metz's style reveals a passive voice that assists in creating a pastoral image of a fatefully destroyed community, an image of innocence. The use of the passive voice is part of a linguistic operation through which the events are recalled: “snatched out,” “conscripted into,” “overwhelmed by.” Other discursive elements suggest childish innocence and confusion (“hasty training” of “solely young people,” “wandering during the night,” “anxieties of childhood”) and paint a picture of a lost and perished Heimat (“home”): “snatched out of school,” “shattered, burning villages and farmsteads,” “still, dead faces” instead of “the joys of youth.” Much is left unsaid or left to the imagination. Who snatched him out of school? Who burned the villages? How did he relate to wearing a uniform? In his own teenage mind, what was he fighting for?

Metz is not alone in employing such rhetoric of innocence. We find similar constructions in the autobiographical essays of his colleagues Jürgen Moltmann and Jörg Zink in How I Have Changed. This volume's personal and autobiographically informed pieces written by German theologians of the second generation do occasionally mention the National Socialist regime. When they do—and this is particularly true of the male narrators—their recollections always commence with the last years of the war or the immediate postwar period. Moltmann's narrated memory, for example, begins with the “last week of July, 1943,” when “Hamburg was destroyed in a firestorm as a result of the British Royal Air Force's ‘Operation Gomorrah’ in which 40,000 people perished.” He writes: “With my school class I was in a flak battery in the inner city as an auxiliary [Luftwaffenhelfer]. It was wiped out, but the bombs which tore away the school friend standing next to me spared me. In the night, for the first time I cried out to God. ‘My God, where are you?’”³¹

Jörg Zink describes the “beginnings of my theological career” in the “winter semester of 1945/46” with the following words: “We returned then from five years of war and imprisonment and wanted to hear whether theology could give us new ground under our feet after the great invasion of all our intellectual foundations.”³²

These narrative fragments are permeated by the apologetic tinge summed up in the phrase Gnade der späten Geburt (“grace of late birth”) that characterize the late 1980s parlance of the Hitler Youth generation. They suggest innocence that pertains to one's family history and biography. True, the theologians mentioned above avoid describing themselves explicitly as victims, and yet they employ a language of suffering, recalling their own anguish in a war-ravaged country. Their reminiscences fit neatly into the larger narrative discourse of West Germany: Biographically grounded memories of the war and the postwar period are readily recalled, but the same cannot be said about personal memory of the Shoah, that is, memory that concerns NS persecutions and the genocidal policies against Jews and other undesirables. Events that may allude to one's family's role in a perpetrator culture rarely appear as remembered personal stories, as stories that are emotionally charged, recounted and passed on.³³

For “after Auschwitz” theologians of the second generation, the Shoah emerges only later in their careers as a historical entity that challenges them intellectually and morally. But they do not own it as memories connected to them personally.

What is the discursive function of such fragmented narratives? What is their theological function within in an “anamnetic culture?”³⁴

Recalling situations of one's own victimization, these narrative fragments facilitate theological declarations of solidarity with the victims of the Shoah and with the oppressed and afflicted today. The recollection of one's own suffering as Germans (the “firestorm” in Hamburg, “the combined fighter-bomber and tank attack,” and “war and imprisonment”) may have led, in the 1970s, to the theological turn toward victims in general and Jewish victims in particular. Yet, such possible correlations between affective memory and political solidarity are neither explicitly stated nor consciously reflected. At junctures like these, however, it is difficult to uphold a strict analytical distinction between political-theological articulations of solidarity with the victims and emotional identifications with them, the latter nurtured by specific biographical and generational experiences.

I suggest that we need to enlarge Metz's plea for a “threefold departure”³⁵

from theological innocence and add a fourth category: the departure from the myth of innocence of one's family history. Doing theology in the land of perpetrators must resist a culture of forgetting as it is enacted in the social setting of German families. A conscious articulation of the myth of innocence of family history would move a theology after Auschwitz caught in postwar memories to a German post-Shoah theology that claims the memory of genocidal anti-Semitism as one's own. Thus expanded, such a theology does not necessarily assume a new authoritativeness but learns how to speak with a more authentic voice. It will gain a necessary corrective without having to undermine its concern for calling Christians to care for those who are suffering and victimized.

Postwar or Post-Shoah Generation?

Calling for a departure from the myth of innocence with regard to German family history requires theologians born after 1945 to examine critically the narrative material transmitted in their families. We know that intergenerational communication within the families of bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators is characterized by silence and selective memory, which is why children and grandchildren are clinging to the few stories that have been passed on. From those fragments, post-1945 Germans are trying to reconstruct an image of parents, grandparents, and extended families during the NS regime. These fragments, however, are not value-neutral. They must be approached with a healthy measure of suspicion, because they often hide more than they reveal. Furthermore, new research suggests that the grandchildren themselves render some of the narrative fragments even more “innocent” than they were in their first telling. In the process of transmission, Nazi party members are changed, for example, into people with anti-Nazi attitudes; bystanders are changed into resistance fighters.³⁶

It is important to remember that family narratives about the past are governed by transindividual patterns and strategies that are contingent on social forces of legitimation—and this dynamic is all the more prevalent in bystander and perpetrator families.

The autobiographical sketches of Metz, Moltmann, and Zink reveal, as I have already pointed out, a legitimizing discursive strategy that is widely used in German families: the reconstruction of life-stories of nonpersecuted Germans does not start with Hitler's seizure of power in January of 1933 but usually with the last years of the war and the immediate postwar period. Stories about German refugees and expellees, about Allied bombing raids and German prisoners-of-war, and about the hunger and cold experienced in war-ravaged Germany move to the foreground of what is remembered. German people are the subjects of descriptions of suffering—a perspective fostered by German historiography of the 1950s.³⁷

What remains out of sight are the years prior to 1944.³⁸

A second discursive strategy is closely related. Because family history picks up with the end of the war, Jews and other victims of the racist Nazi-ideology never or rarely appear in the stories of German families who were not persecuted. What remain obscured are any contacts that members of one's own family may have had with the European Jewish population. Did they have any relations with them, and if so, in what ways and for how long? Did they watch their neighbors being deported without intervening on their behalf? Did they actively lend a hand in the persecution? Did they participate as civilians or soldiers in the bloody Aktionen in the occupied territories, especially in the East? These are the kind of questions that, with few exceptions, are never part of the memory transmitted in German families.

There is a third defensive pattern that needs to be mentioned. On the rare occasion that Jews do appear in the family histories of nonpersecuted Germans, they do so mostly in connection with some kind of assistance offered to them. These “good” stories often date back to the 1930s and early 1940s. In families that were part of the political resistance or the Confessing Church, one should expect that such good stories are being told. But oddly enough, they also circulate in numerous “ordinary” German families, sometimes leaving the impression that every German must have aided a Jew. It is easy to dismiss these good stories as entirely fabricated, but I suggest pondering for a moment whether they might possess a kernel of credibility. After all, the NS dictatorship lasted for twelve years, going through different phases with respect to anti-Semitic policies. A lot of things happened in day-to-day lives during this time. Family members may have extended a helping hand toward a Jewish person in dire need, however brief or insignificant such aid may have been. Selective memory clings to this one instance. Perhaps someone exchanged a word of comfort and encouragement in the early years of anti-Jewish discriminations, a memory worth recollecting after the war, regardless of all the other acts of omission that followed. Flashes of compassion occurred even among hardened anti-Semites. After the war, these real or alleged acts of relief were not only employed strategically in the defense of NS criminals but also contributed to the popular mythologizing of an unblemished family history.

Like others of my generation, I have been exposed to such patterns in my own family, not because my parents intentionally wanted to keep secrets, but because we partook in an accepted cultural conversation. To understand and resist such discursive practices requires active memory work. My father, for example, belongs to the same generation as Moltmann, Metz, and Marquardt.³⁹

What I knew about his childhood was, for many years, limited to a few stories about his conflicted identity as a devout Catholic and a member of the Hitler Youth. Because of his continued loyalty to the church, he could not rise in the ranks of the local Hitler Youth movement. I was also familiar with a few events that occurred toward the end of the war and with his eventual imprisonment as a German soldier by the Czech military. I did not learn a more complete story until I was already in my thirties, and then only because I had earlier befriended Edward Gastfriend, a Polish Jewish survivor now residing in the United States. Gastfriend had survived several concentration camps in Poland, including the slave labor camp of Blechhammer in Upper Silesia.⁴⁰ As I unexpectedly discovered in a conversation with my father, he had been stationed as a seventeen-year-old soldier less than three miles away from the Blechhammer camp. Both Edward Gastfriend and my father were at this place at the same time, and both were of the same age; one was behind the fence as a slave laborer, while the other manned antiaircraft guns to protect the nearby industrial complex from Allied war planes. The unearthing of this part of my father's past, which I owed to a series of coincidental encounters described in more detail elsewhere,⁴¹ was very important to me—albeit at first painful and confusing. It transcended a family history limited to stories about the war and postwar years. Now, memories linked to the Shoah rushed in.

Eventually I decided to ask my father to accompany me on a journey back to places of his past. For several days, the two of us visited his hometown and other sites, including Blechhammer, the forgotten concentration camp, today located in Poland. During our journey, my father did not hold back in remembering the past. He told me anything I wanted to know. For the first time, Jews of his former hometown in the Sudetenland and a Jewish childhood friend emerged in his stories. He remembered having seen inmates in striped uniforms being marched to the industrial complex at Blechhammer and Jewish survivors lining the streets of Terezin the day after liberation.

I am telling this story to emphasize the necessity of active memory work if one wants to expand one's self-understanding from membership in a German postwar generation to a post-Shoah generation. At first sight, the distinction I am suggesting here may not be obvious. It may even be misleading! If Germans of a new generation adopt the term “post-Shoah” for themselves, do they claim once again the victim perspective? Needless to say, this would be counter to my intentions. Rather, I am claiming the usefulness of this distinction in order to rupture the selective post-war memory of German families who were not persecuted, and thereby making room for the possibility of incorporating memories of the genocide. To become sensitized to personal and family ties to the history of genocidal anti-Semitism is crucial: It prevents a separation of the historical and intellectual knowledge of the Shoah from an affective understanding rooted in (family) biographical memory. Against societal evasions, the Shoah can thus be reclaimed as part of a personal past—which, by the way, it always has been, and frequently in more intimate ways than previously realized.⁴²

Children of Jewish survivors had no choice in this matter. They knew early on the wounds of Holocaust memory.⁴³

They organized themselves in “second generation” self-help groups and in “children of survivors” associations, especially in the United States. They have brought to bear their experiences on their artistic, intellectual, and scholarly work. The literary critic and child of Jewish survivors, Marianne Hirsch, for example, has put forth the idea of “postmemory” to draw our attention to the fact that her parents' memory, based on actual lived experience, remains so strong that it has become a vivid and vital part of her own memory, despite the fact that it was transmitted only through stories.⁴⁴ Such a lively and vital relationship to memory is absent among most of the descendants of a perpetrator culture. Ironically, it is the “privilege” of living in the land of perpetrators that the descendants of bystanders, accomplices and victimizers do not have to confront the various levels of culpability in their own family history. For them, it seems to remain a voluntary choice. But not so for most of the children of survivors. This continuing and perhaps maddening inequality between the descendants of different sides is one of the disturbing legacies of the Shoah.

If the third generation of nonpersecuted German families continues to understand itself exclusively as a postwar generation, then emotionally charged stories of the anguish of non-Jewish Germans during the last war years will dominate personal memory. It will inform their thinking, theological thought included. As a German post-Shoah generation, however, they are called to the task of facing up to the challenges of a perpetrator history. Specifically, they must resist splitting off a detached political and historical study of the Holocaust from comprehension of the affective ties to (selective) memories transmitted in German families.

Active memory work, which insists on the integration of the personal and affective dimension into the study of the Shoah, helps to prevent distorted reconstructions of an unblemished family past. A recent study in Germany cautions that “children and grandchildren … use even the most far-flung clues in family stories about the good deeds of their parents and grandparents to invent a version of a past that configures them as good people.”⁴⁵

If we apply this observation to the task of the theologian, it would become necessary for people interested in doing theology to see themselves as a post-Shoah generation so as to be able to divest themselves of a benevolent view of family history rooted in half-truths, distortions, denials and sometimes outright lies. Instead, they would have to engage in a realistic assessment of the involvement of their own family in perpetrator history. Such a move would help them to become more resistant to relying on discursive strategies of denial, on theological (mis)appropriations, and on flawed emotional and political identifications.

Those who have taken steps in this direction report that they have been able to replace the burden of vague personal guilt feelings with, for example, commitments to explore the moral and juridical dimensions of genocidal and post-genocidal situations. “However unspeakable the truth appears to be, knowing almost always liberates,” Gabriele Rosenthalargues, who has researched the psychological effects on children and grandchildren of perpetrators.⁴⁶

People with such knowledge seem better prepared to counter the tendency of objectifying victims or of using them for their own theological agendas. Surprisingly, the departure from the myth of innocence of one's family history seems to generate more openness toward the testimony of victims and survivors and toward genuine relations with their descendants. The human encounter with the “Other” that respects differences is more valued than a theological appropriation that effaces the “Other.”

Toward a German Post-Shoah Theology

How can we apply these general thoughts on post-Shoah generations to the contemporary theological situation in Germany? I want to conclude by suggesting six possibilities.

1. A German post-Shoah theology needs to position itself within the context of family history in order to keep the perpetrators in sight. Central to my argument has been that “theology after Auschwitz” of the second generation has been negligent with regard to positioning itself within the context of the land of perpetrators. This theology—regardless of its many merits—remains somewhat detached from the Holocaust insofar as the Holocaust is conceived of as a political, theological, and moral challenge that is not rooted in biographical experience and family history. The past is cut off from biographically grounded memory. “After Auschwitz” theology of the second generation does not locate itself explicitly and consciously in the context of a perpetrator culture. As a consequence, it tends to make universalizing and inclusivist theological claims.

This is the special challenge for a new generation interested in theological, ethical, and religious inquiry in light of a legacy to which it is tied emotionally, culturally, and through their families. Theologians of a new generation would have to acknowledge their ties to the Shoah without short-circuiting them by theological operations that make a priori claims about being on the side of the victims (for example, constructing “theologies of the cross” or paralleling the Passion Narrative with Auschwitz). A new “post-Shoah” theology would not present models that announce universal solutions or promises of salvation. Rather, it would articulate a theological critique that locates itself in the land of perpetrators, demanding a confrontation with this legacy on societal, political, emotional, and personal levels. German post-Shoah theologians would incorporate into their theological thinking their tangled cultural and biographical roots in a perpetrator culture. The legacy of perpetrators becomes the new theological challenge.

2. A post-Shoah theology has the courage to resist concealment of subjectivity. Departure from the myth of innocence in German family history begets, almost inevitably, an unveiling of the thinking, writing, and acting subject. The scholarly concealment of subjectivity is, however, not the problem of theology alone. Sociologist Harald Welzer showed, for example, that the German social sciences are engaging in similar patterns,⁴⁷

and Helmut Dahmer criticized Germany's modern historians of the Holocaust for having “rationalized their discipline” to such a degree that they “de-emotionalized and de-moralized the subject of their research” and “de-personalized” the events. “Victimizers and victims,” he concludes, “disappear from their [historical] reconstructions, which is why these experts have little to say to us, the heirs [of this past].”⁴⁸ Dahmer's and Welzer's criticism of their disciplines coincides with my observation about the shortcomings of too many post-1945 German theologies. Their concealment of subjectivity corresponds to a disappearance of moral agency with regard to perpetrators. And that, in turn, leads to the eventual effacement of victims as well.

Resisting the propensity to conceal subjectivity will not resolve all problems. Certainly, there is always the risk that autobiographical referencing does not go beyond the anecdotal or the listing of professional accomplishments. Any conscious incorporation of the writing self must be a genuine effort of cultural positioning so as to protect it from the danger of parochialism and narcissistic self-referencing. Metz's notion that a new “kind of saying ‘I’ must be learned categorically; it is by no means subjectivistic or uncritical, and also not unpolitical” can serve as a good starting point for further work.⁴⁹

Literary critic Irmgard Wagner writes: “Positionality refers to the conscious adoption of particular perspectives, such as ethnicity, race, gender, class, generation, or sexuality, when examining hermeneutically different texts, discourses, history, events.” Positionality is the “acknowledgment” and “reflection” of one's own perspective as one “interprets a cognitive entity.”⁵⁰ Such a positioned approach is rarely adopted and practiced in contemporary German theology; yet it is sorely needed in the face of the Shoah.

3. A post-Shoah theology must be credible from the perspective of the victims without evading the legacy of perpetrators. To account for both victims and perpetrators in theological thought is a controversial claim. Traditional “after Auschwitz” theologians, who are in unquestioned solidarity with the victims, would argue that such a position is ethically untenable because it puts victims and perpetrators on the same level. Do both groups deserve the same moral weight? I do not think so. Rather, by integrating the history and legacy of perpetrators into a scholarly and moral inquiry, we would add a corrective to previous “after Auschwitz” theologies. By focusing on bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators, the new theological thinking would have to be assessed as to its validity and authenticity from the perspective of the victims as well as to its effectiveness in confronting the perpetrators and their legacy. For example, when speaking about the necessity of repentance, forgiveness or salvation, whom do we have in mind? For whom do we speak: for Holocaust survivors, or for “ordinary” Germans who avoid delving into their family past? What cultural desires are revealed when German theologians promote concepts of reconciliation without participating in actual conversations with survivors and their descendants?

By incorporating theologically the perpetrators and their deeds, the idea of the Shoah as rupture, as Zivilisationsbruch, can no longer remain the exclusive focus of theological inquiry. Rather, continuities in church and theology move to the foreground. No longer is the year 1945 the Stunde Null, the “Zero Hour,” the watershed between past and present. No longer are the church declarations of guilt in the im-mediate postwar years the sole representation of ecclesiastical attitudes of a new West Germany. Rather, we also need to turn our attention to the period from the end of the war until the late 1950s and to investigate both theological statements and declarations put forth by the church about the Allied internment of suspected war criminals and the American denazification program (both of which the churches condemned almost unanimously), about the Kriegsverurteilte (“accused war criminals”), or about Heimat and Vertreibung (“expulsions”). We may discover that these attitudes, which reveal conservative and nationalistic tendencies, do not so much signal a theological break with the past rather than a continuation of thought dating back to the 1920s. Theological and ideological continuities to previous Weltanschauungen will remain hidden if Germans take only the end of the war as the point of departure for their (family) biographical memory and their theological inquiry.

4. A post-Shoah theology that takes into account the history and legacy of perpetrators requires the testimony of victims. When scholars and theologians decide to take on the surviving documents, memoirs and memories of perpetrators, they first must make a conscientious and deliberate effort to understand the experiences and viewpoints of the victims. Perpetrators have something to hide; victims and survivors usually do not. Material related to perpetrators requires different methodological approaches than testimony of victims. After 1945, most perpetrators tried to veil their deeds and motivations, both officially in the Allied denazification process⁵¹

as well as in the transmission of personal memories in the private setting of families. They solicited pity and sympathy. On occasion, they did so by using religious language explicitly, as is evident in the autobiographic and apologetic works written after 1945 by people like Hans Frank (the General Governor of the Polish protectorate), Rudolf Höss (commandant at Auschwitz), and Oswald Pohl, the person in charge of all economic aspects of the concentration camp system.⁵²

Integrating material left by bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators into theological thought requires the testimony of victims. Their witness serves as a corrective to the perpetrator's omissions, distortions, and lies. Caution and suspicion must also be applied when reading the work of theologians who had succumbed to and embraced nationalistic ideals but, after 1945, have disguised their moves in a theological language adjusted to the new realities.⁵³

After the Shoah, it is impossible to do an ethically tenable theology that solely relies on material left by the perpetrators. Today it is equally untenable to do theology in the German context without taking the legacy of perpetrators into account.

5. A theology that positions itself culturally and family-biographically opens new ways of relating to witnesses of the Shoah as well as to one's own history. A post-Shoah theology that questions an unconscious, affective identification with victims of the Nazi genocidal policy and does not misappropriate their testimony provides space to initiate new kinds of encounters between the descendants of nonpersecuted German families and of the descendants of members of victimized communities. The victim or survivor ceases to be the object of theological curiosity, ceases to be a mere resource of raw material for Christian theologizing. Instead, witnesses of victimized communities regain subjectivity and become truly a Gegenüber, an “equal other.” A post-Shoah German theology may thus be able to overcome a relationship that is characterized by silences and feelings of guilt. Instead, such a theology encourages lively conversations with witnesses and their families. Rather than being struck mute when encountering witnesses of victim-ized communities, post-Shoah theologians would learn how to speak responsibly when face to face with the “Other” and how to respect differences. They would also learn not to sacralize victims, survivors, and their descendants, because any sacralization, well-intended as it may be, dehumanizes the witness. It effaces the real person.

As new relationships open up to people of victimized communities, theologians consciously positioned in a perpetrator culture are also empowered to liberate themselves from the postwar myth of innocence and thus account for their social origin and family with more clarity. A German post-Shoah generation, as it encounters the memory of victims and survivors with more openness, will be able to extend this openness to the past of their parents and grandparents. Understanding one's own roots is an indispensable part of this process.

No doubt this venture, like all face-to-face encounters, comes with a risk, for it requires an honest and lively reconnection with one's own family and social networks as well as with people persecuted by the NS regime. Because of this risk that lies at the heart of all human relationships, a post-Shoah theology is vulnerable. But if we try to avoid vulnerability, then “Auschwitz,” despite of all the rhetorical power that we lend to this word, is reduced to a metaphor.

6. Finally, a post-Shoah theology resists the Christian tendency of allegorizing suffering and commits itself to theological acts of preventing genocides. A post-Shoah theology written from the context of the land of perpetrators and cognizant of the necessity of the witness of victimized communities cannot limit itself to doing theology on the grounds of the suffering of the victims alone, because the danger of pathos remains ever so close. Instead, it must integrate a critical awareness of how the legacy of perpetrators has been transmitted through cultural and social systems as well as theological and public discourse. This is a political act that strives toward justice in a postgenocidal situation and engages in preventive measures in a pregenocidal climate.