This substantial volume is the product of a conference held in 2018 at the University of Münster, a nerve center for scholarship on modern church history that was recently awarded a national Cluster of Excellence designation in the field of religion and politics. Conference volumes are often a mixed bag, and while this one is no exception, its twenty or so essays are linked by a shared perspective that aims to complicate classic narratives of the Third Reich era in which cross and swastika are counterposed as antitheses in a confessionally inflected dialectic of resistance and repression, religion and secularity. The contributors are concerned less with familiar theological and institutional categories than with faith in the broadest sense, as manifested in a complex interplay of religious and political identities in the lived experience of ordinary Germans.
Contributions are grouped under three rubrics—“Actors and Practices,” “Ideological and Religious Motives,” “Interpretive Discourses”—though the category boundaries are more than a little fluid. Despite obvious contrasts between Protestants’ internecine Church Struggle and the Catholic hierarchy's running battles to defend institutional rights under the 1933 Concordat, patterns of quotidian ambivalence and accommodation, as Manfred Gailus suggests in a wide-ranging overview, were endemic to both communities. The Party rank and file were largely indifferent to ideological agendas; a majority remained nominal church members. Many if not most Germans arguably practiced some form of what the editors term a hybrid (or “dual”) faith in which Christian and National Socialist impulses were not mutually exclusive and could in fact be mutually reinforcing. A great many were probably oblivious to any real dissonance; others may have elected to conform despite awareness of tensions or else found ways of assimilating new dictates to inherited beliefs and practices.
As might be expected, many of the contributors explore the contours of this hybrid faith by way of biographical inquiries and microhistories of particular communities and organizations. Nearly twice as many studies deal with Catholics as with the Protestant majority. Hybrid loyalties at the outset of the Third Reich are a central theme of two local case studies that focus on Berlin Catholics: an account by Klaus Große Kracht of major public church events and Holger Arnin's nuanced analysis of the polyvalent character of the term “Führer” as used in one widely circulated parish paper. Olaf Blaschke's impressive portrait of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, an icon of resistance for his role in the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, in many respects encapsulates the central project of the book. If Stauffenberg's Catholic faith was an important motivating factor in his resistance activities, Blaschke argues, then one must also ask how that faith functioned during his prior decade of loyal service to the regime.
Another case study of ambivalence is Lucia Scherzberg's essay on the Bavarian priest Franz Seidl who, as an active participant in Walter Grundmann's notorious Institute for Research on Jewish Influence on German Church Life, devoted considerable effort to plans for purging the Catholic liturgy of alleged Jewish elements. Seidl's proposals were a mélange of predictably racialist themes—the eucharist re-conceived, for example, as Nordic “grail celebration”—and, interestingly, reforms generally associated with the interwar Liturgical Movement. Seidl the National Socialist fellow traveler remained a parish priest in good standing for a quarter century and more after the war and was in fact celebrated in church circles as a victim of Nazi persecution, having been jailed briefly in 1941 for joining protests against official efforts to remove crucifixes from Bavarian classrooms.
Several contributions are noteworthy for drawing attention to the experience of women, although, as Isabel Heinemann concludes in her insightful commentary, gender still remains an under-researched dimension of the period. Thomas Brodie notes the frequently gendered character of Catholic experience during World War II, while Sarah Thieme offers a finely textured case study of syncretism and “feminization” in Advent and Christmas observances in Bochum under the aegis of local National Socialist women's organizations. Hans-Ulrich Thame describes a project in one small central German town in 1935 to produce a tapestry for the local Protestant church, a joint undertaking of Party and church women's groups that constructed a symbolic universe combining cross and swastika, taking this as the point of departure for a broader examination of ways traditional symbols and rituals could be instrumentalized in the interests of political agendas. A fascinating case study that combines both hybrid faith and women's agency is Armin Nolzen's depiction of the League of German Girls as a surrogate spiritual community, with a “semantics of faith” built around topoi of loyalty, duty, and love of Führer. Nolzen underscores the limits of this initiative by citing the case of Ursula Meyer-Semlies, a member in East Prussia who rose to a position of regional leadership that afforded her entrée to party membership and an eventual career as a schoolteacher, in which capacity she stubbornly insisted on retaining religious instruction among her classroom duties in contravention of party officials’ dictates, appealing to deeply held Protestant convictions and the freedom of conscience she claimed as a politically reliable National Socialist.
The final essay in the book, a stimulating comparative analysis by Mark Ruff, juxtaposes interpretive issues raised by the Church Struggle era with those raised by Trump-era American evangelicalism, showing how each case helps to shed light on the other. His reflections serve as a compelling reminder of the continued relevance of themes pursued throughout this book. It is manifestly impossible for a brief review to convey the full range of topics and approaches that its contributors explore. Taken as a whole, however, they provide a useful index of scholarly developments over the past generation and help identify avenues of inquiry that invite further investigation.
