Udi Greenberg: Brandon, your exciting book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy, could not be more timely. At a moment in which religious nationalism increasingly embraces authoritarianism, you explore the opposite trajectory: how German Protestants, perhaps the country’s most nationalist and authoritarian bloc, came to embrace democracy and liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century. Can you perhaps summarize your key arguments and contributions?
Brandon Bloch: Thanks, Udi, for your generous introduction to my book. Reinventing Protestant Germany follows a cohort of Protestant pastors, theologians, and lay intellectuals born around the turn of the twentieth century who emerged as leaders in West German churches, political parties, and universities after 1945. Members of this cohort were socialized into the highly nationalistic Protestant youth movement of the 1920s. Under National Socialism, many participated in the Confessing Church, an organization that openly criticized Nazi incursions on the churches, but remained largely silent on the regime’s racial and antisemitic policies. After the war, however, these Protestants spearheaded democratic reform movements around issues such as family law, conscientious objection to military service, and executive emergency authority.
A key piece of my argument is that the Protestant Church’s political transformation had less to do with the repudiation of longstanding nationalist ideologies than with their recasting under the conditions of German occupation and division. I characterize the Protestant nationalist worldview in which my protagonists came of age to include several elements: antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-socialism (all familiar from The End of the Schism); but also the belief that Protestantism provided a set of values that underlay Germans’ shared political life. This latter conviction became critical for Protestant political activism in post-1945 West Germany. Armed with a narrative of principled resistance against the Nazi regime—which misconstrued a far more complex history—Confessing Church veterans reframed their church as a bulwark against overweening state power. At a time when a divided West Germany was governed by the Catholic-majority Christian Democratic Union, many Protestants continued to imagine their confession as the moral center of the German nation, even as they criticized the Cold War policies of the West German state. Protestants could thereby embrace calls to expand individual rights against the state without fully confronting their church’s historical antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and xenophobia.
At the same time, what I term West Germany’s Protestant public sphere was not closed off to outside influences. Encounters with individuals outside the German Protestant milieu challenged the tenets of Protestant nationalist ideology. For instance, German Protestants adopted the language of international human rights through dialogue with U.S. and West European ecumenical Protestants involved in founding the World Council of Churches. Pastors who participated in delegations to Warsaw and Prague, or engaged in newly founded Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, faced victims of Nazi atrocities who challenged their church’s preoccupation with German suffering. But transnational exchanges also enabled German Protestants to garner support for their own, self-serving narratives of the war. The German church’s postwar campaign against the Allied denazification and war crimes trials programs, for instance, depended upon the cooperation of sympathetic U.S. and British pastors.
Udi: I’d like to ask you about the fascinating conflict that you’re tracing between two major Protestant factions all the way from the 1930s to the 1960s. At its center was the question of religious communities’ relationship to the state: while conservatives tended to focus on state authority, others showed growing skepticism about it. In your book, it seems the fault lines were drawn in 1933 and 1934, and much of what follows is a rearticulation of the same conflicting visions. How do you explain the persistence of this division? What was it about the experience of early Nazism that made it into the founding intellectual moment for Protestant thought?
Brandon: The divergent responses in 1933/34 mapped onto a denominational divide between Lutheran and Reformed Protestants that long predated the rise of Nazism. The Confessing Church’s founding Barmen Declaration, which was drafted principally by the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, criticized the “totalitarian” state for exceeding its God-given limits. The Barmen Declaration—and especially the Dahlem statement of October 1934 (signed by a more radical faction within Barth’s camp)—conflicted with the traditional Lutheran distinction between the fallen worldly realm, in which the Christian owed loyalty to the political sovereign, and the coming reign of the Gospel. Doctrinal questions about church-state relations took on an existential nature at a time when the German Christians, the radically pro-Nazi faction favored by the regime, threatened to upend the autonomy of the Protestant churches altogether.
Still, theology cannot fully explain the personal and political divides among Protestant pastors and lay intellectuals. Many baptized Lutherans aligned themselves with Karl Barth’s wing of the Confessing Church, and neither Lutheran nor Reformed dogma provided an obvious answer for how Protestants should respond to National Socialism. Sharp differences in personal experiences under the Nazi state are also key to explaining the embittered relations between the conservative and “Dahlemite” camps. Pastors and lay leaders in the Dahlemite faction frequently experienced arrest, Gestapo harassment, and bans on public speaking for their criticisms of Nazi church policy, even if the experience of Martin Niemöller, imprisoned for eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, was unusual. Members of this group believed that their suffering entitled them to lead the postwar Protestant Church federation. They had difficulty accepting that U.S. occupation authorities favored the conservative, anti-Communist Bishop Theophil Wurm, who had not come to the aid of the Dahlemites during the Nazi years.
Intra-Protestant animosities were further entrenched by the parallelism between the resistance narratives adopted on both sides. For Dahlemites, a legacy of heroic anti-Nazi opposition proved the bankruptcy of the Lutheran “two kingdoms” doctrine. According to traditional Lutherans, their own inward, spiritual resistance demonstrated the validity of the distinction, whereas the Dahlemites threatened to politicize the church in the manner of the German Christians. For either side to accept the legitimacy of the other would expose the holes in their own resistance narratives. Both groups whitewashed messier realities of compromise and compliance.
Udi: One of your book’s most illuminating sections charts the impact that Protestant ideas had on West German politics and governance. You show how politicians and writers—including socialists—explicitly drew on Protestant writings to justify legal exemptions to military service, reform of family law, and major shifts to diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe (to name just a few examples). This is all while the Protestant milieu was progressively losing its centrality in social and electoral life. How do you explain the persistent significance of Protestant theory to German politics?
Brandon: I appreciate this question because it points toward the multiple meanings and trajectories of secularization in the modern era, an important theme for both of our projects. The fact that rates of Protestant church attendance declined during the postwar decades, a classical measure of secularization, does not mean that the institutions of the Protestant public sphere—such as Protestant Academies, church commissions, the Protestant Lay Assembly (Kirchentag), or the church-affiliated press—lost their political relevance.
This apparent disjuncture is explained in part by the structure of organized religion in German society. Under the West German Basic Law, Protestant churches were (and continue to be) recognized as “corporations of public law,” authorized to collect funds through state taxes and to conduct public functions such as the supervision of religious education in schools. The churches also played important roles in the provision of hospitals and welfare services through the charitable Diakonie organization. The opt-out structure of church membership meant that the churches remained well-funded despite the decline in active participation. Political leaders therefore continued to recognize the Protestant churches as important pillars of public life. The postwar Protestant Church federation appointed an ambassador to the West German government, who maintained contacts with parliamentarians across the political spectrum. Conferences of the Protestant Academies brought together politicians, journalists, academics, and other figures of public life with pastors and church officials. The biennial Kirchentag, which continues to draw upwards of 100,000 participants, offered a space for lay Protestants to discuss major political controversies.
Postwar Protestant intellectuals spearheaded a distinct form of secularization: one in which the church did not retreat from politics but identified itself as the very source of secular democratic principles.
One also needs to consider how Protestant intellectuals positioned themselves in West German politics. The public figures I discuss, whether right-leaning like the jurist Ludwig Raiser or left-leaning like the Social Democratic parliamentarian Adolf Arndt, did not purport to represent the institutional interests of the Protestant churches. Instead, they positioned the Protestant confession as a source of democratic values for the West German polity as a whole, frequently by relying upon embellished accounts of anti-Nazi resistance. This vision mediated between conservative demands for a strong role of the churches in shaping legislation, and liberal calls for the absolute separation of church and state. It gained traction among reformist Social Democrats attempting to broaden their party’s appeal beyond its traditional working-class milieu, as well as constitutional scholars and federal judges seeking a foundation for the Basic Law in pre-political norms. Postwar Protestant intellectuals thereby spearheaded a distinct form of secularization: one in which the church did not retreat from politics but identified itself as the very source of secular democratic principles.
Udi: Let us conclude with a question about your work’s contemporary relevance. One of your book’s most important themes is liberalization’s incomplete nature: you powerfully show how Protestants’ embrace of democracy went hand in hand with their persistent clinging to nationalist and exclusionary ideas. As we witness the hardening of nationalist sentiments, did your project offer any useful models for de-radicalization and liberalization?
Brandon: As mentioned earlier, a major theme of the book is the importance of encounters across religious and national divides. In particular, exchanges with their counterparts across the Iron Curtain, as well as participation in nascent Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, confronted German Protestant pastors with individuals who did not share their narratives of the war centered on (non-Jewish) German victimization and Christian resistance. These processes of dialogue culminated in the Protestant Church’s Eastern Memorandum (Ostdenkschrift) of 1965, the first document by any major non-Communist German institution to call on the West German government to recognize the postwar German-Polish border, and thereby accept Germany’s loss of its former eastern territories. The memorandum’s authors had participated in both East-West and Christian-Jewish exchanges. They came to accept that reconciliation required both a personal and communal acceptance of responsibility—precisely what had been denied in the Protestant Church’s earlier campaign against denazification and war crimes trials.
Certainly the memorandum, like the dialogue itself, had its limitations. The authors prioritized reconciliation over material restitution, did not challenge the narrative of widespread Protestant resistance against Nazism, and called on the Polish side to equally “reexamine their own standpoint.” But the Eastern Memorandum, the most widely received and politically influential statement of the postwar German Protestant Church, also stands as a testament to the liberalization of a political milieu that, after the First World War, had denounced the Versailles Treaty and refused to accept the legitimacy of Germany’s territorial losses. My book shows how such a statement could emerge only through dialogue that relativized the perspectives of the participants, an indispensable precondition for democracy today as much as sixty years ago.
