8 - Disruptive Potential: Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, National Socialism, and Democracy

Summary

I

FEW BIOGRAPHIES IN modern German history provide as many dynamic encounters with the occult as that of stigmatic Therese Neumann (1898–1962) from the small town of Konnersreuth in the Bavarian countryside. She became a religious phenomenon from 1926 until her death, bleeding from her eyes, feet, and hands and hearing heavenly voices in ecstasy before devoted followers for thirty-five years. She also allegedly spoke archaic languages during her trances, experienced miraculous cures, and subsisted exclusively on communion hosts. Although accused by many of fraud, she developed a group of advocates known as the Konnersreuth Circle and her beatification process began in 2005 after Church authorities received 45,000 letters of support.1 Her alleged connection with the Christian supernatural and popularity with millions of Catholics worldwide made her an uneasy figure for the hierarchy of the Church as well as a National Socialist regime that sought strict social conformity. Her presence as a public figure from the middle years of the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich and the first years of the Federal Republic likewise provides a unique window into the continuities and discontinuities of occult, religious, and paranormal thinking during this tumultuous period in German history.

The life of Neumann's most famous supporter, Fritz Gerlich, illustrates the potential for controversy that her stigmata posed both to the institutional Church and the totalitarian state. Initially a liberal Calvinist journalist who visited Konnersreuth to prove Neumann's dramatic ecstasy a fake, Gerlich became convinced instead of her holiness and converted to Catholicism. After publishing two books defending the authenticity of Therese Neumann's stigmata, Gerlich started a newspaper, Der gerade Weg (The straight path), which challenged the political establishment at the end of the Weimar Republic. Devoted to strident confrontation with Communism and National Socialism, the newspaper also critiqued Gerlich's own Bavarian People's Party (BVP) for cooperating with Social Democrats during the Weimar period. A wealthy aristocrat from the Konnersreuth Circle funded the project.

It was a prophecy by Therese Neumann herself that sparked Gerlich's interest in starting the newspaper that ultimately cost him his life in Dachau on the infamous June 30, 1934, Night of the Long Knives, when the Third Reich settled scores with hundreds of political opponents including a few prominent Catholics. In fact, Gerlich regularly sought answers from Neumann while in her so-called state of exalted rest on Fridays regarding the everyday functioning of Der gerade Weg.