On November 5, 1943, the sixty-seven-year old Roman Catholic priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, died in Gestapo custody en route to Dachau concentration camp. From November 10, 1938 until October 22, 1941, Lichtenberg had offered daily public prayers at St. Hedwig, the Catholic cathedral in Berlin, for “non-Aryan Christians and persecuted Jews” (xv). It was this deed that distinguished “Lichtenberg from other clergymen, even those who resisted the Nazi regime in another manner” (116). But why did Lichtenberg break the Catholic Church's deafening silence during the Holocaust and pray for Jews? Gaydosh seeks the answer in Lichtenberg's “life experience” that, she argues, gave him “the resolute courage he needed to choose to pray for the Jews” (xvii). She writes that her conclusions “differ from previous authors” in that in her biography, “Bernhard Lichtenberg emerges not as a German nationalist . . . but as a cosmopolitan Christian” (xx).

The biography is organized chronologically. Lichtenberg was born in 1875 in Ohlau, Silesia to devout Catholic parents in the era of the Kulturkampf. Gaydosh argues that his experiences as a member of the Catholic minority in Silesia and the activism of his parents during the Kulturkampf perhaps alerted the young Lichtenberg to the suffering associated with ideological battles, sensitized him to the plight of minorities, and taught him tolerance. She asserts further that Lichtenberg's university education “stressed support and understanding of different nations and various cultures” (11). Unfortunately, she offers little evidence to back up this claim.

In 1900, Lichtenberg became vicar at St. Mauritius in Friedrichsberg-Lichtenberg before, in 1913, being named pastor of Sacred Heart parish in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Lichtenberg became rector (Probst) of St. Hedwig cathedral in Berlin in December 1932. Readers will find Gaydosh's discussion of Lichtenberg's ministry to the Catholic minority in Berlin of great interest, as she offers an informed overview of Lichtenberg's tenure in Berlin. What is striking in this discussion is not so much Lichtenberg's cosmopolitanism and tolerance of others but his conservatism and orthodoxy. Gaydosh acknowledges that Lichtenberg was quite conservative, and he fought what he perceived as harmful manifestations of modernity, secularism, and immorality in German society. Thus, he fiercely advocated for confessional education, clashed with Social Democrats, and vocally opposed public sunbaths and childbirth and sex information centers.

Throughout her work, Gaydosh attempts to analyze what Lichtenberg's engagement with the religious, political, and social issues of his day reveal about his stance on race and Jews. Surprisingly, here too, Lichtenberg mostly appears quite conventional for his era. In his opposition to abortion and birth control, Lichtenberg conflated nationalism, eugenics, and racism when he proclaimed that, “The white race begins to die because of its culture,” whereas “The colored race increases two times as quickly as the white race” (59). Later in the monograph, Gaydosh discusses a well-known letter Lichtenberg wrote in 1935 to Hitler, in which he protested an anticlerical publication, Der Pfaffenspiegel. Lichtenberg noted the author's “non-Aryan heritage” and blamed Social Democrats for the book's dissemination (96). Unfortunately, Gaydosh's analysis falls short because she neither contextualizes these statements nor does she offer a critical examination of Lichtenberg's attitude toward race, Jews, and eugenics, especially in the context of Catholic teaching and practice. Instead, she argues that both statements were neither racist nor anti-Semitic but pragmatic. Gaydosh writes that, “If officials would not listen to a Christian argument regarding abortion, he would offer them a nationalist argument. . .He did not hate other races nor was he prejudiced against other races” (59). In the case of Lichtenberg's letter to Hitler, Gaydosh insists again that “Lichtenberg's statement was neither anti-Semitic nor questionable” (97). Rather, his choice of words was “purposeful” since he simply used the term “non-Aryan” to get Hitler's attention (97). In contrast, when in 1920, Lichtenberg argued for the primary role of Catholic priests in Catholic youth welfare and conceded the same rights to Protestant pastors and rabbis over Protestant and Jewish youth, Gaydosh interprets this statement as a show of “respect for Protestantism and Judaism” by Lichtenberg (48).

It appears that Gaydosh's high regard for Lichtenberg prevented her from offering a more critical historical analysis that considers recent scholarship on the Catholic Church's anti-Semitism. This scholarship emphasizes the Church's explicit distinction between secular and religious Jews, its passive response to the murder of Jews, and its failure to create, what Kevin Spicer called, “a theology of rescue and fellowship that embraced all people, especially Jews.” Gaydosh acknowledges that it was “specifically religious persecution [of Jews] that stirred Lichtenberg to speak,” but she does not contextualize or develop this crucial point (117).

Including the important topic of antisemitism in her analysis of Lichtenberg's life and writings would not have diminished his courageous acts, such as his 1935 protest of the torture and murder of Jews in Esterwegen concentration camp and his public daily intercession on behalf of Jews and other persecuted people in the aftermath of the 1938 November pogrom. On the contrary, such an analysis would serve to illuminate even further how extraordinary Lichtenberg's protests were, when even in the face of the vicious anti-Semitism that permeated German and European society and infected the Catholic Church, Lichtenberg still could, in his own words, “hold on to the firm precepts of Jesus Christ: ‘You should love your neighbor as yourself’” (136).