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  • Zwischen Protest and Propaganda: Die Zeitschrift “Junge Kirche” im Dritten Reich
  • Katharina Von Kellenbach
Zwischen Protest and Propaganda: Die Zeitschrift “Junge Kirche” im Dritten Reich. By Ralf Retter. Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2009. Pp. 387. Paper €44.00. ISBN 978-3869060668.

In their efforts to reclaim moral authority and public credibility, Roman Catholic and Evangelical church leaders asserted Christianity’s principled opposition to National Socialism immediately after Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. Catholic leaders pointed to the church hierarchy’s public resistance to the euthanasia program, while Protestants highlighted the struggle of the underground Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) to contravene the state law that imposed the Aryan Paragraph of 1933 on church employees. The military, political, and moral collapse of Nazi Germany was presented as proof of the eternal truths of biblical law and Christian doctrine: Only a return to Christian truths could protect people against the false teachings of modernity, rationalism, and secularism that had led to the type of human degradation and wholesale slaughter unleashed by the Nazis. This narrative proved to be remarkably persuasive and persistent; in fact, it is still endorsed by Pope Benedict XVI. A number of recent historical studies have slowly chipped away at this myth. Based on his dissertation, Ralf Retter’s study of the journal Junge Kirche adds more historical ammunition aimed at correcting this simplistic narrative.

The journal was founded in May 1933 to disseminate information among members of the Jungreformatische Bewegung, which had been constituted that same month in opposition to the growing influence of the Deutsche Christen. The latter group, merging Christian and Nazi worldviews, had launched a campaign a year earlier to gain control of local and national church governing bodies. Appearing every two [End Page 428] weeks, Junge Kirche combined political and theological commentary with news and information. Based on unpublished materials from the archives of its publisher, Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht, Retter chronicles the internal ideological and personal struggles that reflected the overall failure of the Confessing Church to mount effective political resistance against National Socialism.

In this careful and comprehensive analysis, Retter argues that Junge Kirche featured articles critical of National Socialism between 1933 and 1936, but then moved decidedly toward the right, until it finally ceased publication in May 1941 for economic and political reasons. Retter sees the year 1936 as pivotal in the journal’s loss of a critical function: that year witnessed the departure of Hanns Lilje from the editorial board, as well as growing tension between the more radical wings of the Confessing Church in Berlin and the “intact” Lutheran state churches—whose leadership had not been taken over by German Christians in the election of 1933—in Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, and Hannover. The sole remaining editor, Fritz Söhlmann, was more susceptible to National Socialist ideology and began to cater to a more conservative, Lutheran, and southern audience. Until 1936, Junge Kirche included articles criticizing National Socialism as a “political religion,” analyzing the concept of race in völkisch theology, discussing the proper relation between state and church, and denouncing the Aryan Paragraph on the basis of the Barmen Theological Declaration of 1934.

Retter considers Junge Kirche in its early period to be an example of what Martin Broszat called Resistenz (i.e., nonconformist activities that denied the Nazi state’s claim to total control), because it defended Christian freedom and established an open forum for critical reflection on theological and political issues. But the journal did not move beyond a church-centered, defensive posture to advocate proactively on behalf of victims of state persecution or to demand regime change. This reflected the Confessing Church’s overall unwillingness and inability to coalesce into a political movement against the Nazi state. Instead, it splintered along progressive and conservative, Reform and Lutheran, as well as northern and southern territorial lines. When the journal began to publish articles on Lutheran piety, extolling German patriotism and soldierly virtues and peppered with anticommunist and antisemitic polemics, more progressive members of the Confessing Church called on their followers to cancel their subscriptions. Söhlmann’s gamble to increase readership by tailoring the journal’s content ever more closely to reigning Nazi views could not save...

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