Review of Brandon Bloch, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

Reviewed by Philip Decker

Brandon Bloch has written a superb new history of Germany’s twentieth century, told from the perspective of a large, heterogenous cast of Protestant theologians, intellectuals, judges, and academics whose trajectories the author tracks from the interwar years to the early 1970s. The thesis of Reinventing Protestant Germany is that these figures—who originally came of age amid blistering Weimar polemics against parliamentarism, and most of whom accommodated themselves in one way or another to the Hitler state—reemerged in postwar society as champions of the democratic process, recruiting for this purpose the mythology of expansive Confessing Church resistance to Nazi crimes and the idea that shared Protestant values represent the natural bedrock of a plural German polity.

Chapter 1 is a survey of theological debates that tore through German Protestantism of the Weimar era, at the center of which were three factions: the “conservative Lutherans [waxing] nostalgic for a lost unity of throne and altar” (32) such as Paul Althaus and Friedrich Brunstäd; the dialectical theologians clustered around Karl Barth, who increasingly pined for the church’s retreat into Scripture and “disentanglement from worldly concerns” (47); and the followers of Rudolf Smend, who believed that representative government could be made to work within a patriarchal Protestant consensus. Chapter 2, concerning the Nazi era, reveals the fatal complementarity between the NSDAP’s völkisch ultranationalism and Schmittian theories of the “total state” advanced by the likes of Althaus, Walter Künneth and Erik Wolf (52-53). Bloch argues that what Protestant resistance to Nazism did arise usually responded to direct assaults on the church and only sporadically to the persecution of Jews, the evils of militarism, and the elevation of race as the highest principle of state and society. Chapter 3, containing what may be some of the most surprising revelations of the book, discusses the immediate postwar years. It shows how figures such as Theophil Wurm and Hansjürg Ranke mobilized the embryonic language of human rights not to confront the sins of Nazism, but to oppose the trials of war criminals on the grounds that these defendants could not be judged by human law and would answer to God alone in the afterlife (110-111). Cleverly manipulating the Protestant values of well-placed American occupation officials, Ranke (himself an ex-Nazi) helped convince U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy to commute all but five of the remaining death sentences handed down within his jurisdiction (116).

The next four chapters each cover fractious issues facing the Federal Republic and the role of Protestant intellectuals and institutions, chiefly the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), as participants in a democratic system and as authors of the compromises that shaped West German law, identity and politics. Chapter 4 discusses family and education debates, the former revolving around the right of the husband to make decisions for the wife, the latter around the extraordinarily raw question of interconfessional school integration. Chapter 5 relates to the dilemma of German rearmament and concomitant right of conscientious objection, in defense of which the Barth and Martin Niemöller branches of the EKD honed the myth of Protestant anti-Nazi resistance (164-165). On all these scores, jurists such as Smend, Ulrich Scheuner and Adolf Arndt, whipping up the specter of Catholic tyranny, influenced rulings of the Constitutional Court in favor of the liberal positions, which were coded as synonymous with Protestant values. Turning to international relations, Chapter 6 recounts the origin and reception of the 1965 Eastern Memorandum, through which publication the EKD became “the first major institution in West Germany to challenge the national consensus” (197) that former territories east of the Oder-Neisse line ought to be restored to German control and that expelled peoples were entitled to return to them. Finally, Chapter 7 narrates Protestant sympathy for and involvement in, rather than reflexive antagonism toward, the student movements of the 1960s. A conclusion reflects briefly on Protestant stances toward the German antinuclear movement and on the EKD’s ambivalent orientation toward Germany’s growing Muslim minority.

Scrupulously researched, Reinventing Protestant Germany displays at every turn the author’s mastery of the intellectual life of German religion. Bloch is attentive to the subtle shades between theological positions as well as the penetration of these ideas into the institutions of society. Indeed, his book has quite a bit to say beyond the parameters suggested in its title. There are commentaries on Catholic natural law doctrine, the relationship between religion and jurisprudence (including Carl Schmitt’s cross-pollination with authoritarian Lutheran thought), German Protestantism’s ties to the Anglosphere (e.g., the 1937 Oxford conference on “Church, Community and State”), the nationalization of regional questions (e.g., Lower Saxony’s centrality to the debate over school integration), and the politics of reconstruction and the Cold War. Students of German history will find familiar topics refracted through a confessional lens in novel ways. I was startled to learn, for instance, that a former Rosenberg henchman turned Protestant pastor, Matthäus Ziegler, had been the one who brought the secret protocol of the 1933 Reichskonkordat to public attention (147), and did so while preaching a Protestant ethos of “tolerance” even as he himself had persecuted the Confessing Church on behalf of his neo-pagan master. In this example and elsewhere, Bloch underscores the relentless human instinct to obfuscate, shift blame, and reimagine the past, and reminds us that certain concepts which have entered the mainstream lexicon—human rights and tolerance—have strange histories and have been put to purposes which seem alien from a contemporary vantage point.

Bloch’s interest is in the intersection of theological controversy and statecraft, and this does come at the expense of a “bottom-up” approach to the history of German religion. Apart from the section about student protest in Chapter 7 (255-267) and sporadic references to figures like Elizabeth Schmitz (64), a secondary school teacher who urged prominent theologians to resist Nazi abuses, one notices little in the book about the lived experiences of Protestant believers. Moreover, absent a grounding in both German and Christian history, lay readers may find the dense earlier chapters hard to follow and lose track of the Scriptural or doctrinal bases of debates explicated therein. These are not flaws of the work so much as reflections of the author’s priorities. I did, however, wonder about the tension between, on the one hand, Bloch’s proposition that the postwar EKD gradually embraced participatory democracy, and on the other, that many of its victories were attained not through electoral politics but through the backdoor lobbying and manipulation of specific judges and Allied administrators. Is this an embrace of democracy, or, per Bloch’s attention to continuity, an embrace of oligarchy masked by a legitimizing democratic rhetoric, and in this sense a mutation of interwar Protestantism’s authoritarian stripes?

Reinventing Protestant Germany is an admirable work of scholarship which will be of interest not only to specialists of German religion, but equally to political scientists and historians of culture, law and liberalism. Bloch says much that is new about the religious heredity of the secular German state and his book will no doubt be read and discussed widely.