Diktatur und Diaspora: Das Bistum Meissen, 1932-1951 (review)

In this volume published by the venerable Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Birgit Mitzscherlich, Director of the Domschatzkammer (Cathedral museum) at Bautzen, the former seat of the diocese of Meißen, offers a comparative study of the Saxon diaspora under first the Nazi regime and then during the early years of the communist regime.

In German history generally and in German Catholic scholarship in particular, regional studies recently have gained in popularity. Currently Saxony is an attractive field for historians as its surviving records became available only after 1989. For Catholic scholars, it is interesting also because it is an important diaspora region. Until 1918, the ruling house of Wettin was Catholic, but the vast majority of the population was Lutheran. While in the first years of the Nazi regime, the Catholic Church and its organizations enjoyed some protection by the sympathetic minister of education, the reign of the notorious Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (regional party and government head) Mutschmann quickly ended any hopes of maintaining intact the Catholic subculture. In fact, throughout the period addressed by Mitzscherlich, both the Nazi and communist Saxon state administrations were more extremist in their antireligious policies than was the national government. Both Nazi and communist central authorities in Berlin occasionally tried to rein in the extremism of the regional leaders in Dresden, not always with success.

In addition to the overwhelming challenges facing the Church from the outside, the diocese faced a number of internal challenges. Bishop Petrus Legge was fairly weak, did not really desire the post, and was further undermined by a money-laundering trial during the Nazi-era. He did not co-operate well with the other German bishops, nor was he a particularly skillful defender of the Church's needs. The diocese suffered from the diversity of its flock; it extended across state boundaries (parts of the diocese were in Thuringia); and it contained a considerable Slavic minority, the Sorbians of Upper Lusatia.

Being the smaller of the two Christian Churches in Saxony helped the Church as the state's animosity largely was focused on the majority Lutheran church. This continued even after 1945, when large numbers of Catholic refugees and expellees from Silesia, the Sudetenland, and other former German settlement areas almost doubled the number of Catholics in Saxony.

From Mitzscherlich's work one gets a good sense of the repression that both the National Socialist and the Communist regimes exerted against the Church and its members. Her work provides a clear sense that active resistance or even vocal witnessing by Catholics, both institutionally and individually, would have had to begin from a position not of relative strength, but one in which the religious and faithful themselves already were considered dangerous nonconformists. The forced elimination of the Church from most youth activities, from education, and from the media meant that anyone wishing actively to oppose either regime would have had to venture out at a time when the Church's life was contracting in order to preserve its essential functions.

Comparing Saxon Catholics with those in majority-Catholic areas such as Bavaria or the Rhineland, Mitzscherlich argues that their lengthy experience as a minority and the Church's broader ties to the rest of Germany and to the Holy See not only offered some measure of protection, but also imbued Saxon Catholics with a sense of belonging and unity that helped them persevere in the face of repression.

The largely implicit question underlying this detailed study is what great value religious and above all laity must have seen in their Church to remain faithful when the choice for one's faith implied fundamental opposition to the regime's exclusive value system, and all the hardships in schooling, career, and public life that this choice entailed. Mitzscherlich's work makes clear that Seelsorge, the quest for the sacramental life of the Church, remained the core of Catholic life, which the regimes...