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Brandon Bloch, "Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books Network podcast. I'm Jenna Pittman, a host for the Network. Today we'll be talking to Brandon Block about his new book, Reinventing Protestant Germany. Religious Nationalist in the Contest for Post Nazi Democracy, published by Harvard University Press just a few weeks earlier in 2025. Examining the sources and limits of democratic transformation. Reinventing Protestant Germany Sheds new light on the development of post World War II European politics and the power of national myths. Brandon, thank you for being with us today. Welcome to the Show.
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Oh, thanks so much for having me.
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I would like to begin with just you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write Reinventing Protestant Germany.
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Sure. So I'm an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I teach modern German and European history. This is my first book, so based on my dissertation, but really transformed since then, but arguably it has an even older origin. So my first time living in Germany before I began graduate school was in 2011 and 12, when I was an English teacher in a Berlin public school and also worked for a Jewish organization. And I became really interested in some of the religious dynamics I was observing at the time. I noticed some tensions between certain teachers and Muslim students in the school I was working at. I also noticed that Christian religious education, surprisingly to me, in supposedly, you know, secular Germany, was offered as a subject in public schools. Working for the Jewish organization, I became fascinated by how many Christian groups were important interlocutors of the Jewish community. So the narrative that we tend to have about, you know, the United States being a kind of outlier among Western democracies as a highly religious society versus Germany and Europe being exclusively secular seemed not to be quite matching up. I felt that some of the religious dynamics I vaguely knew about from. From German history continued to be relevant. So that's really what I wanted to dig into in my dissertation. And when I got to graduate school, I worked with the intellectual historian Peter Gordon, who's very interested in theories of secularization. And I got exposed to a critical interdisciplinary literature about the idea of secularism which challenges this notion that modernity means simply the linear decline of religious beliefs and communities and practices. At the same time, I felt this sort of existing literature on secularism didn't really explain the German case where you have this sort of peculiar phenomenon where, yes, especially from, you know, the 50s, 60s onward, you have fewer people attending church. So classic measure of secularization. Yet the churches remain, these important partners of the state, have a role in public debates. They can, you know, as I mentioned, supervise religious instruction in public schools. So I felt that that dynamic of German secularism wasn't really fully accounted for in the existing literature. There was a literature on sort of Catholic history and its relationship to the Christian Democratic Party post war, but very little on Protestants. So that's where I decided to make my intervention.
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Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I bet your time in Germany just kind of making those observations about some of the religious tension and, I don't know, their political system and kind of trying to navigate just. I don't know, it's very interesting and I can kind of see where I'm sure you made some observations that led you to being like, I want to know more about that and you know, kind of why this structure is right.
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And interesting as an American because, you know, we think of ourselves as a more religious society yet at least, you know, at the time in 2011. Right. You know, separation of church and state was quite strong. I mean, you wouldn't have religious education in a public school. So those, you know, dynamics struck me as quite different.
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C
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I mentioned this to you a little bit earlier, but I truly, this is one of my favorite introductions that I've read in a, in a book in quite some time. It's just very clear and well articulated. You've definitely thought about this for quite some time because of how you, how you build your, your introduction upon itself, I think just as really, really well written. So I want you to kind of explain for our listeners what Reinventing Protestant Germany argues. I don't want to butcher it because again, you just so eloquently lay it out in this introduction and then just kind of what the historical context and historiography that this study builds from is.
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Yeah, absolutely. So the book argues that the Protestant churches play a really important role in shaping some of West Germany's earliest movements for the expansion of constitutional and human rights, which is surprising given the entanglements of the churches with the Nazi regime. But at the same time I argue that this post war transformation has less to do with a kind of successful or open moral reckoning with the Nazi past, but rather the recasting of certain elements of Protestants own political tradition. So the book is framed as a generational history. It looks at a cohort of pastors, church leaders, lay intellectuals born around the early 20th century. This group is socialized into the quite nationalistic Protestant youth movements in the Weimar Republic, which tend to adopt a quite hostile attitude toward democracy and look toward the Nazi regime in 1933 as potentially a vehicle for, for religious revival. There are certain overlaps between their Protestant nationalism and Nazi ideology. So shared anti Semitism, kind of a hostility toward pluralist democracy, the need for authoritarian leadership. But after 1945, we see members of the same generation begin to rethink the role of their church, not as a lackey of state power, but as a kind of bulwark against the overextension of the state. And we see Protestants getting involved in a range of political campaigns that I detail in the book around issues of conscientious objection, nuclear arms, reconciliation with Eastern Europe, campaigning against sort of emergency laws and states of emergency. And so this is a really important shift, I think, that helps to consolidate West German democracy, especially given the kind of significance and institutional reach of the Protestant church is an institution that has 26 million members in 1950. But as I mentioned, there's important continuities as well. In particular, post war Protestant activists continue to insist that their confession is not simply one kind of religious group among others, but a source of shared values for German society as a whole. And this also gets to the question of sort of secularism, right? Sort of the church can represent not simply a particular doctrine, but kind of the general values underlying German politics. Where it fits in the historiography is I mentioned. So there is a growing literature sort of challenging this idea of a sort of linear secularization. Over the course of the 20th century, there's been much more attention among historians to the Catholic Church, certainly of historians of 20th century Europe, given the Catholic Church's transnational reach, its intertwinement with Christian Democratic parties. There's been literature on the role of the Catholic Church in promoting kind of conservative family law and education policies in post war Europe, its entanglements with Cold War anti communism. And I think the story of Protestant church in West Germany is somewhat different, given that the Protestant Church. We'll talk about this a bit later, but sort of transcends the Cold War divide. There's some skepticism about Cold War rearmament, let's say, and skepticism about, among Protestants, about the ways that they feared that Catholics were sort of using the Christian Democratic Party to push the institutional power and interests of the Catholic Church. So even within the Christian Democratic Party in West Germany, there's, there's important, I think, confessional divisions over a range of issues. Family, religious, education. Um, and so what I'm arguing for is, you know, the salience of a German Protestant political tradition even after 1945, rather than seeing Protestants as simply sort of following their Catholic counterparts into the Christian Democratic Union, which is kind of the story we often get.
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Yeah, yeah, that is really interesting. Very important, I think, to kind of, you know, I've been talking about this a lot lately actually with like some of my, my peers in my graduate program. And when a historiography is focused on one, one topic, you know, in this case, it seems like Catholicism in the Catholic Church was, was a big part of the historiography. You start to overlook or kind of take some space away from looking at other influences. And it, like historiography is fascinating, like the more that I actually think about it because I'm like, why do we approach things in the way that we do? And it actually just all goes back to what was the focus at one point and that shapes our narrative. I don't know. Very fascinated by it. But I think it's a very timely intervention. With just some other things that I'm seeing in German studies come forward. Discussions of this democratic transition in West Germany and how West Germany thought of democracy in the post war era. So I guess I'm just wondering how this book speaks not only to religious studies, but also to discussions of the democratic transition, democratization in post war West Germany.
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Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, a central goal of the book is really to contribute to German studies and to the history of democracy and to move the history of religion beyond the silo that it sometimes finds itself in, especially in the German language literature. In terms of democratization, I mean, I think we have, you know, kind of two competing narratives. So there's the older kind of classic view of West German democracy as a success story that focuses on the economic miracle, on reeducation and denazification under Allied auspices. And on the other hand, we have an emergent literature that takes a more critical view of West German democracy from the perspective of those who were excluded from the post war political consensus. So a literature that looks at queer people and migrants and black Germans to ask, well, how democratic was West Germany really in its early decades? I think I'm not so much trying to mediate between these two literatures is to say that both the achievements or the progress as well as the exclusions of early post war democracy were perhaps more intertwined than we may have recognized. And even movements that were pushing for the expansion, expansion of constitutional rights or the sort of fullest realization of the promise of the Basic law could be quite exclusionary in their outlook. And one certainly sees this, I think, in looking at Protestant political movements. To give one example. So I discussed the Protestant campaign for the expansion of the right of conscientious objection to military service. This is a fundamental democratic innovation. The West Germany's Basic Law, I believe, is the first democratic constitution in the world to allow individuals, as a matter of being a citizen, the right to, you know, not participate in military service and to exercise their freedom of conscience. But at the same time, the Protestant campaign is based on assertions of a legacy of Protestant resistance against Nazism that doesn't quite match up to the historical reality. So post war Protestant pastors will look towards sort of individual Resistance heroes like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian executed by the Nazis in 1945 as a sort of model. But in those resistance narratives that would get invoked in the movement for conscientious objection, a lot of the sort of unsung heroes of the resistance, lay women, Christian of Jewish descent, who are more likely to actually participate in resistance activities, get marginalized and excluded. So even for Protestant political movements kind of seeking to expand individual rights to again realize the promise of the Basic Law, the sort of imagination of what a German citizen could be. Right. What are the norms of citizenship was still quite narrow. So I would say that in some ways my story helps bring together these two literatures. The kind of success story version and then the more critical story.
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C
Yeah, yeah, very interesting. How does this book, I guess, kind of touching on the later half of your answer there. How does this book reconsider the relationship between the church, the German Protestant religions, and then Nazi ideology and kind of National Socialism as a political movement after 1945, that relationship and how they're reevaluating what the relationship between Protestant Germany and Nazi ideology was?
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Yeah, absolutely. So again, I think we have kind of two competing narratives in the historiography here. Right. So there's a traditional approach which really emphasizes the resistance of Protestants under Nazi Germany, especially looking at the Confessing Church, which was an organization established in the spring of 1934 to protest Nazi efforts at taking over the churches. In this sort of resistance literature would look at, you know, figures like Bonhoeffer, who I just mentioned, people like Martin Niemoller, a Protestant pastor who was imprisoned beginning in 1937 in Sachsenhausen and then at Dachau. And this approach, you know, has a long history going back to the earliest post war years. I mean, on the other hand, you know, there's also a more critical approach to this field that's gained ground especially with the rise of Holocaust studies. And since the 1990s, that had a big impact on the writing of the history of the German churches, showing how the, you know, resistance narrative was exaggerated, how individuals highlighted is resistance heroes were often not representative of their milieu more broadly, and how even people like Niemoller and the Confessing Church tended to focus on protecting typically baptized Christians of Jewish descent, but not really speaking out on behalf of the Jewish community per se. So the. The resistance narrative has been kind of deconstructed over the last generation. So I would say my book is certainly a contribution toward the. The latter vein of scholarship. Right. So I'm, you know, with this concept of Protestant nationalism. I'm showing how key elements of Protestant nationalist ideology, a certain antisemitism, hostility toward a pluralist democracy, and desire for authoritarian leadership all prime many members of my generation of Protestant intellectuals to sort of join up with the Nazi party or be sympathetic to it early on. I think what I'm departing from the literature a little bit is rather than simply dismissing the resistance narrative as a kind of vestige of an older authoritarian mindset within the church, I show how this illusory resistance narrative also becomes, after the war, productive in some sense for the church's reorientation toward democracy. So it's in discussions around the concept of resistance, both during the war, but especially after that members of the Confessing Church begin to call into question this ideology of the state is an order of God which Christians are expected to obey. This is a long, you know, we could talk about the biblical roots, but a sort of long standing tenet of Lutheran theology instead. To see Christian conscience and Christian community as bulwarks against state power. Justifying that view based on this notion that the churches had been leading organs of resistance. Of course, that is, you know, not true in itself, but this sort of narrative of resistance gets used to justify, you know, the campaign for conscientious objection. As I just mentioned, by the 1960s, in the context of the student protest movements, in debates about emergency laws, Protestant figures are talking about kind of, is there a right of resistance when a state breaches its constitutional authority? And in fact, when the emergency laws are passed in 1968, at the same time the Bundestag, the Western parliament, passes a constitutional right of resistance, another sort of democratic innovation that emerges out of, out of this movement. So, so I would say this idea that the, you know, kind of distortive or exaggerated resistance narrative also allows the, you know, church leaders, lay intellectuals, to position themselves as supporters of democracy. I think is something that hasn't been really unpacked in the existing scholarship.
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C
Yeah, that's, yeah, very interesting. And I think that that thread comes through very clearly. As a reader, I guess I'm also kind of wondering, just generally speaking, when we refer to Protestant Germany, church and leadership, is that different than when we refer to just Protestant citizens and how Protestant citizens may be perceived this period of the church? I guess I'm just curious more about like when we say Protestant Germany, is that referring to kind of a collective religious community or is it more leadership? Or is it more like everybody was kind of feeling this way? I don't know.
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Yeah, that's so that's a question that I often get. And certainly, you know, my methodology. I mean, I was sort of trained as an intellectual historian. The book is, I think it's one of the intersections of intellectual and religious and political history. And it takes this generational approach that I mentioned, focusing on, you know, a somewhat narrower cast of characters to really allow me to flesh out their sort of generational trajectory and political careers from the 1920s through the 1960s. And I think that approach has the advantage of allowing me to cover along the span of German history to transcend, you know, conventional periodization. So I don't Simply begin in 1945. I think to understand the post 1945 period, you have to understand how these pastors and church leaders and intellectuals were formed in the 1920s. At the same time, I don't pretend that the, you know, individuals that I'm focusing on were necessarily representative of all German Protestants. Right? Hardly. So this is a kind of highly diverse religious community because of the principle of sort of automatic church membership. Right. That, you know, in. In Germany, the church dues are collected through the state tax system and people have to sort of opt out of the church rather than opt in. Um, so for that reason there are 26 million members of the Protestant churches in West Germany in 1950. Right. Which remains pretty consistent until it starts to dip in the later 60s. So that's obviously a very, you know, large group. And there's also a considerable degree of sort of secularization in the 50s and 60s as well. Right. So not necessarily sort of an active church leading, leading movement, but simply disengagement from other churches, especially with the expansion of consumer culture and popular culture that are pulling people in a different direction on Sunday mornings by the 1950s, and that sort of tension between the sort of secularization of the laity versus the role the church is playing in politics is something I'm interested in. Among the more sort of active Protestant laity, I would argue that, you know, the active lady could be more conservative than the church leaders who are maybe more open to, you know, different kinds of democratic innovations or social movements. You know, there's. I write a little bit about the so called Stuttgart Declaration, which was a statement issued by the famous statement issued by the Protestant leadership in October of 1945, acknowledging Germany's solidarity of. Sorry. Acknowledging the church's solidarity of guilt. Not even guilt. Solidarity of guilt with the German people. And for many lay Protestants, even that was too much. And the Protestant Chancellery in Hanover is receiving letters from parishioners Complaining the church has gone too far in justifying the Allies ideology of collective punishment. Right. So there's definitely a conservative branch of the laity that kind of sees that the church is going too far toward, you know, recognizing any degree of guilt. But at the same time, I think there are also ways in which the sort of pro democracy movements I'm describing also had resonance among a broader laity. The Kirchentag, the German Protestant lay assembly, is a really important institution. Even today it's a biennial convention. In the post war period, united Germans across East and west would have upwards of 100,000 participants at its conventions. And all of the major issues discussed in the book, from gender equality and family law reform to military service to east west relations were all debated also by the laity at the Kierketag. And you do have lay Protestants getting involved in the campaign against rearmament and nuclear weapons and emergency laws. The Protestant student movement has dialogue and interactions with theologians from the older generation. So I would say there is resonance with elements of the active laity. But, but certainly the people that I'm, you know, talking about, I don't speak for everybody who is, you know, simply registered as a Protestant church member, which in itself does not necessarily mean a whole lot in terms of religious commitment given this sort of system of automatic church membership.
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C
Yeah, that's really fascinating and definitely, definitely a important distinction that I think you do a good job of, good job of clarifying throughout each of the chapters kind of who you're talking about when you're using these terms like who the actors are. You do a really good job of kind of setting the stage early on in some of these chapters and how this book progresses. But it is really interesting to think about how you kind of said it has to be more of a conscious choice to opt out of the church than it is to just be a part of it. Which is really, really interesting and I don't know, interesting to kind of, when you put it in that frame, it's like, oh, wait, so it's actually more of a conscious choice to not be religious than it is just to like move along with, I don't know, the way that things are structured.
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Right. And there's a difference between being merely a church member versus being sort of actively engaged, which is something that my, you know, the people I'm looking at were quite concerned about.
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Yeah, interesting. So how did the Protestant church kind of perceive you? Touched a little bit on the Allies and West German perceptions of collective guilt and the Protestant churches. I forget how you worded it. But their statement of a solidarity of guilt. Okay, yeah, their solidarity of guilt. I guess I'm wondering how the Church perceived the denazification and democratization of West Germany and if these processes, denazification and building democracy, were regarded as simultaneous or separate. Just kind of what the views on those were.
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A
Yeah, thanks. So I think this gets to another intervention I'm trying to make in the book. So in the older, you know, I spoke briefly about the older kind of success story version of West German democracy. And here democratization and denazification were really tied quite closely together. Both democratization denazification were aims, official aims of the Allied occupation announced at the Yalta Conference in February of 1945. And scholars have emphasized the significance of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, for instance, in making public the crimes of National Socialism and in helping to teach Germans the error of their ways for having supported Nazism and paving the path toward a critical reckoning with the Nazi past and move toward democracy. At least this was kind of the older narrative, the sort of liberal narrative that we got about the Nuremberg trials and other measures toward denazification. What's interesting is that from the perspective of the Protestant actors that I'm looking at, denazification and democratization are actually quite in opposition to one another. So the post war Protestant Church, its first major political campaign after the Church Federation is re established in 1945, is a comprehensive effort to oppose Allied denazification policies. You know, writing letters to Allied occupation officials denouncing denazification and even writing affidavits on behalf of defendants who were facing, you know, criminal prosecution for crimes committed during the Nazi period. The basic argument of these Protestant figures was that denazification was not truly based on, you know, print on print sort of Christian ideas of kind of grace and reconciliation. But instead this was simply a kind of victor's justice. You know, the victors sort of asserting their power over the vanquished when in fact both sides had committed terrible crimes during the war. And Protestant leaders would also point to the Allied bombardments of German cities, for instance, to contest denazification. And there's also an argument that punitive denazification is not in keeping with ideas of democracy in human rights. So Protestant leaders would use the language of human rights to talk about denazification, but to talk not about the human rights of the victims of Nazism, but rather the human rights of those who were being investigated for their involvement with the Nazi party under the argument that this is a kind of illegitimate extension of state power over the individual an illegitimate application of kind of punitive victor's justice. Now, one certainly needs to look at these human rights claims very critically. There's certainly an anti Semitic impetus behind them. So just under the surface, or sometimes not even, is the contrast between a kind of putative Old Testament justice versus Christian ideas of sort of grace and reconciliation. But on the other hand, many of the Protestant pastors who are developing a language of sort of human rights in the context of the campaign for denazification and their critiques of the Allies would go on to articulate human rights claims in the context of debates about the post war West German constitution. Some of the earlier debates around executive emergency authority. Conscientious objection I mentioned earlier. So, so, so there's a sort of interesting tension there, right, where you have, you know, again, this sort of tradition of Protestant nationalism, you know, the churches representing the German people against Allied depredations, then being repositioned actually to support kind of human rights, in turn feeding into human rights campaigns in West German democracy. So, so I think this helps to, to make our notion of, of democratization and denazification more complex. And one just final quick, you know, piece I would add on to that is that it's not only German Protestant leaders who see denazification and democratization intention, but denazification is also quite controversial in American society, among American politicians, especially as West Germany is needed as a Cold War ally. There's a need to sort of quickly reintegrate its political leadership class. And the German Protestant church had many allies within international bodies like the World Council of Churches or the Federal Council of churches in the U.S. so certainly these arguments against denazification are coming from Western Europe and the US as well.
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C
Yeah, that's really, really interesting. Just kind of the justifications and the use of some of these, these values in their approach to denazification and what democracy means and kind of defining all of that. But then this broader Cold War scope of just bring West Germany in really quick, don't push them away, make them a Western ally throughout this Cold War tension. I guess that kind of maybe brings me to some curiosity about divided Germany. So what uncertainty or, you know, maybe ideological division emerged throughout the Protestant church as the Allied division of Germany kind of made the hope for unified German state less likely.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So German division is a huge issue for the Protestant church, arguably more so than for the Catholic Church. And I think we need to keep in mind some, some demographics that it would be good to, to lay out. So Protestants up until sort of German defeat in 1945. Traditionally, Protestants had made up about 2/3. I mean, well, about 2/3, of course, you know, not including the foreign laborers. And you know, of course by 1945 we're getting, you know, very different sort of population dynamics, but let's say sort of pre1937, Protestants made up about 2/3 of the German population, with Catholics about one third and Jews making up less than 1% before the mass emigrations and eventually deportations during the Nazi regime. So Protestants have traditionally been the large majority. And this goes to this, you know, idea within Protestant nationalists thinking that sort of Protestantism represents the values of the German political community as a whole. But the demographics look quite different, is a result of the division of Germany. So Protestants, right, the traditional heartlands of the German north and east, those that are not accorded to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war, become part of communist East Germany, where Protestants make up about 90% of the population, at least until the intense campaigns against the churches that are propagated by the East German communist regime. On the other hand, Protestants make up only a slim demographic majority in the western occupation zones and are also less politically organized. They don't have an equivalent of, you know, the kind of Catholic center party which then from the Weimar era, which becomes crucial for establishing the Christian Democratic Union. So there's this sense, and it's also worth noting that the Protestant church itself, the Protestant Church federation remains a body that crosses east and West Germany until 1969, when the Protestant churches of East Germany split off to form their own federation of Protestant churches in the German Democratic Republic. So Protestant, you know, church leaders and pastors and intellectuals, even those of a more kind of conservative pro Christian Democratic union bent, continue to think of themselves as responsible not only for church members in West Germany, but also for their co confessionals in the East. So this makes German division a really huge, I mean, the major political issue that's being debated in places like the Hirschentag, the Protestant lay assembly, over the course of the 1950s. So you would ask, you know, what ideological divisions emerge as the hopes for a unified Germany become less likely. And here I would say that I think the divisions were within the Protestant church, certainly among the West. German churches on this issue were the most intense in the early 1950s when the boundaries of a future German state seemed more fluid. In 1952, you have Joseph Stalin's famous note offering the Western Allies a reunified Germany in favor of, in exchange, excuse me, for German neutrality in the Cold War and For many Protestants who opposed German division and rearmament, who wanted a speedy reunification, they wanted. They urged the Christian Democratic Union to embrace the possibility for reunification in exchange for neutrality. On the other hand, a more conservative wing within the church, led especially by the Berlin Bishop Otto de Belius and others around him, very much aligned themselves with Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union and anti communism in West German rearmament. So this was a huge matter of division within the church. But I think already by the mid-1950s, one in certain respects can see a softening of some of those divisions. So after. So in 1955, the policy of West German rearmament is successfully pushed through in West Germany joins NATO. This was sort of Konrad Adenauer's major foreign policy goal. But at that point we actually see some of the conservative Protestants who had pushed for West German rearmament also getting on board with the campaign for the right of conscientious objection to military service. So there's this notion that if sort of West Germany's status as a Cold War ally is secure, then the right of individual conscience should also be defended as a kind of Christian principle. On the other hand, the opponents of rearmament would continue to call for an expanded dialogue between west and East Germans, supporting even Christian Marxist dialogue, let's say. But the hopes that a dialogue with Communists would somehow immediately lead to German reunification was no longer really in the cards after 1955 and especially after the Berlin Wall got constructed in 1961. So in some sense the, you know, Germany's joining of NATO and then the Berlin Wall sort of stabilizes the Cold War division and makes the sort of immediate issue of German division less intensive. I guess the, the final point I'll make is that in chapter six of the book, I examined what I think was the Protestant church's most influential post war political statement, which has to do with Germany's eastern border and the territories that were lost to Poland in the Soviet Union after World War II. And here the Protestant church as a whole is the first major German institution to come out in favor of recognizing that post war border and accepting the territorial losses. And that memorandum has support both from conservatives as well as the more the group within the church that was more sort of critical of the Cold War. Right. And I think this goes to the point that the stabilization of the Cold War division allows both sides to pursue new projects of rapprochement, of reconciliation, without necessarily anticipating that that would change the political borders of Europe at any time in the immediate future.
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C
Yeah, thank you for that. Definitely. A very Very fascinating dynamic again with the partitioning of German Germany. What was the relationship between the Protestant churches in east and West Germany? I guess we, we kind of touched on that a little bit. But I guess I'm a little bit more curious about, like, the social cultural side where church leadership either kind of stayed connected or maybe drifted apart as a result of the division. Or maybe with your generational approach, it's different at different periods in, in German history and maybe like, how their ideological beliefs with, you know, how the, how the church approached, you know, what does it mean to be a Protestant in both east or West Germany either stay aligned or become a little bit disconnected or redefine kind of what that means.
- [39:23]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So I would say there certainly is. I mean, the East German churches don't split off to establish their own church Federation until 1969. During the 1950s, as I mentioned, the Kirchentag is an important site for west and East German Protestants to interact with each other. But certainly the East German churches face different pressures and especially by the late 1950s, are moving in a somewhat different direction ideologically. A key point for the East German churches comes in 1958 when a group of East German church leaders sign a declaration of loyalty to the East German state, essentially saying that they will pursue their Christian mission of social justice without challenging the authority of the Communist state. So this was an ideology which was called a church within socialism. And this remained kind of the official ideology of the Protestant churches within East Germany until the collapse of the communist state in 1989. And, you know, to what extent this remains connected or not with developments in West Germany, I think that view of a church within socialism was extremely contentious. So for, again, people like de Belius, for the more conservative wing, and not only sort of church leadership, but also, as I mentioned, I think the act of laity on a lot of these questions was, was more. Was more conservative than the Protestant leadership. For the conservative wing, this was, you know, absolutely selling out to the communist state. And conservative Protestants in West Germany would even compare their sort of East German colleagues who had signed the loyalty declaration to the kind of ultra pro Nazi German Christians who had sold out the church to the Nazis in 1933. Of course, some of these comparisons are quite ironic since many of those Protestant conservatives were themselves sympathetic to Nazism early on. But nevertheless, this kind of comparison between, you know, Nazism and Communism is quite pronounced, going along with the sort of ubiquitous discourse of totalitarianism right of the early Cold War. But there's also a wing within the West German churches that's very inspired by this idea of a church within socialism and argues that actually a church that faces a certain alienation from the state, as the East German church certainly did, had the space to be a more authentic church to reach its members, you know, kind of where they were, without pursuing political power, as opposed to the church in West Germany, which was increasingly intertwined with the state, especially after in 1957, the Protestant Church Federation agreed to provide military chaplains for, for the West German army. So this issue of a church within socialism is, you know, not only sort of shapes the East German churches, but also is highly divisive within West Germany as well.
- [42:28]
C
Yeah, that's really interesting. And not to water it down too much, but it's like this, this ideological kind of conflict or the pointing the fingers of like who's, who's right and wrong for selling out to the state is almost like it's the same, it's two sides of like the exact same coin because it's still just churches existing within these government structures that they engage with. And it's in very different ways, but it's on kind of both sides. It's just church and state, like coming to agreements and finding a balance in a sense, I guess.
- [43:06]
A
Right. And I think, I mean, one thing that you, that I find interesting in sort of the West German debate, you know, about this issue of the East German churches is that really both sides are increasingly appealing to a language of democracy. Right. So nobody is really saying by, you know, the 1960s that the church should sit, you know, the role of Christians in the political sphere is simply to, you know, obey state authority. So the more anti communist vein of the Protestant church, you know, argues for the importance of, you know, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion within the basic law and says, look, these things are being violated by the church in East Germany. And on the other hand, those who are more sort of open to the idea of a church within socialism see this as a kind of, you know, the importance of a critical dialogue between, you know, kind of Christians and Marxists, but certainly are also opposed to the idea of the church simply becoming reduced to a kind of function of the communist state. And at least in their minds that was not the role of a church within socialism was supposed to sort of preach its message within the state without being of the state. So I think, you know, on both sides of that debate, we can see the shift away from the idea that Christians are simply expected to obey the existing state authorities and that's their only role in the political world.
- [44:26]
C
Yeah, yeah, very interesting. How does this period of German religious and legal history that, you know, reinventing Protestant Germany deals with, help us understand more about contemporary German democracy, their political system, their multi party dynamics and just current political debates in general?
- [44:50]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And this, you know, to some extent takes me back to where I began the project. I mean, certainly there are important Protestant figures who have, you know, high roles in government. Frank Walter Steinmeier, the German president, was, you know, a longtime leader in the Kirchentag. And the president traditionally in Germany has been a kind of Protestant position, the head of state who sort of represents the state as a whole above party division. So some of that, those older ideas, I think are still with us. Toward the end of the book, I also address the church's approach to the growth of a Muslim minority, especially from the 1980s when the growth of Islam in Germany becomes increasingly politically visible. This is a topic that many other scholars are working on and goes beyond maybe the scope of my book. But I think my book does help explain the kind of two sided approach I think, that the church has taken to questions of Islam in Germany, which is certainly a major political issue today, given that the far right alternative for Germany has gained power largely through this claim that the mainstream parties have been too open toward immigration from Muslim majority countries. So on the one hand, the Protestant academies have actively, since the 80s, promoted Christian Muslim interreligious dialogue, which they've seen as an antidote toward racism and xenophobia. So we can see the sort of evolution toward, you know, of the Protestant church toward, you know, embracing its place in a democracy, perhaps in some of this dialogue and in the lead, I mean, you know, very recently, in the lead up to the February 2025 elections, both the Protestant and the Catholic churches in Germany put forward official statements openly rejecting the alternative for Germany, even arguing that a vote for the AfD was incompatible with the Christian faith. So there is this move toward a kind of inclusion and anti racism. But on the other hand, interreligious dialogue is frequently framed by the churches less as a project of a sort of mutual transformation and learning from one another, but rather of integrating the minority into the values of the majority society. So if one looks at the church's more recent statements on the place of Islam in Germany, one sees a discourse that talks about the post 1945 trajectory of the church. So what I'm sort of discussing is an example of successful democratization, right, of how a church embraces democratic values and therefore comes to coexist in A secular society sort of promoting democracy without sort of pushing its own partisan agenda. And that sort of idealized image of the role the Protestant church had played is put forward as a trajectory that Islam should take. At the same time, you know, these statements oftentimes refer to the kind of inherent connections between Protestantism and democracy in terms of Christian values of universalism and human dignity and equality, and argue that Islam does not have the same inherently democratic values and therefore has to be kind of transformed in order to be integrated into the, the majority society. And one sees this also in, you know, in legal debates where debates about, you know, the wearing of the headscarf by the Islamic headscarf by public school teachers and public officials, which is an issue in many European countries. Right. One sometimes sees these arguments, you know, that can one sort of publicly, you know, display Islam while also being sort of, while also identifying with institutions of the democratic state. So I think that both of these kind of features, on the one hand, the discourse of sort of universalism, on the other hand, the discourse that's sort of the normative religion for post war German democracy is the Protestant one. Both of these can still be seen in the church's approach to the question of Islam in Germany and the rise of the AfD and other contemporary issues.
- [49:04]
C
Absolutely fascinating and definitely a very well timed book that I think I always kind of try to extract. If something's not directly relating to my field of study or my research interests, why does it matter? And I think this book has so much in it where it's like you can very easily out of every chapter be like, that's that matters today because of xyz. And it comes across very clearly, even if it's not points that you're directly articulating. It's very interesting to see the contemporary situation in relation to this history. So, yeah, so after this book, this is your dissertation book. Congratulations. That's like a huge weight off of your shoulders. What's the next steps? Because you've got a lot of career left ahead of you and I'm excited to see what's next.
- [49:55]
A
Thank you. Yeah. So I'm working on a new project now that's also engaged with the post war period, but more transnational. And it's about the aftermaths of the expulsions of over 12 million ethnic Germans from East Central Europe at the end of World War II. And particularly how expellee organizations, organizations that represent those expelled Germans in both post war West Germany and Austria get involved in international human rights politics during the Cold War. Era and likely through the 1990s. And this project builds on a piece of reinventing Protestant Germany. So I mentioned that key memorandum from 1965 when the church calls on the West German state to acknowledge the post war German border. So in that chapter, the sort of antagonists of the church are these expellee organizations which are putting forward claims around the idea of a right to the homeland. So the idea that the expelled Germans have a right to return to the territories from which they were expelled or at least to receive some kind of compensation and recognition for their losses. Now the ex belly lobby is often dismissed as kind of reactionary and revanchist. Many of its members, though certainly not all, had been Nazi administrators in Eastern Europe. But what I've gotten interested in is how the expelle lobby tries to advance these kind of claims around a right to the homeland and other human rights ideas of right of return, a right against expulsion not only within, you know, post war German politics, getting in debates with the Protestant church for instance, but also on the international stage. So we see expellees submitting petitions to the United nations and Council on Europe. We see human rights lawyers associated with the expellee lobby representing West Germany and Austria on the UN Human Rights Commission. So I'm interested in how German expellees are seeking to gain sympathy for their cause by internationalizing it. Right. Thinking about forced migration not simply as a German experience but as a global one. And finally I'm interested in what kind of alliances did expellees seek to develop or find for their campaign in the on the peripheries of Europe and also in the post colonial world as the acceleration of decolonization from 1960 produces new waves of forced migrations and population displacements, which the expelley lobby is very interested in, is it's trying to gain sort of international sympathy for its own agenda and also to develop a kind of analysis of forced migration as a kind of pathology of the modern nation state, not simply something that happened to the Germans. So there's certainly some continuities in terms of the sort of mutable languages of human rights and you know, how people who had been involved with the Nazi party or other sort of far right politics sort of reconfigured themselves as human rights activists in the post war. So I'm interested in that the sort of political deployments of war memory in different ways. But I think the new project takes a more explicitly transnational step. So I've been already doing some research in Germany and Austria and really looking forward to continuing with that work.
- [53:20]
C
Yeah, that's absolutely so fascinating. My mind is like Rolodexing through everything that I've ever read about the kind of global human rights regime and concepts of that in the post war world. So definitely a very interesting project and I'm excited to see how that develops for our listeners. Reinventing Protestant Germany, Religious Nationalist in the Contest for Post Nazi Democracy, published by Harvard University Press in 2025, is available now. Brandon, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really enjoy chatting with you.
- [53:54]
A
Oh, thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed our conversation.