Die “Christlich-deutsche Bewegung”: Eine Studie zum konservativen Protestantismus in der Weimarer Republik (review)

Die "Christlich-deutsche Bewegung": Eine Studie zum konservativen Protestantismus in der Weimarer Republik. By Christoph Weiling. [Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Darstellungen, Band 28.] Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1998. Pp. 386. DM 88.)

Christoph Weiling's comprehensive survey of the Christian German Movement ("Christlich-deutsche Bewegung," hereafter CdB) traces the conservative Protestant group through the three fateful years of its existence (November, 1930, to September, 1933). His purpose is to move beyond the simplistic understanding of the CdB as a mere forerunner of the Faith Movement of the GermanChristians ("Glaubensbewegung deustche Christen," or DC), the principal nationalist movement within German Protestantism during the National Socialist era. His aim is to provide an understanding of the composition, organization, activities, and theology of the CdB within the broader set of relationships that existed between members of right-wing political movements and German Protestantism during the last years of the Weimar Republic.

Weiling accomplishes this by organizing his book into three large chronological chapters. In the first, he examines the founding of the CdB, its key leaders (including Werner and Walter Wilm and Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin), its early aims and writings, and its participation in the national mission ("Volksmission") to renew German Protestantism. The second chapter follows the reorientation of the CdB under Mecklenburg Land Bishop Heinrich Rendtorff, its subsequent publications, theological emphases, and forms of public activity in 1931-1932, while the third chapter explores the detailed organization of the CdB and its decline in 1933. Documentary appendices contain three versions of CdB guiding principles and a list of all CdB officers and members.

Drawing on a vast array of primary sources from north German state and church archives, Weiling constructs a nuanced account of the CdB and its unique place within the conservative Protestantism of later Weimar Germany. He argues that the CdB was established by conservative elites to provide a theological foundation for the struggle to create a national government that would stand "above the parties" and unite the political right wing in Germany. To that end, the CdB upheld a theology of orders affirming marriage, the family, thestate, and the nation ("Volk") as divinely created and absolute in nature. Christianity was to be the basis for a political conservatism that affirmed the racial particularity of Germans, rejected the Weimar republic, struggled against liberalism and Marxism, and favored the re-establishment of the monarchy. For CdB members, to be conservative was to be Christian (p. 21). Once the NationalSocialists gained power and the DC began to dominate German church politics, the CdB disbanded itself, believing that it had accomplished its missionto awaken a mass movement uniting Christianity and conservative nationalism.

Weiling concludes that the religious conservatism of late Weimar Germany had more in common with the traditional piety and church-mindedness of Wilhelmine conservatism—he refers to Fritz Fischer and the continuity of history—than with the theological and church-political extremism of the Third Reich. Just as the German National People's Party and the Stahlhelm cannot be reduced to the status of forerunners of National Socialism, so he argues that the CdB conservatives were not simply forerunners of the DC National Socialists. Rather, it was committed to the traditional confessions of faith, and opposed the deification of Volk and Fatherland. It sought to bring the influence of the churches into national public life, not to allow the national movement to transform the nature of the churches. Weiling's argument is clear and well documented. His comprehensive account of the CdB in the late Weimar era is a useful addition to the literature on the German Christian Movement and the relationship between nationalism and Christianity in the early phase of the Third Reich.