Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945 (review)

This book calls to mind Franklin Littell's well-known insistence that Nazi genocide be regarded as a "mass apostasy of the baptized."¹ It represents the latest installment² in an ongoing re-examination of the Holocaust and its theological legacy by three younger German scholars. Norbert Reck serves on the editorial staff of the ecumenical Catholic journal Concilium; his Protestant co-authors are colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College (Maryland). As Reck notes in his introduction, their project involves a "self-critical re-reading of Christian traditions that failed to prevent million-fold murder" ( p. 13). For Germans in particular, they argue, theological issues must be located in the context of a "society of perpetrators," implicated in mass crimes through pervasive indifference, denial, evasion, and self-justification if not actual forensic culpability. The authors' interest therefore lies not with issues of systematic theology but rather with theology as lived experience. Their specific focus is the construction of guilt and responsibility in Protestant and Catholic discourse after 1945. In many ways their work both reflects and interrogates the canon of post-Auschwitz theology; it also reflects the concern with issues of memory and representation so prominent in much recent historical scholarship on the period.

The book consists of three separate but interrelated studies. Taken together, these make a case that postwar German theology has suffered from a protracted inability to comprehend and confront the moral legacy of the Nazi era. All too often, the authors insist, theologians and church leaders ignored the nature and extent of their own complicity in a culture of systematic injustice and criminality. Instead, like so many of their contemporaries, they tended to adopt unreflective "poses of innocence" that in effect constituted the "discursive continuation" ( p. 19) of collective mentalities that helped facilitate the Shoah in the first place.

Björn Krondorfer documents this tendency at length in an insightful analysis of representations of the Nazi era found in the autobiographies of Protestant theologians and church leaders since 1945. Predictably enough, all but a handful of the nearly sixty writers in question are male. Krondorfer suggests that the particular genre of autobiography in which they couch their accounts is essentially patriarchal, privileging self-presentation over self-disclosure, let alone self-examination à la Augustine's Confessions. Employing a cohort model adapted from Harold Marcuse, Krondorfer charts continuities and transformations across successive generational "discourses of memory." While alert to variances in outlook within and between generations, he emphasizes the degree of commonality evident especially in those cohorts most responsible for shaping the church's moral vocabulary in the first postwar decades—namely individuals born between 1890 (or earlier) and 1936, for whom the Third Reich was a defining feature of adulthood, adolescence, or childhood. With rare exceptions, he shows, published recollections from these age groups reflect a striking absence of empathy for Jewish victims and a virtual silence regarding the church's own heritage of anti-Judaism and antisemitism. They also betray a frequent tendency to render Jewish and German suffering as moral equivalents and an equally frequent tendency to frame issues of moral responsibility in terms not of personal agency but of impersonal forces—materialism, secularism, imponderables of "fate" or divine decree—for which Jews themselves could often enough be made to serve as exemplars. Few if any of these writers, Krondorfer concludes, were prepared to risk the kind of vulnerability an unsparing self-assessment would entail. As a result, most of their accounts remain disappointing examples of "self-justification, moral vindication, and concealment of the subject" ( p. 138).

Norbert Reck reinforces these conclusions in a study of guilt and responsibility as themes in selected works by a dozen prominent Catholic theologians (including the memoirs of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger). Like Krondorfer, Reck traces generational patterns of continuity and transformation. The patterns he unearths, while understandably colored...