In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory
  • Matthew D. Hockenos
German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory, K. Hannah Holtschneider (Münster: LIT, 2001), 225 pp., cloth $34.95.

The practitioners of Theologie nach Auschwitz (theology after Auschwitz), also known as "Holocaust theologians," have struggled over the past few decades to radically [End Page 122] reform Christian theology in light of the churches' abysmal response to the Holocaust. Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz articulated their goal in 1977: "to do no more theology that is formulated in a way that remains or could remain untouched by Auschwitz."1 These theologians have tried to purge Christian theology of the antisemitism and anti-Judaism that fostered accommodation with Nazi racial policy. They contend that maintaining the credibility of Christianity necessitates embracing its Jewish roots while also incorporating reflection on the Holocaust into doctrine and practice.

Although postwar theologians addressed both the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations in the two decades after 1945, Theologie nach Auschwitz is primarily thework of second-generation postwar theologians of the 1970s and 1980s who aim to reconstruct the relationship between Jews and Christians. However, some emerging third-generation theologians believe that their greater temporal distance from the Holocaust enables them to examine the legacy of Christian antisemitism and anti-Judaism with greater critical insight than their predecessors. German scholar K.Hannah Holtschneider, author of German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory (2001), identifies with this third generation.2

Holtschneider examines in detail three texts written by German Protestant theologians between 1980 and 1996, and analyzes their representations of the Holocaust and of Jews. Of the three texts two were written by second-generation theologians: the 1980 Rhineland statement, Towards a Renewal of the Relationship of Christians and Jews, and Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt's About the Misery and Affliction of Theology (1988); the last is third-generation theologian Britta Jüngst's doctoral dissertation In the Realm of Death There Is Life (1996). Both the Rhineland statement and Marquardt's text are characteristic of second-generation Holocaust theology in that each presupposes a shared tradition between Christians and Jews, maintains that Judaism is essential to Christianity, and portrays Jews positively as witnesses of God's actions in history. Holtschneider praises these theologians for attempting to develop a post-Holocaust Christian identity that depicts Jews and Judaism in a positive light. However, she criticizes them on three fronts: for appropriating elements of the Jewish faith into their theologies in order to redeem the Christian faith, for imposing definitions on Jews that they may not agree with, and for failing "to reflect on Jewish self-understandings in their own right" (p. 197). Jüngst, who tries—although not always successfully—to avoid these problems, fares somewhat better in Holtschneider's critique of Holocaust theology.

The Rhineland statement, a "milestone" according to Holtschneider, was the first in Germany to declare that post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish relations were an essential component of a Protestant confession of faith. In January 1980 the synod of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland adopted the controversial statement that was conceived by a committee of Christian theologians in consultation with Jewish [End Page 123] dialogue partners, including Yehuda Aschkenasy, Eberhard Bethge, Edna Brocke, and Heinz Kremers. Several Protestant statements between 1945 and 1980 acknowledged partial responsibility for the Holocaust and rejected the Christian doctrines of supersessionism and triumphalism, but the Rhineland statement went several steps further: it recognized the integrity of the Jewish faith, emphasized the continuing salvation-historical significance of the Jewish people, rejected proselytizing among Jews, and stressed the importance of present-day Christian-Jewish relations to Christian identity and faith.

Holtschneider's primary objection to the statement is that Jews are defined solely in religious terms as witnesses to the presence of God in history.3 The characterization of Jews as "witness people"(people invested with religious significance for the church) although well intentioned is problematic because many Jews do not self-define themselves as witnesses to the presence of God. Interpreting Jews as significant for salvation history, Holtschneider maintains, "intrumentalizes Jews and does not explore alternatives...

pdf

Share