Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before

Patterns of Prejudice

ISSN: 0031-322X (Print) 1461-7331 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpop20

Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler Anthony Kauders To cite this article: Anthony Kauders (2000) Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler, Patterns of Prejudice, 34:3, 27-45, DOI: 10.1080/00313220008559145 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00313220008559145

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ANTHONY KAUDERS

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Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler1

ABSTRACT Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced vb'lkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the 'Jewish question' as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of 'the Jew' (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although GermanJewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and 'Germans'. I

KEYWORDS antisemitism,

Catholic, church, Germany, Holocaust, Munich, Protestant, racism

I

n June 1960, some six months after the desecration of Cologne's synagogue, Golo Mann was invited to give a talk at the Rhein-Ruhr-Klub in Diisseldorf. Although not a specialist in the field, Mann's reputation as a historian of note had led the organizers to suggest that he give an overview of the 'roots' and 'repercussions' of antisemitism, a request he attended to in a fairly thorough manner. The grandson of a Munich family that had converted from Judaism,

1

The author wishes to thank the Vidal Sassoon Center for the International Study of Antisemitism for its generous financial assistance and, in particular, Drs Leon Volovici and Simcha Epstein.

PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE, O Institute for Jewish Policy Research, vol. 34, no. 3,2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi) 0031-322X/27-45/014399


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Mann was not averse to arguing that the Jews, too, were partly to blame for the calamity that had beset them, not least because of their predilection for intellectual pursuits that had often ended in 'corrosive' criticism, humour and d e r i ~ i o n Mann .~ also distinguished between various forms of Jew-hatred, choosing Heinrich Treitschke as the exponent of a prejudice that, all things being equal, might have been tolerated. Indeed, 'had this kind of antisemitism prevailed in Germany, it would have been endured, it would not have led to a disgraceful [schandvbllen] catastrophe', it would have petered out eventually for lack of 'lifeblood' (Lebensk~aft).~ As will be remembered, Treitschke's antisemitism of the 1880s had infuriated most Jews, who construed the renewed efforts to curtail 'Jewish' influence in Germany as an attempt to revoke their emancipation altogether.* Golo Mann, by contrast, invoked the legacy of Treitschke as an act of empathetic re-creation, hoping to show that the objective of 'respectable' antisemites was not nearly so dangerous as that of Hitler and his followers. Treitschke, though bad enough, was manageable. The Gesellschaft fur christlich-judische Zusammenarbeit (Association for Christian-Jewish Co-operation in Munich), writing a letter of protest to US General McCloy in August 1949,was driven by similar concerns. Catholic and Protestant members of the organization submitted that it would be a tremendous exaggeration to suspect the majority of the German people of being antisemitic. Already at the time of Hitler's despotic rule the majority of the enslaved people turned away with horror from the persecution of the Jews. . . . That among 60 millions [sic] of good Germans there are a few 10,000 bad ones who stick to the godless and inhuman antisemitism must not surprise anybody who knows something about the psychology of p e ~ p l e . ~

These men did not go on to say why Hitler had been able to achieve his goals in the early years of the regime, when most 'good Germans' had not yet become the 'enslaved' victims of 'despotic rule'. Had the men of Munich's Gesellschaft fur christlich-judische Zusammenarbeit wished to proffer an explanation, however, Golo Mann's comments of 1960 might have come in handy. With Mann's ruminations at their disposal, they might have contended that the differences between ill will towards the Jews before 1933 and antisemitism thereafter made all the difference. They could have agreed with Mann that

Golo Mann, Der Antisemitismus. Wurzeln, Wirkung und Uberwindung (Frankfurt and Munich: Ner-Tamid-Verlag 1960), 23,27. Ibid., 15. O n Treitschke, see Uriel Tal, Christiansand Jews in Germany. Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1975), 55ff.; Walter Boehlich (ed.), Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag 1965); Ulrich Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke:politische Biographie eines deutschen Nationalisten (Diisseldorf: Droste 1998). Letter from Brandlmeier and Menzel to McCloy, 2 August 1949: Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 259, no. 111 (this (poor) translation can be found in the files). O n the Gesellschaft, see Josef Foschepoth, Im Schatten der Vergangenheit: die Anfange der Gesellschaften fur christlichjiidische Zusammenarbeit (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1993).

ANTHONY KAUDERS 29


Treitschke's sentiments were understandable and that these views were not to be mistaken for the murderous policies of Himmler and Heydrich. The reasons for not offering this version of events lie at the heart of the present investigation, the purpose of which is to examine how many post-war members of the Protestant and Catholic churches, in this case clerics in the Bavarian capital of Munich, reflected on the nature of Jew-hatred with preHitler minds and post-Hitler words.

Continuity and discontinuity in clerical attitudes towards the Jews Both Catholics and Protestants agreed on a number of issues vis-a-vis the 'Jewish question' during the Weimar R e p u b k 6 First, they often distanced themselves from what they perceived to be rowdy or unruly antisemitism, so-called Radazzantisemitismus. In many areas of Germany, clergymen opined that the volkisch movement had been instrumental in promoting the idea of inherent differences between Germans and Jews, while dismissing this notion in so far as it involved violence and bloodshed. Second, there was a pronounced tendency to be critical of certain types of Jews, particularly Eastern European Jews and those who ostensibly undermined the fabric of the nation, representatives of the left-liberal-press, of left-wing parties and of 'finance capital' being prominent amongst them. Third, Catholics and Protestants alike frequently held that Jews had been responsible for Germany's demise, either because of their 'international' proclivities and pacifism, because they had been shirkers and profiteers during the First World War or else because they had brought about the noxious revolution of 1918-19. Fourth, Christian theology as well as medieval stereotypes provided clerics with an arsenal for conceptualizing Gentile-Jewish relations, and more often than not this arsenal comprised unfavourable images of the Jew. Finally, as much as racial antisemitism threatened the teachings of both churches, and especially of Rome-based Catholicism, attacks against Judaism were usually condemned 6

The following is based on Thomas Breuer, Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstreit zwischen Nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt i m Erzbistum Bamberg (Mainz: Matthias-Griinewald-Verlag 1992), 313; Wolfgang Altmann, 'Die Judenfrage in Evangelischenund Katholischen Zeitschriften zwischen 1918 und 1933', PhD dissertation, University of Munich, 1971,417-18; Olaf Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus i m Deutschen Kaiserreich (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1997), esp. the conclusion; Marikje Smid, Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/33 (Munich: Kaiser 1990), 343; Horst Jesse, Die Geschichte der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirchengemeinden in Munchen und Umgebung, 1510-1990 (Neuendettelsau: Freimund-Verlag 1994), 242; Ino Arndt, 'Die Judenfrage im Licht der evangelischen Sonntagspresse von 1918-1933', PhD dissertation, University of Tiibingen, 1960, 218; Bjorn Mensing, Pfarrer und Nationalsozialismus.

Geschichte einer Verstrickung a m Beispiel der evangelisch-lutherzschen Kirche in Bayern (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1998), 77; Thomas Fandel, Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930-1939 (Paderborn: Schoningh 1997), 576ff.; Paul Mendes-Flohr, 'Ambivalent dialogue: Jewish-Christian theological encounter in the Weimar Republic', in P. Mendes-Flohr and Otto Dov Kulka (eds),Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism (Jersualem: Historical Society of Israel l987), 123ff.; Anthony Kauders, German Politics and the Jews. Dusseldorf and Niirnberg, 1910-1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996).


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when they endangered tenets of the faith, such as the inclusion of the Old Testament or the Jewish roots of Jesus and St Paul. The Jews themselves were time and again not seen as the main targets of volkisch propaganda and, even after 1933, National Socialist antisemitism was interpreted first and foremost as the harbinger - of Christian suffering.' Let us consider two examples, one prominent, the other less so. In a sermon of 1925, Munich's Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber praised Hitler as someone who knew much better than his cronies that Germany's history had not commenced in 1870 or 1517, that the rejuvenation of the Volk required the 'indispensable powers' of Christian culture, and that neither the cult of Wodan nor hatred of Rome could affect the recovery of the nation. What is more, he described it as deeply distressing that a movement whose 'spring' had once been 'pure' now lay poisoned as a result of a new Kulturkampf and other pernicious influence^.^ In the same sermon Faulhaber also recalled the words he had preached on New Years' Eve 1923.At the time, he had responded to anti-Jewish acts of violence by remarking that no 'human being was allowed to starve during this winter, every human life was precious, also the life of an Israelite'. Faulhaber now continued by attacking those unscrupulous commentators (gewissenlose Berichterstatter) who had concluded from 'this one sentence in a sermon lasting three-quarters of an hour' that 'I had protected the poor, starving J e ~ s ' A . ~number of points seem noteworthy. Faulhaber, like many other members of his church, was captivated by the volkisch climate, of which Hitler was a leading proponent and whose main fault lay in its antiCatholic and extremist positions. Faulhaber was equally concerned that antisemitic feelings would culminate in Jewish deaths. Yet, however much he may have feared this outcome of widespread hostility towards the Jews, he was not willing to challenge it unequivocally, thereby risking the alienation of members of his flock. Instead, he tried to steer clear of the Scylla of radical antisemitism and the Charybdis of inappropriate philosemitism, in the process satisfying neither the right nor reassuring the Jews. Eight years later, on the occasion of Advent 1933, Faulhaber held a series of famous sermons on 'Judaism, Christianity and Germandom'. In these sermons, he advanced an extensive defense of the Old Testament, especially of its value to Christianity, and at the same time emphasized the superior status of the New Testament, which he called the holiest of books. Church historians have frequently pointed to numerous passages as evidence of the This belief has sometimes been adopted by Catholic historians, who claim that the church had too much on its hands to be able to defend the Jews, or that the Jews had enjoyed enough support from abroad, or that the church was ignorant of events in 'the East'. See Anselm Reichold, Die deutsche katholische Kirche zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (1933-1945) (St Ottilien: EOS-Verlag 1992), 205-6, 210; Heinz Hurten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918-1945 (Paderborn, Munich etc.: Schoningh 1992),436-7; Konrad Repgen, 'Die Deutschen Bischofe und der Zweite Weltkrieg', Historisches Jahrbuch, 1995,440. 8 'Deutsches Ehrgefuhl und katholisches Gewissen', 13-14: Archiv des Erzbistums Munchen und Freising (AEM), 8 Theol. 337811. 9 Ibid., 18-19.

7


ANTHONY KAUDERS 31 anti-antisemitic approach of the Catholic clergy. Indeed, Faulhaber warned that 'racial research' could not be embraced if it jeopardized the 'foundations of Christianityyand that the 'aversion [Abneigung] to the Jews of today' must not be transferred to the sacred books of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, the Cardinal qualified whatever defense may have existed here and elsewhere by adding that Christianity had not become 'a Jewish religion through the incorporation' of the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, the writings of the Tanakh had not been 'penned by Jews'; rather, they had been inspired by God's spirit and therefore figured as His word. As if to underline this point once again, Faulhaber repeated his admonition not to apply present-day dislike for the Jews to the Jews of pre-Christian times. As had been true in 1923 and 1925, Faulhaber embraced the volkisch creed in its call for racial hygiene; he implicitly accepted the basis for antiJewish sentiments and policies of the early 1930s, and again distanced himself from solutions to the 'Jewish question' that appeared to be targetted against the Christian faith.1° In fact, aside from Faulhaber's strong words in favour of the Old Testament, which after all had more to do with the fear that National Socialist Gleichschaltung might affect Catholic institutions and beliefs, he never once put forward reasons as to why the 'Jews of today' should deserve solidarity. As in the mid-192Os, the Jews were important merely as progenitors of Christianity. Similarly, Jewish men and women occasioned his sympathy only as victims of harsh and brutal measures, though unlike in the mid-1920s he never said so publicly.ll In short, it did not take from the authorities to limit seriously Faulhaber's utterances on the 'Jewish question'. H e had said similar things prior to the rise of Hider, at a time when racialist ideas had already infiltrated the general as well as Catholic discourse on the Jews. The other example worth analysing briefly is that of Friedrich Langenfal3, dean or superintendent of the Protestant Church in Munich from 1930 to 1950, editor of the Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt (EvG) and of the influential journal Zeitwende,12as well as one of three chairmen on the board of Munich's

10 'Judentum, Christentum, Germanentum. Adventspredigten gehalten in St Michael zu Miinchen 1933', 9,19,24: AEM, Hom. 317. O n the importance of 'moderate' racial hygiene, see Faulhaber, 'Christentum und Germanentum. Silvesterpredigt in St Michael zu Miinchen am 31. Dezember 1933', 16: AEM, 8" Hom. Conv. 111; and Stadtpfarrer Muhler, 'Religion und Rasse', intended as a contribution to Munich's church paper, in Johann Neuhausler,

Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: der Kampf des Nationalsozialismus gegen die katholische Kirche und der kirchliche Widerstand (Munich: Katholische Kirche Bayerns 1946), ii.389. 11 Faulhaber argued that the Jews, too, belonged to Germany. He maintained that the church had to focus on its own problems and that the Jews could count on support from abroad. Finally, he insisted that Jews who had converted to Christianity be given church protection. See Ludwig Volk (ed.), Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers. I 1917-1934, vol. 17 of Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fiir Zeitgeschichte, ed. Konrad Repgen (Mainz: MatthiasGriinewald-Verlag 1975), documents 300,3 16,569. 12 See the comments in Clemens Vollnhals, 'Die Evangelische Landeskirche in der Nachkriegspolitik: die Bewdtigung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit', in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Neuanfang in Bayern 1945-1949. Politik und Gesellschaft in der Nachkriegszeit (Munich: Beck 1988), 150.


32 Patterns of Prejudice 3 4 3 Association for Christian-Jewish Co-operation from 1953 to 1965. In early 1921, Langenfai3 gave a talk as pastor of St Matthew's Church on the subject of 'The Christian and Antisemitism'. Far from denouncing the volkisch movement, the Protestant cleric described how 'our people' had witnessed shirking and profiteering amongst the Jews; how the 'Jewish-capitalist' press had subverted the 'unity of the struggling German Volk'; how East European Jews had benefitted from the revolutionary upheavals and the fall of the empire; and how Jewish 'materialism' had been responsible for the evils of socialism, capitalism, modern art and literature.13 At various district synods of the rites st ant Church in the early 1920s, Langenfai3, his as dean, Hermann Lembert, and other leaders sharplyattacked the-destructive influence of certain Jews on public life, intimating that this minority was striving for world dominion, and repudiated 'racism', the desecration of cemeteries and the defamation of the Old Testament.14 Like Faulhaber, Langenfai3 also held sermons touching on the 'Jewish question' in the years after the onset of the Third Reich. O n New Years' Day 1935, for example, he reminded his audience that the Jewish origins of St Paul and Jesus were insignificant in that the 'living God' had spoken to the Jews, thereby giving meaning to the Bible and making irrelevant such matters as what 'the Jews have done or not done, said or not said'.15 At the end of the same year, Langenfai3 reproached those who believed they could derive God's will from within their own selves, whereby the search would be accomplished in lieu of a supposedly Jewish Bible. Far from being Jewish in character, so Munich's dean argued, the God who upheld His laws was the 'anti-Jewish God', for His judgement had first been directed at the Jewish people, H e had first 'destroyed the pride and works of this people'. And God would, so Langenfai3 concluded, destroy 'any people' that displayed pride and 'any work' that ignored the fact that 'we are on the path of death'.16 Some six months later, the Protestant churchman insisted that the Talmud was the book of the Jews, whereas the Old Testament had 'prepared the message that Jesus Christ was God's son'. He then conjured up Martin Luther, who while writing his

13 'Der Christ und der Antisemitismus', EvG, 13 February 1921. See also the introductory words of Pfarrer Joch: 'Being an antisemite means being an enemy of materialism, capitalism and the internationalist clichCY(Phrase). See, furthermore, Bjorn Mensing, '"Hitler hat eine gottliche Sendung". Munchens Protestantismus und der Nationalsozialismus', in Bjorn Mensing and Friedrich Prinz (eds), Irrlicht im Leutenden Miinchen? Der Nationalsozidlismus in der 'Hauptstadt der Bewegung' (Regensburg: F. Putset 1991), 98. 14 Mensing, 'Hitler', 99,101. Anne Lore Buhler, Der Kirchenkampf im evangelischenMiinchen: die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus and seinen Folgeerscheinungen im Bereich des evangelisch-lutherischen Dekanates Miinchen 1923-1950 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Vereins fur Bayerische Kirchengeschichte 1974), 31. Buhler's work is apologetic and at times rife with antisemitic clichis from the 1920s (see especially page 15). For comments on the Hitler putsch, which largely resembled Faulhaber's assessment of the events, see 'Wochenschau', EvG, 18 November 1923. 15 Sermon of 1 January 1935, 5: Landeskirchliche Archiv Nuremberg (LKA), Nachlass Langenfafi, no. 101. 16 Sermon of 15 December 1935: LKA, NL Langenfafi, no. 101.


ANTHONY KAUDERS 33 'hard and heated tract against the Jews and their Talmud' spent ten years as lecturer at Wittenberg expounding only one book of the Bible, namely Genesis.'' Again, as was the case with other Protestant and Catholic theologians, ~ a n ~ e n f achose f l to use language before 1933that referred to Jews and ~ e r k a n s as distinct entities. Furthermore, despite his harsh censure of Jews and 'Jewish power', he rejected manifestations of antisemitism that engendered excesses such as damage to property or uncalled-for harm to human beings. Most important, both before and after 1933, LangenfaiS remained adamant that the Old Testament be included in the canon of the Protestant Church. In the latter case, he used various means so as not to appear too friendly to the fleshand-blood Jews of his day. O n the contrary, whenever he defended the Tanakb, he did so by denying that it was really a Jewish product; instead, it breathed the spirit of God, which could not be said of the 'Jewish' Talmud. While it is true that in many of these lines the critic of National Socialism could detect references to undue German pride or to Christians who wrongly sought to forswear the 'Jewish' sources of Christianity, LangenfaG included passages that retained anti-Jewish images, whether in the shape of Luther's heritage or in that of the perfidious Talmud, none of which had been forced upon him. Like Faulhaber, then, LangenfaiS never relinquished the more common views underlying both Catholic and Protestant conceptions of the 'Jewish question' in the Weimar Republic.

The survival of antisemitism in the Catholic Church after 1945 Let us turn to the post-war period. In mid-June 1945 Cardinal Faulhaber submitted his first major assessment of the National Socialist past, which he distributed as 'pastoral guidelines' for clerics of the diocese. In it, he lamented the 'outrageous acts of &humanityy (bimmelscbreiende Unmenscblicbkeiten) in Dachau and Buchenwald that every 'reasonable human being detested' (verabscbeut). He added, however, that these 'terrible events and conditions' had been the responsibility of individual Unmenschen, not that of the German people as a whole or even of all Nazi Party members. The residents of Dachau, moreover, had never been allowed to enter the camp and thus had never known what went on inside. Faulhaber next decided to compare German crimes with Allied ones, and did so in fairly dramatic terms. Although the Allied forces had been in Germany for 'only a few weeks' and the occupation had had no 'history of twelve years like Dachau' did, things had 'happened here and there' that, from a moral point of view, could only be deplored. The Catholic dignitary went on to recount the various efforts of American journalists to relate to the world, including the 'remotest Negro village' (bis zum letzten Negerdorf), Germany's 'shame and disgrace' (Scbmacb und Schande). Yet the pictures would be no less frightening, he averred, if one had shown the terrible misery caused by British and American aerial bombardments of Munich and

17 Sermon of 4 July 1936: LKA, N L Langenfai3, no. 101.

34 Patterns of Preiudice 3 4 3


other cities. Humanity, Faulhaber closed, would be equally indignant at this horrible sight.18 Like other Catholics in Munich and Germany in general, Faulhaber also explained the Third Reich with reference to metaphysics, cumulative secularization and the effects of relying on 'Enlightenment ideology'.19 O n All Souls' Day 1946, for example, he condemned the 'spiritual morass in the old and new world, the betrayal of marital fidelity, the mass murder of unborn life, the confused state of moral terminology and in consequence the decline of public morality . . . the beatification [Seligpreisung]of the flesh in art and literature, in the cinema and theatre'.20 In a similar vein, the Miinchner

Katholische Kirchenzeitung. Bistumsblatt der Erzdiozese Munchen-Freising (MKK)contained various castigations of this aberration of human evolution. In an editorial of March 1946 entitled 'Our Guilt', the paper maintained that the events surrounding Hitler's reign had been foreshadowed by developments that replaced 'earnest Christian faith' with all kinds of 'Weltanschauung'.21A few months later, an article in the same paper cast this interpretation of the past in identical terms, subjecting the 'corrosive influence of rationalism', which

18 Dienstlicher Verkehr mit der Amerikanischen Militarregierung, 'Pastorale Richtlinien fur den Klerus der Erzdiozese Munchen', 5-6: LKA, Landeskirchenrat, no. 869. The same text, with substantial passages left out, can be found in Ludwig Volk (ed.), Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers. 11 1935-1945, vol. 26 of Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte, ed. Rudolf Morsey (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald-Verlag 1978), no. 953. In the published version there is no talk of 'Negro villages' or Allied crimes that required far less time than the twelve years the Nazis had had at their disposal in Dachau. For Catholic victimhood, see Michael Phayer, 'The German Catholic Church after the Holocaust', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, autumn 1996,153-4. 19 See, for example, Maria Mitchell, 'Materialism and secularism: C D U politicians and National Socialism, 1945-1949', Journal of Modern History, vol. 2, 1995, 283-4, 286, 291; Joseph Foschepoth, 'Zur deutschen Reaktion auf Niederlage und Besetzung', in Ludolf Herbst (ed.), Westdeutschland 1945-1955. Unterwerfung, Kontrolle, Integration (Munich: Oldenbourg 1986), 152; Ernst Klee, 'Persilscheine und falsche Passe: die Kirchen als Nazi-Fluchthelfer', in Walter H. Pehle and Peter Sillen (eds), Wissenschaft i m geteilten Deutschland. Restauration oder Neubeginn nach 1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer 1992),75ff.; Werner K. Blessing, '"Deutschland in Not, wir im Glauben . . ." Kirche und Kirchenvolk in einer katholischen Region', in Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke and Hans Woller (eds), Von Stalingrad zur Wahrungsreform: zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg 1989), 634,106; Konrad Repgen, 'Die Erfahrung des Dritten Reiches und das Selbstverstandnis der deutschen Katholiken nach 1945', in Victor Conzemius, Martin Greschat and Hermann Kocher (eds), Die Zeit nach 1945 als Thema kirchlicher Zeitgeschichte (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1988), 138. O n opposition to denazification, see 'Gemeinsamer Hirtenbrief nach beendeten Krieg', Fulda, 23 August 1945, in Rolf Rendtorff and Hans Hermann Henrix (eds), Die Kirchen und das Judentum. Dokumete von 1945 bis 1985 (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifatius and Munich: Kaiser 1988), 235; Bernhard Lehmann, Katholische Kirche und Besatzungsmacht in Bayern 1945-1949 i m Spiegel der OMGUS-Akten (Munich: Uni-Druck 1994), 152ff.; Institut fur Zeitgeschichte,Monthly Reports of the Military Governor US Zone, Dk 101.006, October 1945: 'Many clergymen of both the Protestant and Catholic churches have tended to take the denazification of both laymen and themselves with marked ill-grace. Appeals on "moral" grounds for a modification of denazification policies have had prominent sponsors among church leaders.' 20 Faulhaber, 'Das achtfache Selig der Bergpredigt. Allerseelenpredigt im Biirgersaal zu Miinchen', 3 November 1946: AEM, Gedruckte Predigten und Schriften, 4-9-223/9. 21 'Unsere Schuld', MKK, 17 March 1946.


ANTHONY KAUDERS 35 resembled a 'lifeless infection', to a stinging ~ritique.'~ D r Joseph Koenig, writing in the same paper again in the autumn of 1947, summed up this line of argument when he held that the 'declaration of absolute personal freedom' was a product of the Enlightenment and, in so far as it no longer conformed to the authority of God, a good example of degenerate natural law (eines entarteten N a t ~ r r e c h t s ) . ~ ~ In the immediate post-war years, therefore, Faulhaber and other Catholic leaders frequently alluded to the fault of others and of entire historical periods when reflecting on the grounds for Germany's 'catastrophe'. The upshot of this kind of reasoning was sometimes spelled out, at other times left unsaid: to wit, that a majority of Germans was innocent of any wrongdoing, had borne the effects of the war like any other nation and could not be associated with the few Unmenschen of the regime. As for the Jews, many of the writings contained elements that conformed to the above ways of thinking, while others eventuallv moved awav from standard rewonses of the 1940s and earlv 1950s. For a start, one element divorcing church pronouncements from political language in the immediate post-war period is the accentuation on ChristianJewish as opposed to German-Jewish relations. Cardinal Faulhaber's pastoral letter of February 1946, for example, contained many passages that touched on church history as well as Christian responses to Jewish suffering, never once implying that Germans had been implicated both as victims and as perpetrators. Faulhaber compared the arrests of Jews with the torments Christians had endured at the time of the catacombs. As then, so too during the Third Reich, such inhumanity was the work of 'demons from hell'. But at the same time, even as Jews were being shipped off to Theresienstadt, 'brave love' enabled some citizens to provide these wretched creatures with a warm blanket or two. The transports to the East, Faulhaber concluded, had been orchestrated with no 'preliminary examination of personal guilt', simply on the grounds of racism, and therefore had also affected Christian 'non-Aryans', who, the Cardinal was wont to recall, had been baptized in the name of Christ.24 Similarly, a number of articles in the Munchner Katholische Kirchenzeitung intimated that Christians had been the only ones intent on saving Jews from Hitler's clutches. In October 1945 a piece entitled 'Jews Thank Catholics' described how the Jewish community of Roermond in the Netherlands had collected £1 80 for the restoration of various churches in a gesture of gratitude for the help they had received from the Limburg provincial clergy.25One month later, the paper reported on a papal reception granted to the head of the World Jewish Congress, 'who in the name of the organization of Jewish communities' thanked the Catholic Church for its effective aid to the Jewish populations of J

/

I

J

22 'Vom Wesen des Menschen, seine Gefahrdung und Erlosung', MKK, 28 July 1946. 23 'Christentum und KapitalistischeWeltordnung', MKK, 5 October 1947. 24 'Hirtenbrief Fastenzeit 1946', Amtsblatt fiir die Erzdiozese Miinchen und Freising, vol. 2, 1946. 25 MKK, 14 October 1945.


36 Patterns of Prejudice 3 4 3 war-time E ~ r o p eThat . ~ ~not being enough, the paper proclaimed in the spring of 1947 that 'one may establish without exaggeration that nearly the total remnant of Israel located in the liberated countries-however small that number might be-, owed its survival to Christians', whose acts showed them 'worthy before the God of Israel and his Messiah, as well as before world hi~tory'.~' Various articles in subsequent years dealt with the theological relationship between Christians and Jews as against the heroic feats of individual Christians. It is here, again, that continuity outweighed change, at least in the first decade after the war. Lorenz Freiberger, editor of the Miinchner Katholische Kirchenzeitung, invoked familiar ide'es forces in early 1948 when he wrote about the Jews being forever 'inscribed in the books of our holy liturgy'. 'To us you are the chosen people . . . and at the same time the people for whom Christ wept. You are the gospel's shadow' (der Schatten des Evangeliums). And, as if to elucidate this point, Freiberger recalled the denial of Jesus' divinity, which was the 'lost hour of your history'. Instead of grace and the gospel, 'the rigidity of the law and Talmud' set in. Freiberger went even further, however, in offering the following parable of Jewish history: 'Ghetto and gold and the stake and bank palaces and gas ovens and hallelujah are the way stations of your past.' The age-old curse from Matthew 27:25 ('His blood be on us and on our children'), interpreted as a response to pride in the face of patent truth, was also evoked.28 In December 1949 the Miinchner Katholische Kirchenzeitung treated Edith Stein's conversion to Christianity in much the same way, for any break with Judaism meant separation from the Jewish tribe (Sippengemeinschaft), a radical parting with a form of existence that completely negated Christ (der ganzen Christus verneinenden Daseinsform des J u d e n t ~ m s ) Even . ~ ~ those early discussions that rejected antisemitism did so in conjunction with Christian teachings. O n the occasion of Brotherhood Week in March 1954 Professor Johann Michl spoke to the community of St Benno in Munich about early Christian documents on the Jews. According to the Kirchenzeitung, Michl maintained that Jew-hatred had no foundation in the New Testament, though he refused to make concessions to the prevailing Zeitgeist by compromising on matters of truth (konjunkturbedingte Abstri~he).~~ Likewise, following a meeting of the local Society for ChristianJewish Co-operation, the paper announced that no Christian document had ever accused the Jews of deicide; collective responsibility for the death of Jesus, moreover, could never be extrapolated from the deeds of a minority. Yet the author then went on to list a number of common tenets, amongst them the

'Notizen', MKK, 25 November 1945. See also 'Pius XI1 empfing ehemalige KZ.-Insassen', MKK, 6 January 1946. 'Christen und Juden', MKK, 27 April 1947. 'Brief eines Christen an die Juden', MKK, 25 April 1948. See also 'Wenn Du es doch erkannt hattest', MKK, 18July 1948. 'Geschichte einer jiidischen Bekehrung . . .', MKK, 11 December 1949. 'Die Woche der Briiderlichkeit', MKK, 28 March 1954.


ANTHONY KAUDERS 37 image of the wandering Jew, the Augustinian doctrine of the Jews' misery bearing witness to Christian truth and the certainty that it was only a question of time before the Jews, too, would experience divine ill~mination.~~ It is in the early 1960s, however, that more and more commentaries on the 'Jewish question' move away from these themes to focus on mutual respect and understanding. The theologian Heinrich Spaemann, for example, condemned Christians who refused to grasp that 'Jesus would have been crucified in any people', and that by handing him over to the Romans, the Jews had acted as a proxy, representing the sins of all of humanity. Although Spaemann too spoke of the 'blanket covering their hearts', he stressed that it was up to Christians to embrace and love the Jews as their 'older brothers' in the name of In March 1963 Professor Heinrich Fries of Munich University conveyed the message of contemporary Christian-Jewish dialogue being marked by unity rather than dissent, since both Christians and Jews were 'advocates of brotherhood in the world', whose calling derived from the 'knowledge of God as father of all human beings'.33Similar words came from Father Legault. In a longer contribution entitled 'We and the Jews', the clergyman examined the goings-on in Rome, where a special secretariat at the Vatican was busy reformulating the church's position vis-a-vis the Jews. Legault welcomed these moves as a step in the right direction. Paraphrasing the text of Cardinal Bea, he asserted that all the nations had been guilty of Christ's death, and that individual Jews calling for Jesus' execution in Roman times did not justify condemning the Jews of today. He then advised priests and catechists to preach respect and compassion for a people who gave birth to Christianity's spiritual forebears and to the Son of Man.34Finally, in March 1965, the Kirchenzeitung ran a piece on the nature of brotherhood that gave an overview of recent developments in the area of Jewish-Gentile relations: Since the first Brotherhood Weeks, which were still under the impact of recent events and at first tended to strive for reconciliation between German people and racially Jewish people in the spirit of both Testaments, serious change has set in. Words of friendship, of mutual respect, of openness towards the undeniably alien [den a n sich Fremden], the wholly different human beings, are being heard everywhere, in the political realm, in the religious realm.35 'Das geheimnisvolle Volk. Gedanken aus der Tagung der Gesellschaft fur christlich-jiidische Zusammenarbeit im Kloster Scharlarn', MKK, 5 November 1955. See also 'Wo Abraham seinen Brunnen grub', MKK, 7 February 1960; 'Warum SchweinefleischG r uns nicht verboten ist?', MKK, 1 May 1960; 'Gebet fur die ermordeten Juden und ihre Verfolger', Amtsblatt fiir die Erzdiozese Miinchen und Freising, vol. 7, 1961. 'Das Zeichen Israel', MKK, 5 August 1962. 'Christlich-judisches Gesprach dient der Einheit', MKK, 24 March 1963. 'Wir und die Juden', MKK, 1 December 1963. O n the Second Vatican Council and the Jews, see Otto Hermann Pesch, Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil(1962-1965). Vorgeschichte. Verlau. Ergebnisse. Nachgeschichte (Wiirzburg: Echter 1993), 291ff. 'Wo die Briiderlichkeit beginnt', MKK, 14 March 1965. It should be added, however, that some Catholics (and possibly many, had they published their views) did not easily relinquish hope that the Jews would eventually see the light. See, for example, 'Feigheit vor dem Feind? Das Schicksal der Konzilserklarung uber die Juden', MKK, 22 October 1965.

38

Patterns of Preiudice 3 4 3


Munich's Catholic clergy thus participated in a discourse that separated Germans from Jews even as it distanced itself from National Socialist ideology. O n a conscious intellectual level, many Catholic clerics in Munich saw themselves as separate from the Jews in the wake of coming to terms with the past: that is, by (re-)establishinga Christian-Jewish dichotomy and by accepting the Jew as the Other. The first move was conventional and not confined to Germany; the second was novel and indicated a radical break with the past. In short, some Catholics, though holding fast t o many common sureties, resembled those powers in the public sphere, such as the press, that increasingly came to contemplate the Holocaust as an assault on individual human rights.36

The post-war Protestant Church In the correspondence of Hans Meiser, bishop and head of the Bavarian Landeskirche both during and after the Nazi years, we find an elaborate composition entitled 'A Word on Denazification'. Written in the post-war era, ;he author (most probably Meiser himself) dealt with a number of aspects pertaining to the National Socialist past. In true theological fashion, he began by announcing that 'all catastrophes of history, all imponderables and contradictions of our personal life reveal a hidden depth of God, who travels the world . . .in various masks'. Some pages later, he returned to the question of guilt, this time doubting whether the German people could be blamed for not having known the 'criminal aims' of National Socialism, given that both France and England had perceived Germany to be 'worthy of an alliance' (biindnisfahig) as late as 1938. Following on from this, the author tendered a well-known explanation for the horrors of yesteryear, avowing that Enlightenment ideology, long thought dead, had re-emerged in the shape of National Socialism, 'burying all deeper springs [Quellen], all spiritual powers of pure humanity, all moral reasons for human action'. In fact, the German people had been 'deluded and deceived, abused and maltreated', and mere membership in the party was not a guarantee of National Socialist beliefs.?' A

A

36 O n the theory that the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trials (1958), along with other events of the late 1950s and early 1960s, brought about a sea-change, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 1997),268,390-1; Paul Passauer, 'NS-Prozesse und historische Forschung', Tribune. Zeitschrift z u m Verstandnis des Judentums, vol. 2, 1995, 122; A. J. Nicholls, The Bonn Republic. West German Democrucy, 3945-1990 (London and New York: Longman 1997), 191. American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee Archives, Jerusalem: Geneva I, SLH Files, Country Report 1961: 'The Eichmann trial was very well covered by the press and particularly by television. It was an eye opener for many Germans, particularly the youth.' The Eichmann trial commenced in mid-1961; the Auschwitz trials in late 1963. For accounts of and reactions t o both, see, for example, Jurgen Wilke et al., Holocaust und NS-Prozesse: die Presseberichterstattung in Israel und Deutschland zwischen Abneigung und Abwehr (Cologne, Vienna and Weimar: Bohlau 1995); Thomas Wandres and Gerhard Werle, Auschwitz vor Gericht. Volkermord und bundesdeutsche Strafiustiz (Munich: Beck 1995). 37 'Won zur Entnazifizierung', [n.d.], 1,8,12: LKA, Nachlass Hans Meiser, no. 1925.O n Meiser's view that a catastrophe had befallen the Germans, see also 'Ansprache von Meiser beim Empfang der amerikanischen Missourisynode im Brautsaal der Erloserkirche in Munchen


ANTHONY KAUDERS 39 Similarly, in October 1949, the district dean of Munich, Oskar Daumiller, wrote a memorandum responding to a letter complaining about Allied requisitionings of German homes. According to Daumiller, even Americans had testified to the fact that the Germans had not wreaked havoc in the occupied territories the way the 'Americans had during their brief rule' (dap die Deutschen im besetzten Gebiet nicht so gehaust haben, wie es die Amerikaner tate~z).~* Both Meiser and Daumiller, then, resembled Catholics in their attempt to absolve a majority of Germans from any wrongdoing. To their minds, much of the responsibility for Hitler's triumph lay with larger, uncontrollable, forces; as for German crimes, other nations, too, had committed offences no less gruesome than those of the Nazi elites. Neither protestant leader, however, had anything to say on the 'Jewish question' after A u s c h ~ i t z . ~ This ' does not mean that the subject was ignored by the church. Quite the opposite. Numerous articles in the Gemeindeblatt and the journal Zeitwende, as well as statements by Friedrich Langenfai3 and others indicate that the silence was confined to major speeches delivered in the immediate aftermath of the war.40Indeed, if we look at extant commentaries, certain similarities with Catholic pronouncements appear to be salient.

Schwabing', 27 October 1945,5: LKA, NL Meiser, no. 1445. Meiser later pleaded with the Allies not to increase the suffering of the German people by carrying out 'hard and relentless measures of punishment and atonement'. See his letter of 10 January 1947 (together with D. Eichorn) in Archiv fiir Christlich-Soziale Politik der Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, Nachlass Miiller, no. 293. For another appeal to sympathy abroad, see 'An die Christen Englands!', letter of the Rat der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland of 14 December 1945, found in LKA, N L Langenfai3, no. 125, which includes the following passage: 'To confine the German people to ever more constricted areas in order to curtail in every possible way its means of existence cannot be judged any differently from Hitler's plans of extermination against the Jews.' Letter of 9 October 1949: LKA, Kreisdekan Miinchen, no. 241. For further contributions dealing with German and others' guilt, see 'Aber die anderen!' and 'Die offene Tiir', EvG, 21 September 1947 and 7 August 1949, respectively. As far as one can tell, Meiser had little to say on the matter after the war. In June 1945 he told Captain Landeen that US and British radio propaganda had provoked anger within the population, which had not appreciated a report that one of 'the first measures taken was the re-opening of the Bad Nauheim synagogue' (memorandum on discussion with Colonel Keegan on 5 June 1945: LKA, N L Meiser, no. 212). My argument also disputes those that view 'repression' and 'silence' as constitutive of the postwar era. See, for example, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfiihigkeit z u trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper 1967); Magarete Mitscherlich, Erinnerungsarbeit: zur Psychoanalyse der Unfahigkeit zu trauern (Frankfurt: Fischer 1993); Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld, oder, Von der Last Deutscher z u sein (Hamburg: Rasch and Rohring 1987); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1998), 34-5,69; Peter Reichel, Politik mit Erinnerung. Gedachtnisorte i m Streit u m die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Frankfurt: Fischer 1999), 25. For works that challenge the notion that debate was absent (or repression rife), see Michael Schornstheimer,Die leuchtenden Augen der Frontsoldaten. Nationalsozialismus und Krieg in den Illustriertenromanen derfunfzigerJuhre (Berlin: Metropol 1995),217 and Helmut Dubiel,

Niemand ist frei won der Geschichte: die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des deutschen Bundestages (Munich and Vienna: C. Hanser 1999), conclusion; Tilman Moser, 'Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern: Halt die Diagnose einer Uberpriifung stand? Zur psychischen Verarbeitung des Holocaust in der Bundesrepublik', Psyche, May 1992,389-405.


40

Patterns of Prejudice 34:3

In an article of August 1947, for instance, the author of a piece on the 'Jewish mission' initially questioned the possibility of Christians approaching Jews in the wake of six million murdered men and women. This 'impenetrable wall' notwithstanding, he went on to recall Leo Baeck's words that 'the Jews had only one friend', namely 'true Christians'?' Likewise, Friedrich Langenfai3, writing in the Zeitwende of November 1949, confessed that Christian antisemitism had been a curse for the Jews and that Christian love had been absent from the churches in the past. Yet at the same time he held that the church deserved to be heard since it had protected Jews to the best of its had impinged on ability, particularly in parts of Europe wheie Nazi the church itself.42Though Protestants were less forceful in their claim that Christians had been the Jews' only saviours during the Second World War, they equally highlighted the work of clerics to protect Jews. Munich's Protestants also engaged in theological reflections of Christian-Jewish relations. Here too we encounter age-old stereotypes that seem to have maintained their enormous hold on the clergy in defiance of recent events. F. Loy, for example, related how Israel had 'a history with God like no other people', but that the Jews refused to listen to His call, whether voiced by the prophets or by Jesus himself." Two years later, in Septemberl949, Pfarrer Heinz Dormann spoke of how the Jews remained religiously and metaphysically homeless,'+'to which his colleague Pfarrer Fiirst added the Augustinian commonplace that Jewish existence, though marred by disobedience, was testimony to God's word and will.45Yet, another two years later, Protestants reiterated the n o less commonplace charge of Jewish 'blindness', for the Jews, full of 'pride and self-righteousness', had been oblivious to the moment of truth when they These traditional doctrines can be found as late as 1961, 'rejected Chri~t'.'~ and they probably influenced church leaders and goers long after most missionary work for the Jews had been abandoned." Like the Catholic clergy, however, Protestants adopted a more conciliatory stance in the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dean Langenfai3, for one, repeatedly demanded that Germans never forget the past and that restitution be made for what had happened between 1933 and 1945.'8 'Judenmission heute?', EvG, 10 August 1947. 'Judenfrage und Neues Testament', Zeitwende, November 1949. '"Auch du"', EvG, 10 August 1947. 'Die christliche Haltung gegeniiber den Juden', EvG, 21 September 1949. 'Christliche Gemeinde und Judentum', EvG, 23 October 1949. See also 'Die Juden-ein Gottesbeweis' and 'Was gehen uns die Juden an?', EvG, 5 July 1959 and 26 August 1962, respectively. 'Was gehen uns die Juden an?', EvG, 29 April 1951; 'Und die Juden?', EvG, 29 July 1951. See also Gerhard Jasper, 'Gesprache zwischen Israel und Kirche', Zeitwende, April 1951,350. See 'Die Frage bleibt', EvG, 10 August 1958; 'Stunde der Entscheidung', EvG, 2 August 1959; 'Der Eichmann-Prozei3und wiry,Zeitwende, November 1961. O n the 'Jewish mission' in Munich and Bavaria, see various documents in LKA, Landeskirchenrat, no. 3056. 'Friede mit dem Judentum', EvG, 18 March 1956; 'Wiedergutmachung-ein Entschadigungsversuch', EvG, 30 March 1958; and 'Zukunft mit geordneter Vergangenheit', EvG, 15 March 1959; 'Wir und die Juden', Sonntagsblattfur die evangelisch-lutherische Kirche


ANTHONY KAUDERS 41 Pfarrer Heinz Schreiner, addressing a crowd of 150 policemen in Munich's Hofbraukeller in March 1960, similarly warned that an antisemite could never be a Christian, and that antisemitism 'always ended in murder!' Schreiner's words came three months after events in coiogne and elsewhere had exposed lingering Jew-hatred in the populace. He therefore tried hard to portray the Jews as 'our spiritual forefathers' and Christian love as the only means of appreciating their peculiar nature (Eigenart).49Moreover, in the summer of that year, Professor Gollwitzer published an analysis of Christian-Jewish relations in the Gemeindeblatt that occasionally verged on a general critique of Christian attitudes towards the Jews. Gollwitzer commented that Jewish suffering had been far more pronounced in Christian lands than in Muslim or heathen ones, and that racial antisemitism had been preceded by Christian Judeophobia. H e mentioned that too many Christians resisted calls for repentance, for brotherly love and for respect. To his mind, the whole question of Christian-Jewish relations was predicated on whether the Jews could 'look us in the face again, us "Aryans", us Christians, us Germans'.lo Synod president Ernst Wilm agreed with this judgement in March 1963, when he asked his audience: 'Where amongst us Christians in Germany was the "good Samaritan" as our Jewish fellow humans "fell into the murderers' hands"? Where did they see the face of Jesus, amongst us, the Christians in Germany . . . when they were being deported to their deaths?'ll A front page editorial in the Gemeindeblatt even went so far as to chide the Confessing Church for its confusing behaviour towards clerics of Jewish descent in the days of Hitler's Arierparagraphen." Finally, two contributions in 1964 and 1965 disowned, on the one hand, Jewish collective guilt for Jesus' death-which was compared to collective guilt of the Germans for Nazi crimes-and upheld, on the other, Jewish chosenness by God, which made 'Christians . . . inconceivable without the Jews!'53 Yet, compared to Catholic statements, Protestants were much more forthright in their acknowledgement of inherent differences between Germans (Christians) and Jews. As early as April 1950, for example, a major piece on 'Christianity and Judaism' elucidated how antisemitism had emerged in the 1920s as a reaction to the growing influence of Jews in the arts and the press, wherebv National Socialism arose as the dominant mouth~ieceof this new movement whose main target was everything Jewish, 'including the oldestablished bourgeois Jewish families' who had been 'all but absorbed into . I

49 50 51 52 53

I

in Bayern, 14 August 1955. See also the articles by other churchmen in the Gemeindeblatt: 'Damonie des Antisemitismus', 13July 1958; 'Vergeben heifit nicht vergessen', 14 September 1958; 'Massenmord in Aktendeckeln', 16 February 1964. 'Ein Antisemit kann kein Christ sein', Gemeindeblatt, 13 March 1960. 'Judenfrage-Christenfrage', Gemeindeblatt, 21 August 1960. 'Wer ist denn mein Nachster?', Gemeindeblatt, 17 March 1963. 'Christen und Juden', Gemeindeblatt, 18 August 1963. 'Sind alle Juden am Tod Jesu schuld?' and 'Kirchentagsforum Juden und Christen. Neues Denken ist notwendig', Gemeindeblatt, 22 March 1964 and 22 August 1965, respectively.

42 Patterns of Preiudice 3 4 3


Germandom' (im Deutschtum nahezu aufgegangen). These families, furthermore, had gained the sympathy of wide sections of the population through their 'philanthropy and charity'.54 Another subtle instance of this kind of thinking was LangenfaS's speech to the Association for ChristianJewish Co-operation in February 1951, in which the dean of Munich's Protestants called to mind the 'appalling consequences' of anti-Jewish rhetoric for 'our Jewish brothers and sisters and for us' (my emphasis).55An essay in the Zeitwende was more explicit: German Jewry. . . lived a lie: it believed it could be both Jewish and German. It relied on its achievements for Germany, it did not take antisemitism seriously. The German people proved after 1945 even more than during the National Socialist era that this synthesis was a fictitious one.

The author went on to explain why this was the case: 'the utterly disappointed survivors of generations of German Jews' had not observed, on the part of Germans, an honest reflection on how they might offer moral as well as material lines were critical in their depiction of German-Jewish r e ~ t i t u t i o n If . ~these ~ irreconcilability-though the emphasis on German Jews could be interpreted as a side-swipe at Eastern Jews or displaced persons-another elaborate meditation on Wiedergutmachung, though dismissive of attempts to weigh Jewish guilt against German guilt, listed all the crimes Jews had committedinterventions with the forces of occupation, Morgenthau's policies, blackmarketeering-and concluded that these misdeeds had led 'us' to neglect the abominations of the past. 'If the Jews were thus, then the Germans had no reason to make amends' (Wiederg~tmachung).~' One last example should suffice to delineate the overall posture of many Protestant clerics. In March 1953Friedrich LangenfaS adumbrated the nature of antisemitism, specifically in Eastern Europe, at the annual Brotherhood Week gathering organized by the Association for Christian-Jewish Co-operation. H e mentioned the even more totalitarian character of the Stalinist regime, admitted Christian guilt alongside Roman and Jewish culpability, and recalled the 'somewhat mistaken' notion that Bolshevism had been engineered by Jews. Towards the end of his speech, LangenfaS remarked: Love does not mean that so-called racial differences be denied. They exist; and it needs to be asked in all honesty, whether it is good . . . if two human beings of fundamentally opposed biological dispositions Cgrundverschiedener biologischer

54 'Christentum und Judentum', Gemeindeblatt, 23 April 1950. O n 'Eastern' (i.e. displaced persons) and 'Western' Jews, see also 'Der base Blick und die Praxis des Herodes', Gerneindeblatt, 13 August 1950. 55 Ansprache Woche der Briiderlichkeit, Sophiensaal, 18 February 1951: LKA, N L Langenfai3, no. 121. For another 'implicit' division of 'Germans' and 'Jews', see '1st ein Gesprach zwischen Christen und Juden moglich?', Zeitwende, February 1952. 56 'Franz Rosenzweig und das Christentum', Zeitwende, June 1951. 57 'Schuld verlangt Wiedergutmachung', EvG, 17 August 1952.

ANTHONY KAUDERS 43 Art] should enter marriage. . . . biological and national orders have also been set by


God. One thing is certain, however: love will also wrap a mongrel [Mischling], like all children, in its coat.58

Post-Hitler words and pre-Hitler minds If we compare Catholic and Protestant post-war language on the 'Jewish question', many similarities can be found in the available evidence. First, both churches disputed the belief that most Germans had been involved in the oppression o> the Jews. In fact, Christians had often proven to be the only friends of this much-maligned minority. Second, Protestants and Catholics alike persisted with theological convention in respect to the Jew in Christian dogma, even missionary work continuing unabated after Auschwitz. Third, clergymen in both camps came to emphasize love as an all-important element in their relations with Jews. If at first this may have sounded like empty rhetoric, it later entailed the acceptance (as opposed to the denial) of Jews as an Other, which in turn implied greater tolerance as well as the solidifying of German-Jewish irreconcilability. Unbeknownst to many parties involved, this polarity also inhered in discourses not immediately connected to the Jews themselves. Whenever men like Faulhaber and Daumiller wrote of American barbarity or German ignorance or individual Unmenschen, they were indirectly commenting on different kinds of antisemitism. Since killing, maiming and torturing Jews was something few Germans had ever welcomed and equally few had ever done in the years after 1933, theologians argued that human sinfulness, Enlightenment thought and metaphysical forces accounted for the events during Hitler's reign. Non-theologians could be more outspoken. In May 1950, for example, Bishop Meiser received a letter from Franz Freiherr von Kress of Planegg (Munich), who protested vehemently against a Protestant declaration that the church had remained silent in the face of Jewish suffering. Kress remarked that he had never contributed to the outrage (Frevel) committed against the Jews. Like many other millions of Germans, he had reacted with abhorrence (Abscheu)to Nazi persecution and, like the simple witness of a violent assault on the street, he and other bystanders could not be held responsible for the crime. He then continued: 58 'Der Feind steht nicht vor den Toren, sondern in unserer Mitte', Woche der Briiderlichkeit, 1 March 1953: LKA, NL Langenfafi, no. 123. See also 'Die Frage bleibt', EvG, 10 August 1958, where we read: 'The Jewish question is also a "racial question", but beyond that something entirely different. It is a "national question" [Volkstumsfrage], but again this answer is not sufficient. A "constitutional question" [staatsrechtliche Fragel-and yet Jewry is far from being just that. If we say: The Jewish question is a "religious question", we come closer to the truth of the matter.' It is difficult to explain why Protestants were more likely than Catholics to speak openly of the racial differences between Germans and Jews. They perhaps had been more affected by racialist thought as a result of the Deutsche Christen. Nonetheless, political Catholicism (i.e. the Christian Socials (CSU) and the Bayernpartei) was also explicit in its occasional use of racist terminology; see Anthony Kauders, 'Catholics, the Jews, and democratization in postwar Munich, 1945-65', German History, vol. 4,2000.

44 Patterns of Prejudice 3 4 3


It cannot be accepted that respectable [unbescholtene] people are defamed and dishonoured in such a way in front of the public. . . . Concerning the passage that all Christians should dissociate themselves from any form of antisemitism, one can only agree, that is, as long as it pertains to decent [anstandige]Jews . . . However, if crimes are committed that disturb public law and order, no one can demand that one sympathize with such people. One ought to be equally uncongenial towards the same subjects of one's own race or religion.59

Which Jews did Kress mean? Perhaps he was first and foremost concerned with Jewish displaced persons, whose dismal existence in various refugee camps had driven some to the black market." But he might have had other Jews in mind. Indeed, he might have identified with Dr Otto Koellreutter, professor of law at the University of Munich, whose essay 'To Germany's Academic Youth' Bishop Meiser Also kept in his files. Koellreutter saw eye to eye with National Socialism's 'healthy volkisch' approach to the 'Jewish question', which included reducing the number of Jews in positions of political and cultural leadership. In particular, he held that policy should have focused on areas 59 Letter from Franz Freiherr von Kress, PlaneggIMunich, to Meiser, May 1950: LKA, N L Meiser, No. 65. In light of this letter, it is not surprising that the chancellery of the Protestant Church in Germany, distributing various estimates of the number of murdered Jews to local and regional church leaders in June 1961, recommended that the material not be made public for fear of alienating too many people. See 'Betreff: Mitteilungen zur Judenfrage': LKA, Kreisdekan Munchen, no. 223. O n reactions to the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis of October 1945-which had admitted to the guilt of Protestants during the Third Reich but nowhere mentioned the Holocaust explicitly-see Gerhard Besier and Gerhard Sauter, Wie Christen ihre Schuld bekennen: die Stuttgarter Erklarung 1945 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1985), 36; Clemens Vollnhals, Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifierung 194j-1949: die Last der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit (Munich: Oldenbourg 1989), 37-8; Armin Boyens, 'Das Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis vom 19. Oktober 1945-Entstehung und Bedeutung', Vierteljahresheftefur Zeitgeschichte, vol. 19, 1971,39. 60 O n displaced persons (DPs) in Munich and environs, see Juliane Wetzel, Judisches Leben in Munchen 1945-1951. Durchgangsstation oder Wiederaufbau? (Munich: Uni-Druck 1987); Angelika Konigseder and Juliane Wetzel, Lebensmut i m Wartesaal: die jiidischen DPs (Displaced Persons) i m Nachkriegsdeutschland (Frankfurt: Fischer 1994);Fritz Bauer Institut (ed.), Uberlebt und unterwegs: judische Displaced Persons i m Nachkriegsdeutschland (Frankfurt and New York: Campus 1997); Susanne Dietrich and Julia Schulze Wessel,

Zwischen Selbstorganisation und Stigmatisierung: die Lebenswirklichkeit judischer Displaced Persons und die neue Gestalt des Antisemitismus in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1998). O n reactions to the DPs, see Ronald Webster, 'American relief and Jews in Germany, 1945-1960', Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 1993,296 and Constantin Goschler, 'The attitude towards Jews in Bavaria after the Second World War', Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 1991,448-9. O n US hostility towards the DPs, see the Klausner Archives, I11 and VII: Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, Jerusalem: Geneva I, 6A12, C 45.069. O n government documents dealing with DPs and various centres of black market activity, see the letter from Wilhelm Hoegner to Aumer, 18 February 1946: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Miinchen, StK 113798; letter from Landrat D r Kessler to Hoegner, 13 March 1948: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen, StK 113798; letter of Landespolizei Landkreis Altotting to Landespolizei Oberbayern, 14 November 1947:StaatsarchivMunchen, Polizeiprasidium Oberbayern (Pp OBB), 616; letters from Bezirksinspektion Starnberg, 19 October 1948, Bezirksinspektion Munchen-Land, 26 July 1948,Bezirksinspektion Traunstein, 5 July 1948: Staatsarchiv Munchen, Polizeiprasidium Oberbayern (Pp OBB), 616; letters from the police president of Munich, Franz Xaver Pitzer, to the district governor and lord mayor: Stadtarchiv Munchen, BUR 2506 and 251 1.


ANTHONY KAUDERS 45 such as academe or the economy, in which Jewish influence could have been halted without recourse to the law (auf kaltem Wege).Because this had not been so, the Nuremberg Laws proved t o be too radical a step for a 'K~lturnation'.~~ In other words, Koellreutter wrote after 1945 that ridding Germany of certain Jews before 1933 would have avoided the atrocities of subsequent years. Both L e s s and Koellreutter tacitly approved of an antisemitism that had become widespread in the Weimar Republic. Like Protestant and Catholic leaders, they distinguished between Germans and Jews, distinguished between policies that held the Jews at bay and those that led to their extermination, distinguished between appropriate and inappropriate modes of deportment towards the Jewish minority. Faulhaber had praised Hitler but did not wish to see Jews starving. LangenfaB had railed against Jewish profiteers, but did not wish to see burial sites desecrated. In the late 1940s and 1950s clerics maintained that the Germans had been largely guiltless of any transgression precisely because they themselves felt innocent of any crime, at least in the legal sense of the term.62They remembered how their antisemitism had been assagacious as Treitschke's, ;he Jew-baiting of a moderate German who was fed up with Jewish equality. Saying so, however, the way Golo Mann was to do in 1960, would have meant using pre-Hitler words at a time when postHitler minds appreciated the effects of antisemitism. They therefore selected post-Hitler words without questioning their pre-Hitler minds. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, they slowly started to analyse the bases of their beliefs, to the extent that they not only moved well beyond Golo Mann, but came to recognize the innate dangers of antisemitism. More important, they also came to see the Jew as an Other who was to be respected as such. Unlike in the 1920s, this form of German-Jewish irreconcilability was no longer related to modes of thought whose monism disparaged co-existence; rather, it demonstrated the influence of pluralistic ideals that were slowly taking root in West Germany's liberal democracy.

ANTHONY KAUDERS is the author of German Politics and the Jews. Diisseldorf and Niirnberg, 1910-1933 (1996). He has most recently been a research fellow at the Institute of German History (Tel Aviv University), the Simon-Dubnow-Institut (Leipzig) and the Vidal Sassoon Center for the International Study of Antisemitism (Hebrew University, Jerusalem).

61 'An die deutsche akademische Jugend', [n.d.], 2: LKA, N L Meiser, no. 1926. Koellreutter may have changed his mind in this matter. In pronouncements of the 1930s we find him embracing National Socialist legislation against the Jews, including the Nuremberg Laws. He might have changed his mind yet again, however, for in 1955 he decided to defend the Nuremberg Laws as the furthest a state could have gone in legislating on the 'Jewish question': see Jorg Schmidt's uncritical dissertation, Otto Koellreutter, 1883-1972. Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit (Frankfurt etc.: Peter Lang 1995), 106ff., 153. 62 I plan to discuss the thorny issue of guilt and shame, as well as responsibility and liability, elsewhere. For a good discussion, see Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind. Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1999), 149-64.