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Conclusion
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Conclusion In his 1959 essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” the German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno (1903–69) expressed frustration and disdain with the German failure to face the Nazi past head-on. In the fourteen years since the end of the war, “no serious working through the past” had taken place. Instead, he detected a concerted eªort to repress the past by “wiping it from memory.”1 It was a rare Protestant churchman who sought to come to terms with the Nazi past by wiping it entirely from memory, but neither did churchmen confront it as Adorno had hoped by engaging in critical self-reflection. Instead, they sought to shape memories and interpretations by explaining the past through the lens of Protestant theology, traditions, and practices. Perhaps the Nazi past and Auschwitz were synonymous in Adorno’s mind, but for most German churchmen Auschwitz did not embody the way they conceptualized or remembered the recent past. Although the pastors, theologians, and church leaders in this book came to diªerent conclusions, they relied on Protestant doctrine and Christian teaching to conceptualize and interpret the tragedy of the Third Reich and the immediate postwar years. The dominant discourse of the church from 1945 to 1950 was borrowed from the Bible; to assuage present suªering, pastors and theologians invoked the traditional Christian concepts such as redemptive suªering, “God’s righteous judgment,” and “His unfathomable compassion”—concepts exemplified by the Brandenburg churchmen in their Repentance and Prayer Day declaration. In their sermons, clergymen regularly employed empty exercises that did not require a serious working through of the recent past. Instead they drew on the crucifixion, suªering, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—images undeniably central to Christian teaching and thought. Jesus’ suªering on the cross provided churchmen in postwar Germany with an analogy for the pervasive suªering around them. Churchmen not only compared Christ’s suªering on the cross to the suªering in their midst, but they reminded parishioners that Christ died for them to take away their sins so they might live in the glory of God’s loving forgiveness. In his Good Friday sermon in 1947, Lutheran theologian Helmut Thielicke told the parishioners of St. Mark’s Church, “We are made to think of the multitudes who in our own day have suªered a kind of crucifixion—on the battlefield, in the concentration camps, in cellars destroyed as the bombs fell.” But, he continued, there is another side to Good Friday and the crucifixion: “In spite of all, the heavens stood open over His pains and wounds. We too, coming to His Cross, can know this most consoling fact, that we may stand with Him under the opened heavens.”2 The sinsu ªering-salvation discourse appealed to churchmen because it allowed them to discredit the judgment of “enemy” nations while calling on Germans to submit to the higher judgment of a merciful God. Conservatives especially were reliant on this type of discourse. When they discussed the church’s guilt, it was almost always construed as religious guilt, or guilt before God. Although there were variations and even contradictions in the way conservative Protestants viewed the years of the Third Reich, they generally agreed— though often reluctantly—that the church was guilty before God “for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently,” as they declared in the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. Their adherence to conservative Lutheran theology and traditions obstructed the process of evaluating critically the church’s conservative nationalism and antisemitism. They defended the limited nature of their conservative churchly resistance, which consisted primarily of defending the church against the storm-trooper tactics of the German Christians and the Nazis, as consistent with the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms. It was highly unusual for conservatives to express remorse for their complacency (and often complicity) in the Nazis’ persecution of communists and socialists; the abolition of basic rights of association, assembly, and press; the elimination of parliamentary representation; the discrimination against, and persecution of, Jews; and the aggression toward, and occupation of, neighboring countries. Although they advocated a new beginning for the church in 1945, conservatives did not believe that such a rebirth entailed any fundamental changes in the church’s theology, structure, or politics. Rather, the new beginning they sought meant confessing and repenting before God, restoring...