CHAPTER 10
THE CHURCH AND
THE JEWISH QUESTION
What is at stake is by no means whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not.
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.
—HEINRICH HEINE
In the first months of Nazi rule, the speed and scope of what the Nazis intended and had begun executing throughout German society were staggering. Under what was called the Gleischaltung (synchronization), the country would be thoroughly reordered along National Socialist lines. No one dreamed how quickly and dramatically things would change.
The Bonhoeffers always had access to privileged information, but as the shadow of the Third Reich fell across Germany, much of the information came from Christel’s husband, lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi, at the German Supreme Court. The Bonhoeffers learned that something especially disturbing called the Aryan Paragraph would take effect April 7. It would result in a series of far-reaching laws that were cynically announced as the “Restoration of the Civil Service.” Government employees must be of “Aryan” stock; anyone of Jewish descent would lose his job. If the German church, essentially a state church, went along, all pastors with Jewish blood would be excluded from ministry. That would apply to Bonhoeffer’s friend, Franz Hildebrandt. Many were confused about how to respond. The pressure to get in line with the National Socialist wave sweeping the country was intense. Bonhoeffer knew someone must think it all through carefully, and in March 1933, he did so. The result was his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question.”
The Church and the Jewish Question
A group of pastors had been meeting in the home of Gerhard Jacobi, pastor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, to discuss developments in the country. Bonhoeffer planned to deliver his essay to them in early April.
The German church was in turmoil. Some church leaders felt the church should make peace with the Nazis, who were strongly opposed to communism and “godlessness.” They believed the church should conform to the Nazi racial laws and the Führer Principle. They thought that by wedding the church to the state, they would restore the church and Germany to her former glory, before the Treaty of Versailles and the chaos and humiliation of the last twenty years. The moral degeneration of Weimar Germany was self-evident. Hadn’t Hitler spoken of restoring moral order to the nation? They didn’t agree with him on everything, but they believed that if the church’s prestige were restored, they might be able to influence him in the right direction.
There was at this time a group that stood solidly behind Hitler’s rise to power and blithely tossed two millennia of Christian orthodoxy overboard. They wanted a strong, unified Reich church and a “Christianity” that was strong and masculine, that would stand up to and defeat the godless and degenerate forces of Bolshevism. They boldly called themselves the Deutsche Christen (German Christians) and referred to their brand of Christianity as “positive Christianity.” The German Christians became very aggressive in attacking those who didn’t agree with them and generally caused much confusion and division in the church.*
But perhaps the most grievous aspect of the church turmoil was the willingness of mainstream Protestant Christian leaders to consider adopting the Aryan Paragraph. They reasoned that Jews who were baptized Christians could form their own church and had no particular business expecting to be a part of a distinctly “German” church. In the 1930s, such racially ideological ideas were not nearly as foreign as they are today, nor can all who were open to them be dismissed as hate-filled anti-Semites.
The idea that the races should be “separate, but equal” was popular and widespread in the Jim Crow American South, and Bonhoeffer had seen it firsthand. He knew that such ideas were powerfully rooted in notions about human identity and community. Across Europe and the world, there had often been strong taboos against mixing races and ethnicities. So even though Bonhoeffer knew that what he was facing was inimical to Christian faith, he knew that such thinking was also widespread. It was indeed possible that a German theologian or pastor who genuinely bore no ill will toward Jews might be persuaded that the Aryan Paragraph was acceptable. Some believed that an ethnically Jewish person who was honestly converted to Christian faith should be part of a church composed of other converted Jews. Many sincere white American Christians felt that way about Christians of other races until just a few decades ago. Bonhoeffer knew that he couldn’t simply attack such people as racists. He would have to argue logically against such ideas.
Unlike most Germans, Bonhoeffer had experienced the church far beyond the Lutheran churches of Germany. In Rome, he had seen Christians of many races and nationalities worshiping together; in the United States, he had worshiped with African American Christians in Harlem; and via the ecumenical movement, he had worshiped with other European Christians. The immediate question before him was, what is the church’s response to the Jewish question? But the question that stood behind that question was still, what is the church?
“The fact, unique in history,” he began, “that the Jew has been made subject to special laws by the state solely because of the race to which he belongs and quite apart from his religious beliefs, raises two new problems for the theologian, which must be examined separately.”
He addressed the issue of the church’s attitude toward the state and created common ground with his skeptical readers by paraphrasing Romans 13: “There is no power, but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God.” In other words, governments are established by God for the preservation of order. The church had no fundamental quarrel with the state being the state, with its restraining evil, even by use of force. His dramatic opening sentence seemed to overstate the case: “Without doubt, the Church of the Reformation has no right to address the state directly in its specifically political actions.” But he was aware of his audience and wished to establish that he shared their attitude here. He was also aware of speaking within a tradition that took its cues from Luther, and Luther’s attitude toward the role of the state erred much on the side of the state, whom Luther applauded in crushing the Peasants’ Rebellion, for example. Bonhoeffer must tread carefully.
Then he moved on to clarify that the church does, nonetheless, play a vital role for the state. What is that role? The church must “continually ask the state whether its action can be justified as legitimate action of the state, i.e., as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder.” In other words, it is the church’s role to help the state be the state. If the state is not creating an atmosphere of law and order, as Scripture says it must, then it is the job of the church to draw the state’s attention to this failing. And if on the other hand, the state is creating an atmosphere of “excessive law and order,” it is the church’s job to draw the state’s attention to that too.
If the state is creating “excessive law and order,” then “the state develops its power to such an extent that it deprives Christian preaching and Christian faith . . . of their rights.” Bonhoeffer called this a “grotesque situation.” “The church,” he said, “must reject this encroachment of the order of the state precisely because of its better knowledge of the state and of the limitations of its action. The state which endangers the Christian proclamation negates itself.”
Bonhoeffer then famously enumerated “three possible ways in which the church can act towards the state.” The first, already mentioned, was for the church to question the state regarding its actions and their legitimacy—to help the state be the state as God has ordained. The second way—and here he took a bold leap—was “to aid the victims of state action.” He said that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society.” And before that sentence was over, he took another leap, far bolder than the first—in fact, some ministers walked out—by declaring that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” Everyone knew that Bonhoeffer was talking about the Jews, including Jews who were not baptized Christians. Bonhoeffer then quoted Galatians: “Do good to all men.” To say that it is unequivocally the responsibility of the Christian church to help all Jews was dramatic, even revolutionary. But Bonhoeffer wasn’t through yet.
The third way the church can act toward the state, he said, “is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” The translation is awkward, but he meant that a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle. It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state; at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil. This, he said, is permitted only when the church sees its very existence threatened by the state, and when the state ceases to be the state as defined by God. Bonhoeffer added that this condition exists if the state forces the “exclusion of baptized Jews from our Christian congregations or in the prohibition of our mission to the Jews.”
The church would be “in status confessionis and here the state would be in the act of negating itself.” This Latin phrase, which means “in a state of confession,” was originally used as a specifically Lutheran phrase in the sixteenth century. By Bonhoeffer’s time it had come to mean a state of crisis in which the “confession” of the gospel was at stake. To “confess the gospel” simply meant to speak forth the good news of Jesus Christ.* Bonhoeffer continued, “A state which includes within itself a terrorized church has lost its most faithful servant.”
Bonhoeffer went on to say that to “confess Christ” meant to do so to Jews as well as to Gentiles. He declared it vital for the church to attempt to bring the Messiah of the Jews to the Jewish people who did not yet know him. If Hitler’s laws were adopted, this would be impossible. His dramatic and somewhat shocking conclusion was that not only should the church allow Jews to be a part of the church, but that this was precisely what the church was: it was the place where Jews and Germans stand together. “What is at stake,” he said, “is by no means the question whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not.”
Many would have remembered Galatians 3:28, declaring that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” To underscore his point, Bonhoeffer concluded with words from Luther’s commentary on Psalm 110:3: “There is no other rule or test for who is a member of the people of God or the church of Christ than this: where there is a little band of those who accept this word of the Lord, teach it purely and confess against those who persecute it, and for that reason suffers what is their due.”
In the spring of 1933, Bonhoeffer was declaring it the duty of the church to stand up for the Jews. This would have seemed radical to even staunch allies, especially since the Jews had not begun to suffer the horrors they would suffer in a few years. Bonhoeffer’s three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state’s victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.
The advent of the Nazi victory and the Nazis’ attempt to co-opt the church resulted in chaos within the church itself, and in fighting and politicking among the many factions of the church. Bonhoeffer wanted to drown out the cacophony of voices and look at these things calmly and logically. He knew that if these questions were not addressed properly, one would be reduced to merely “political answers” or “pragmatic” answers. One could begin to veer away from the true gospel, toward worshiping a god made in one’s own image, rather than God himself, the “eternally other” of whom Barth had spoken and written. And just as many well-meaning Christians at Union had unwittingly abandoned that God for many good reasons, so too many of the well-meaning Christians in Germany were now doing. They were convinced that if they bent their theology a bit, it wouldn’t matter—the results would be all right in the end. Many of them honestly believed that under Hitler the opportunities for evangelism would increase. But Bonhoeffer knew that a church that did not stand with the Jews was not the church of Jesus Christ, and to evangelize people into a church that was not the church of Jesus Christ was foolishness and heresy. From the time Bonhoeffer finished writing “The Church and the Jewish Question,” he saw this clearly and would stake everything on it. But it would be a long and lonely road.
The April 1 Boycott
One week after passage of the Enabling Act, Hitler declared a boycott of Jewish stores across Germany. The stated purpose was stopping the international press, which the Nazis maintained was controlled by the Jews, from printing lies about the Nazi regime. They always cast their aggressions as a defensive response to actions against them and the German people.
Goebbels spoke at a rally in Berlin that day, fulminating against the “Jewish atrocity propaganda,” and everywhere across Germany SA men intimidated shoppers from entering Jewish-owned stores, whose windows had been daubed in black or yellow paint with stars of David and the word Jude (Jew). The SA also handed out pamphlets and held placards: “Deutsche Wehrt Euch! Kauft Nicht Bei Juden!” (Germans, protect yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!) Some signs were in English: “Germans, defend yourselves from Jewish Atrocity Propaganda—buy only at German shops!” Even the offices of Jewish doctors and lawyers were targeted.
Bonhoeffer’s Jewish brother-in-law, Gerhard Leibholz, was a lawyer, and like many German Jews, he was a baptized Christian. Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, fearing the situation, went to Göttingen to be with Sabine and Gerhard that weekend, while other family members checked in via telephone. That April, “the hope, so eagerly nourished, that Hitler would soon ruin himself by mismanagement was shattered,” recalled Sabine. “National Socialism established itself with lightning swiftness.”
On the day of the boycott in Berlin, Dietrich’s grandmother was shopping. The patrician ninety-year-old was not about to be told where to shop. When SA men tried to restrain her from entering one store, she informed them that she would shop where she liked and did so. Later that day she did the same at the famous Kaufhaus des Westens, the world’s largest department store, ignoring the silly kickline of SA men stationed in front. The story of Julie Bonhoeffer marching past Nazi gorillas was a favorite in the Bonhoeffer family, who saw in her an embodiment of the values they sought to live by.
The Lehmanns’ Visit
In these first tumultuous days of April, two other events touched Bonhoeffer’s life: the German Christians held a conference in Berlin, and the Lehmanns came to visit.
The German Christians’ conference was a disturbing spectacle for anyone wary of Hitler’s zeal to reorder German society. The lines between church and state were being blurred aggressively. It was one thing when the state was led by the Christian kaiser, but another when it was led by the anti-Christian Führer. Most Germans believed Hitler was basically “one of them,” however, and they welcomed the Nazis’ plans to reorder society, including the church.
Hermann Göring gave a speech to great acclaim, casting the reordering of society as mainly an “administrative” change. He refreshed the crowd on the basics of the Führer Principle and exhorted them to expect their Führer to fuhr (lead) in every aspect of German life, including the church. As part of the administrative overhaul, Göring explained that Hitler was proposing the office of a Reich bishop, a man who could bring all of the disparate elements in the German church together. Hitler’s choice for this position was one Ludwig Müller, a coarse former naval chaplain. The German Christians wanted a unified German church in accord with Nazi principles, and they fought toward that end. If England could have the Church of England, why shouldn’t Germany have its own church, too—and on a firmly “German” foundation?
Paul and Marion Lehmann arrived in the last days of March. They had come to Bonn to hear Barth and then would spend a few days in Berlin to see their old friend. Ever the gracious host, Bonhoeffer took his Union friends everywhere, showing them the church in Wedding whose confirmation class he had taught, strolling with them along Unter den Linden, and taking them to the opera to see Richard Strauss’s Elektra.*
During their time in Berlin, the Lehmanns witnessed the April 1 boycott, as well as the disturbing spectacle of the German Christians’ conference. Another person in Berlin that week would figure prominently in Bonhoeffer’s life, though the two would not meet for six months. This was George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, visiting for an ecumenical meeting scheduled at the same time as the German Christians’ conference. He got an unplanned but extremely valuable firsthand look at the ugly reality of the German Christian movement, one that would help him in his role as one of their principal adversaries in the years to come.
The Lehmanns spent time with the Bonhoeffer family at Wangenheimstrasse and marveled at their life there. To them, it was a world outside of time, a cultural bulwark against the gathering madness. The Lehmanns noticed that now and again Klaus Bonhoeffer rose and tiptoed to the door of the room where they were speaking to see that none of the servants was listening.
Even in early 1933 one couldn’t know who could be trusted, and some of their conversations were vigorously anti-Nazi. Klaus and Dietrich agreed that Hitler and the Nazis couldn’t last long, but the damage they were now doing to the nation was grave. The Bonhoeffers must do all they could to work against them, especially on their treatment of the Jews. These conversations can be seen as the first blushes of the resistance against Hitler already beginning to form.
And even at this early stage, it was not only talk. That April, Paul and Dietrich composed a letter to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. This was the rabbi whom Bonhoeffer heard preach in his synagogue on that Easter Sunday two years earlier. Wise was honorary president of the American Jewish Committee and an outspoken voice against the Nazis early on. He was connected to President Franklin Roosevelt, so Bonhoeffer and Lehmann thought through him they might alert Roosevelt to the brewing situation. Through the Reichstag Fire Edict, Hitler had made even writing such a letter a treasonable offense. Bonhoeffer knew he could end up in a concentration camp for his troubles, but he wrote the letter and sent it nonetheless.
Paul and Marion noticed that their friend Dietrich had changed in the two years since they had seen each other. In New York he exhibited a more playful and carefree attitude than they saw now. Under the circumstances, this was understandable. But there was something else: his attitude toward God was different. He seemed to take the whole thing more seriously.
Sabine and Gerhard
Ten days after the boycott of Jewish stores, Bonhoeffer was asked to preach another sermon, for a funeral. On April 11, Gerhard Leibholz’s father died. For Dietrich, this was a difficult spot, one that he later admitted he had not negotiated well. Leibholz was ethnically Jewish, but unlike his son, he had not been baptized into the church. Bonhoeffer was forever considering all sides of a question, sometimes to a fault. Now he thought about how it might appear if someone who was speaking boldly against the Nazis on the Jewish issue preached at the funeral of a Jew who was not a member of the church. Would it seem merely incendiary? Would it destroy his chances for future action in the church? Would it destroy his credibility with those inside the church who already thought his ideas on this subject overly radical?
He wasn’t sure what to do, but he was urged to consult with his district superintendent. Knowing the uproar it might cause, his superintendent strongly opposed the idea of Bonhoeffer’s preaching, and so Dietrich declined. But he would soon deeply regret his action.
Sabine stayed in close contact with her family. Gerhard was a popular professor of law at Göttingen, so it wasn’t long before they were directly affected by the mounting anti-Semitism. At one point, the National Socialist student leaders in Göttingen called for a boycott of his classes. Sabine recalled:
I had often heard my husband’s lectures and I went to the university on the actual day of the boycott in order to be there and to hear what the students would have to say. A few students were standing there in SA uniform, straddling the doorway in their jackboots as only these SA men could and not allowing anyone to enter. “Leibholz must not lecture, he is a Jew. The lectures are not taking place.” Obediently the students went home. A corresponding notice had been posted on the blackboard.
After a while, Sabine and Gerhard needed only to walk down the street in Göttingen to breathe the poisonous atmosphere. People who recognized them crossed to the other side to avoid them. “In Göttingen,” Sabine said, “many tried to collaborate. Lecturers who had not achieved further promotion now saw their opportunity.” But a few were sickened at what was taking place and were not afraid to express their horror. The theologian Walter Bauer met them on the street and launched into a tirade against Hitler. When Gerhard lost his position, another professor approached him and, with tears in his eyes, said, “Sir, you are my colleague and I am ashamed to be a German.” And a group of students from Gerhard’s seminar went to the Ministry to ask that he be allowed to teach.
Many of Gert’s relatives lost their jobs too. One Jewish school friend of Gerhard committed suicide. There was constant news of this sort. On Reformation Day, a few months after his decision not to preach at Gert’s father’s funeral, Bonhoeffer wrote Gert and Sabine in Göttingen:
I am tormented even now by the thought that I didn’t do as you asked me as a matter of course. To be frank, I can’t think what made me behave as I did. How could I have been so horribly afraid at the time? It must have seemed equally incomprehensible to you both, and yet you said nothing. But it preys on my mind, because it’s the kind of thing one can never make up for. So all I can do is ask you to forgive my weakness then. I know now for certain that I ought to have behaved differently.
Throughout 1933, the Nazis continued their campaign to legally bar Jews from state-affiliated institutions. More and more laws were enacted along the lines of the April 7 Reformation of the Civil Service. On April 22, Jews were prohibited from serving as patent lawyers, and Jewish doctors from working in institutions with state-run insurance. Jewish children were affected too. On April 25, strict limits were placed on how many of them could attend public schools. On May 6, the laws were expanded to include all honorary university professors, lecturers, and notaries. In June all Jewish dentists and dental technicians were prohibited from working with state-run insurance institutions. By the fall, the laws included the spouses of non-Aryans. On September 29, Jews were banned from all cultural and entertainment activities, including the worlds of film, theater, literature, and the arts. In October all newspapers were placed under Nazi control, expelling Jews from the world of journalism.
The aggressive attacks from the German Christians during April shocked a number of pastors and theologians into action. Their responses varied. George Schulz of the Sydow Brotherhood published a manifesto. Heinrich Vogel published his “Eight Articles of Evangelical Doctrine.” Some Westphalian pastors published a declaration that, like Bonhoeffer’s essay, roundly rejected as heresy the exclusion of baptized Jews from German churches. The Young Reformation movement came into being, representing a number of theological points of view—all opposed to the German Christians, but not agreed on much else. And Gerhard Jacobi, who would work arm in arm with Bonhoeffer in the church struggle, began meeting with other pastors at the Cafe am Knie in Charlottenburg. There were so many theological and political points of view in the opposition that they could never muster a single, focused plan of resistance. But they would try.
“Where Books Are Burned . . .”
In May 1933, the madness continued apace. Gleischaltung was much discussed. This idea, which Göring referenced at the German Christians’ conference in Berlin the previous month, meant that everything in German society must fall in line with the Nazi worldview. This included the world of books and ideas.
Karl Bonhoeffer had a front-row seat to see how the Nazis exerted pressure on the universities. When the Nazi minister for cultural affairs spoke at Berlin University, Bonhoeffer recalled with shame that even though he found the man’s attitude insulting, neither he nor his colleagues felt sufficient courage to walk out in protest:
Young and hitherto wholly unknown medical trainees came, as representatives of the Party, to suggest to the heads of hospitals that they immediately dismiss the Jewish doctors. Some allowed themselves to be persuaded. Any suggestions that such matters came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry and not of the Party were met with threats. The Dean tried to persuade faculty members to join the Party collectively. His attempt was foiled by individual refusals. Nor did the Ministry at first make any move to meet the demand for the dismissal of Jewish assistants. But doctors in individual hospitals were constantly spied upon to discover their attitude towards the Party.
He was at the University of Berlin another five years, and only with some effort did he manage to avoid displaying a portrait of Hitler.
Anti-Semitism had existed for decades among the students of German universities, but now they expressed it formally. That spring the German Students Association planned to celebrate an “Action against the un-German Spirit” on May 10.* At 11:00 p.m. thousands of students gathered in every university town across Germany. From Heidelburg to Tübingen to Freiburg to Göttingen, where the Leibholzes lived, they marched in torchlight parades and were then whipped into wild-eyed enthusiasm as Nazi officials raved about the glories of what the brave young men and women of Germany were about to do. At midnight the whole thing roared to grand effect in a great Saüberung (cleansing) where huge bonfires were lit and into which the students hurled thousands of books.
Thus Germany would be “purged” of the pernicious “un-German” thoughts of authors such as Helen Keller, Jack London, and H. G. Wells. Of course Erich Maria Remarque’s books were included, as were those of many others, including Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. In 1821, in his play Almansor, the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote the chilling words: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” Heine was a German Jew who converted to Christianity, and his words were a grim prophecy, meaning, “Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.” That night across Germany his books were among those thrown into the crackling flames. Sigmund Freud, whose books were also burned that night, made a similar remark: “Only our books? In earlier times they would have burned us with them.”
In Berlin the torchlight procession began at the Hegelplatz behind Berlin University, went through the university, and then eastward along Unter den Linden. The “anti-German” books followed in a truck, and at the Opernplatz stood the great pile of wood that would become the bonfire. Then addressing the thirty thousand, the vampiric homunculus Joseph Goebbels ranted into the darkness: “German men and women! The age of arrogant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end! . . . You are doing the right thing at this midnight hour—to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past. This is a great, powerful, and symbolic act. . . . Out of these ashes the phoenix of a new age will arise. . . . O Century! O Science! It is a joy to be alive!”
As with so much else in the Third Reich, the scene had an undeniably macabre aspect to it: the midnight bonfire feeding like a succubus on the noble thoughts and words of great men and women. Goebbels, the propagandist, well knew that to stage a torchlight parade, followed by a bonfire at the stroke of midnight, evoked something ancient and tribal and pagan and invoked the gods of the German Volk, who represented strength and ruthlessness and blood and soil. The ritual was not meant to be Christian in any sense; indeed it was very much meant to be anti-Christian, though it wouldn’t do to say so, since most of those present might have balked to hear such a thing, though they well felt it. The torches and the drums and the procession were meant to create an atmosphere of ominousness and foreboding and fear, and to summon forces who knew nothing of the weak virtues of the Christian faith, but stood in fundamental opposition to them and to the monotheistic religion of the despised Jews. It’s no mistake that in the cities where the event was canceled by rain, it was rescheduled for June 21, the summer solstice.
Heinrich Heine’s famous words about the book burnings are often quoted and today are inscribed at the Opernplatz as a memorial of the ghastly ritual. But another passage from Heine’s works is perhaps more eerily prophetic of what would take place in Germany a century hence. They are the concluding words of his 1834 book, Religion and Philosophy in Germany:
Christianity—and that is its greatest merit—has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. . . . Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. . . . [W]hen you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.
* . A more complete treatment of the German Christians follows on pages 171-175.
* . The term Confessing Church in large part was coined in reference to the phrase “in status confessionis.” Those who believed that the German church had ceased to be the church of Jesus Christ because of the adoption of the Aryan Paragraph decided that they must break away and form the church anew. The new church was called the Confessing Church because it proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ.
* . Strauss was caught in the cultural crossfire: the Nazis tried to co-opt him by giving him an official arts post. He accepted it, he later claimed, to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law. But Strauss was friends with the German Jewish writer Stefan Zweig and was later forced to resign for refusing to remove Zweig’s name from an opera libretto he had written.
* . It’s unclear whether that date was chosen to mark the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, but since that is the day Germany defeated France, and marked the beginning of its emergence as a united Germany, it’s likely.