The Politics of Religion in Soviet-Occupied Germany: The Case of Berlin-Brandenburg 1945–1949 by Sean Brennan (review)

As Sean Brennan demonstrates, the relationship between the East German regime and the Catholic and Protestant Churches in the early post–World War II years cannot be reduced to a dichotomy of communists versus clergy. Moreover, the Soviet zone period—the four years between the war and the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949—must be understood as a distinct political entity and not as a preview of the ensuing forty years. Brennan’s examination of Christian Churches—he does not include the Jewish community—in the Soviet zone represents a much-needed attempt to access the official policies, personal agendas, and external and internal influences that affected the churches under socialism.

Brennan’s opening premise is that the policy of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei [SED], the Soviet zone and the GDR’s official party) toward the churches was similar to, and even an extension of, Nazi policies. Indeed, the entire first chapter summarizes secondary literature on the Nazis’ treatment of Christianity. Certainly, scholars during socialism and after its collapse have made comparisons between the Nazi dictatorship and the Soviet zone/GDR, from the linguist Victor Klemperer’s comparisons of Nazi and GDR political language (Diaries, 1945–59, London, 2003) to the historian Sigrid Meuschel’s analysis of political power (Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR, Frankfurt am Main, 1992). These comparisons have been reconsidered in multiple scholarly works (see Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 [New York, 2003]); however, Brennan ignores these discussions. Fully twelve of the thirty-three endnotes for that chapter come from John S. Conway’s The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (New York, 1968). Brennan’s narrow use of secondary publications about Nazi policies in the opening chapter results in a weak and confusing beginning for a book about the Soviet zone.

Indeed, the book suffers from the use of too few, one-sided, primary and secondary sources—often older, general texts. Brennan’s work needed rigorous research to have proven his thesis—that is, that the SED’s policies resulted from Soviet-imposed decisions. Brennan’s claims often lack citations or else reference books that tangentially mention the subject at hand. His bibliography comprises fewer than sixty secondary sources: fifteen that were published before 1989, seven German works, and one Russian book. His archival work, conducted in Russia, Germany, and the United States, actually covers only a handful of available files. Entirely absent is the significant documentation on the Christian CDU party—for instance, from the Secret State Archives (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz)—or references to, Martin Broszat and Hermann Weber’s important overview of institutions and their personnel in the Soviet zone, Das SBZ-Handbuch (Munich, 1990).

One of the most unfortunate shortcomings of the book is the chapter on religious education. Inexplicably, Brennan heads the chapter with a secondary-source quotation about the identical nature of Soviet and GDR education (p. 69). Had Brennan looked at Soviet education (e.g., E. Thomas Ewing’s Separate Schools on Soviet schools, DeKalb, IL, 2010), he would have known that neither GDR and USSR textbooks nor schools mirrored each other. It is an almost painful assumption, one that could also have been avoided by secondary source research on German educational history. The “unity schools” that Brennan believes originated in the Soviet Union, to mention one example, boasted a German heritage stemming back to educational and confessional arguments from the nineteenth century—and which suffered from extensive postwar Soviet criticism.

Other problems distract from his argument and should have been caught by the publisher. Misspellings in German, grammar and stylistic mistakes, and missing or incomplete citations abound. This combination of substantive and stylistic inaccuracies makes it difficult to situate this work historiographically. It is an important topic—but one...