UBC: Bergen
May. 26th, 2014 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBergen, Doris. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
So, I have a new theory, which is that the Treaty of Versailles caused a psychotic break in almost the entirety of the "Aryan" population of Germany. Given how egregiously they were being gaslighted by the leaders of the German armed forces, it's not entirely surprisiing. The Nazis didn't cause the psychosis; they were a manifestation of the psychosis--as were the German Christians, the subject of this book. But this psychotic moral reversal, having been encouraged for at least half a century beforehand (Bergen describes one example, the Protestant League, founded in 1887, as "foster[ing] a climate of hatred within German Protestant circles that both encouraged and legitimized collective resentments" (114)), was endemic to "Aryan" German culture in the twenties and thirties. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, although problematic, I think makes, and hammers home, the point that the dominant culture of Germany was ready to hear what Hitler had to say, because all the pieces of Hitler's ideology were already available to them.
(Hitler was stunningly unoriginal; he basically just assembled all the unconnected pieces of hatred, entitlement, and bigotry lying around in "Aryan" German culture in the twenties into something that could be focused, aimed, and deployed for maximum destruction.)
In this context "German Christian" ("Deutsche Christen") means a specific movement in the Protestant German church, as opposed to, say, "Christian Germans," meaning everyone of Christian faith living in Germany--or Christians outside Germany who claimed or were claimed to be "ethnically German." (Bergen is one of the few writers on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that I've read who recognizes how dangerous and slippery using the Nazi terminology of race is:
It is vanishingly rare to find a historian who acknowledges this problem, and I appreciate it in Bergen as much as I appreciate her careful attention to nuances of meaning in over-determined German words (i.e., Volk).) The German Christians, who described themselves as "storm troopers of Christ," are pretty much exactly what you would imagine if you set out to imagine a way of reconciling Christianity and Nazism. They were anti-doctrinal, anti-clerical, anti-theological, anti-Semitic, misogynist, repellantly proud of their own ignorance, and capable of some of the most incredibly clusterfucked logical fallacies I have had the dubious pleasure of reading. I shall quote an example:
The German Christians were fanatically devoted to the idea of making the Protestant Church palatable to National Socialism. They were utterly, utterly doomed to failure, since the Nazi high command was pretty much equally committed to the idea of eradicating Christianity from Germany, which makes Bergen's account of their gyrations and contortions pathetic as well as infuriating. But Bergen's research makes it clear that they also represent a inchoate, badly articulated desire prevalaent among many more Germans than those who joined the mvement, to have their cake and eat it, too: to have the comforting, familiar trappings of the Church, the ritual and sense of community, without any of the uncomfortable rules and restrictions and moral accountability for one's actions. This same desire is visible in many other aspects of interbellum "Aryan" German culture; Bergen has found an articulation of it that is mind-boggling in its on-the-nose, epic failure of self-awareness:
The German Christians were prepared to mutiliate Christianity, its sacred texts, and everything that makes it a coherent body of thought, in order to make it what they declared the German people wanted.
The German Christians are as horrifying and fascinating as the Nazis themselves, and they follow very much the same trajectory, even extending to the aftermath of World War II, in which, just as "de-Nazification" is highly problematic, the German Christian movement, being disbanded, became a convenient scapegoat for the rest of the Christian Germans (the better to distract attention from their own participation in Germany's psychotic break), but the vast majority of individual German Christians, particularly the rank and file, escaped without being held accountable, without any alteration in their thinking, and without remorse.
So, I have a new theory, which is that the Treaty of Versailles caused a psychotic break in almost the entirety of the "Aryan" population of Germany. Given how egregiously they were being gaslighted by the leaders of the German armed forces, it's not entirely surprisiing. The Nazis didn't cause the psychosis; they were a manifestation of the psychosis--as were the German Christians, the subject of this book. But this psychotic moral reversal, having been encouraged for at least half a century beforehand (Bergen describes one example, the Protestant League, founded in 1887, as "foster[ing] a climate of hatred within German Protestant circles that both encouraged and legitimized collective resentments" (114)), was endemic to "Aryan" German culture in the twenties and thirties. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, although problematic, I think makes, and hammers home, the point that the dominant culture of Germany was ready to hear what Hitler had to say, because all the pieces of Hitler's ideology were already available to them.
(Hitler was stunningly unoriginal; he basically just assembled all the unconnected pieces of hatred, entitlement, and bigotry lying around in "Aryan" German culture in the twenties into something that could be focused, aimed, and deployed for maximum destruction.)
In this context "German Christian" ("Deutsche Christen") means a specific movement in the Protestant German church, as opposed to, say, "Christian Germans," meaning everyone of Christian faith living in Germany--or Christians outside Germany who claimed or were claimed to be "ethnically German." (Bergen is one of the few writers on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that I've read who recognizes how dangerous and slippery using the Nazi terminology of race is:
Labels are always tricky, but students of Nazi Germany face particular challenges. To describe National Socialism, we depend on the same words and phrases that Nazi propaganda appropriated and infused with particular meanings: words like race, blood, Aryan, German, and Jew.
(4)
It is vanishingly rare to find a historian who acknowledges this problem, and I appreciate it in Bergen as much as I appreciate her careful attention to nuances of meaning in over-determined German words (i.e., Volk).) The German Christians, who described themselves as "storm troopers of Christ," are pretty much exactly what you would imagine if you set out to imagine a way of reconciling Christianity and Nazism. They were anti-doctrinal, anti-clerical, anti-theological, anti-Semitic, misogynist, repellantly proud of their own ignorance, and capable of some of the most incredibly clusterfucked logical fallacies I have had the dubious pleasure of reading. I shall quote an example:
Most frequently, German Christians based negation of Jesus's Jewishness on their presumption of his antisemitism. Jesus, they asserted, could not have been a Jew because he opposed the Jews. . . . In late 1933 on German Christian offered citations from the Gospels that, he claimed, revealed Jesus' attitude tward Judaism . . . In places, he admitted, the Gospels seemed to suggest the opposite. But those were not the words of Christ, he contended; they were "lies," "Jewishness," the "voice of the Old Testament."
(156)
The German Christians were fanatically devoted to the idea of making the Protestant Church palatable to National Socialism. They were utterly, utterly doomed to failure, since the Nazi high command was pretty much equally committed to the idea of eradicating Christianity from Germany, which makes Bergen's account of their gyrations and contortions pathetic as well as infuriating. But Bergen's research makes it clear that they also represent a inchoate, badly articulated desire prevalaent among many more Germans than those who joined the mvement, to have their cake and eat it, too: to have the comforting, familiar trappings of the Church, the ritual and sense of community, without any of the uncomfortable rules and restrictions and moral accountability for one's actions. This same desire is visible in many other aspects of interbellum "Aryan" German culture; Bergen has found an articulation of it that is mind-boggling in its on-the-nose, epic failure of self-awareness:
In a 1934 declaration, the Protestant faculty of theology in Breslau denounced emphasis on sin as inimical to the needs of the people's church. Blasting Barthian theology, Judaism, and foreign foes in one rancorous breath, the Breslau group announced that Germans could not tolerate a religion based on the concept of sin. "A people," the statement argued, "who, like our own, has a war behind them that they did not want, that they lost, and for which they were declared guilty, cannot bear it, when their sinfulness is constantly pointed out to them in an exaggerated way." The Treaty of Versailles, the Breslauers maintained, made an emphasis on sin untenable. "Our people has suffered so much under the lie of war guilt that it is the task and duty of the church and of theology to use Christianity to give courage to our people, and not to pull them down into political humiliation."
(158)
The German Christians were prepared to mutiliate Christianity, its sacred texts, and everything that makes it a coherent body of thought, in order to make it what they declared the German people wanted.
The German Christians are as horrifying and fascinating as the Nazis themselves, and they follow very much the same trajectory, even extending to the aftermath of World War II, in which, just as "de-Nazification" is highly problematic, the German Christian movement, being disbanded, became a convenient scapegoat for the rest of the Christian Germans (the better to distract attention from their own participation in Germany's psychotic break), but the vast majority of individual German Christians, particularly the rank and file, escaped without being held accountable, without any alteration in their thinking, and without remorse.
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Date: 2014-05-26 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-27 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-27 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 06:17 am (UTC)I just find your reading topics interesting and your analysis insightful. Just wondering where that comes from, as in professional training, etc.
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Date: 2014-06-01 01:34 pm (UTC)The combination of graduate school and professional writer-dom seems to have killed my ability to read fiction for pleasure, so I read non-fiction by the bucketload. At this point, I read purely about things that catch my interest, almost none of which have anything to do with my academic specialties. Mostly, I seem to read about murderers, catastrophes, and places and times at which real societies have functioned like dystopias. So clearly what I read comes from the same thing that makes me a horror writer; how I read comes from a lot of practice in reading like an academic.
Which may be more answer than you were looking for. :)
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Date: 2014-06-01 05:18 pm (UTC)I actually don't think I'm familiar with your fiction. Why don't you toss me a link to your fiction homepage or a Amazon link or something and I'll check it out.
(It's also possible I am familar with it and just forgot who "Truepenny" was after all this time)
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Date: 2014-06-01 08:04 pm (UTC)www.katherineaddison.com (http://www.katherineaddison.com/)
My latest book, The Goblin Emperor (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780765326997-0), came out in April.
All my stories available free online are listed here (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/862386.html#cutid1).
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Date: 2014-06-01 08:41 pm (UTC)