Research in the Evangelical Central Archives in Berlin-Kreuzberg

I have spent the last two days looking through the records of the central archive in Berlin for the collections of the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) and the Evangelical Church of the Union, the former Prussian state church (EKU) (See the reading room on the left). I am searching for records from local churches in hopes of finding sermons, petitions or letters from people in the communities in my study, Erfurt, Magdeburg and Nuremberg. I am particularly interested in any materials that can give me a sense of how German Protestants reacted to the growing anti-Semitism and political violence after the First World War. Protestant Christians made up a majority in my areas of study. So I want to see what fear looks like from a Christian’s point of view and how they dealt with the presence of fear resulting from the rise in more violent forms of politics from more radical leftwing working class groups and racist rightwing associations.

I found interesting sources dating back into the 1870s that I think are worth presenting here at some point. For example, I found a sermon from 1875 in which the minister shapes the Christian vision of a community in the form of a fortress. Notably, the minister draws that vision from the Book of Nehemiah 4, 1-9 in which the Jews must raise a wall to defend Jerusalem from their enemies. I also found a judicial case from 1911-1915, which offers a window into how marital relations and gender shaped a legal investigation and the very physical feeling of fear that influenced the accuser's willingness to tell the truth. The case involves the expert opinions of the local minister, the district doctor and police chief. So there is quite a wealth of material, but one should also be prepared to sift through stacks of documents and read really bad handwriting. It makes getting outside on a beautiful fall afternoon essential and makes me miss my yoga teacher and regular classes back home.

The majority of the correspondence that I have found in these administrative records, however, involves the requests of specific congregations and their ministers for things like pensions, health care support and additional ministers. The early and late periods of the 1920s witnessed massive inflation, unemployment and housing shortages. These findings in themselves tell me that these congregations were more focused on different concerns about old age, health, housing and adequate ministers for spiritual and educational need than the kinds of issues in my work.

It struck me that Erfurt was still growing with industrialization after the First World War. Many people left the churches right after the First World War because of their disappointment in the way the churches had so whole heartedly supported the Kaiser and Imperial Germany’s war aims (Dr. Roeber notes that this was also an international trend after the war). The churches noted larger and larger populations in their districts because of Erfurt’s growing economy, but also added that large numbers of these residents were socialists, communists, freethinkers, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists and Baptists and expressed a militant attitude toward them. On most Sundays there were perhaps only 300 to 400 people at a service. On religious holidays like Easter the numbers more than doubled. So thousands of Germans did not attend for one reason or another, but, interestingly, they were sending more and more of their children to the church schools in their districts (why?). Therefore, the church councils requested the need for more ministers to teach the growing numbers of children in their religion classes. Several churches either built whole new worship houses or requested an additional minister and spent much of the 1920s dealing with the issues of finance in their correspondence with the upper levels of the national church administration.

So far at least, I have not found many records of how Christians responded to the earlier period of violence that is the focus of my study, i.e., the political assassinations from 1921-1922 or the wave of Anti-Semitism in 1923. Why that is the case, is not clear. In part it involves the type of records I am examining, but there might be more (I have found other records elsewhere that I will present in due time). From the little I did find, some Christians viewed the world in terms of believers and non-believers, i.e., Socialists, Communists and even other Christian sects that had erred in their view. The authors of these sources make an effort to remind their audience about how scared Christians were of the anti-religious and anti-private property actions of Communists during the revolutionary period and the wave of people leaving the churches in 1918/19. Where Jews fit into this picture is an interesting question. The sermon that I found from 1875 raises some of these questions for consideration, especially how Jews and others fit into a Christian world view of community through a reading of the Book of Nehemiah. The discussion of actual Jewish neighbors, interestingly, does not appear as a topic. I think that is an important question for the possibility of more diverse and tolerant communities, especially in times of economic crisis. So I wonder why this is the case. That said, it appears that more everyday issues of money, housing and health shaped the concerns of these individuals rather than larger political or moral issues resulting from the spate of political assassinations or reports of violence directed against Jews or defenders of civil society.

Writing letters to church officials noticeably increased with the rise of the Nazi movement and their seizure of power in 1933. Erfurt became a bastion of the German Christians in the State of Thuringia in the years leading up to the seizure of power. These Christians sought to aryanize Protestantism and very closely align it with Hitler and Nazi racial doctrine. The letters in support of aryanization, however, reveal different ideas about how Protestantism should be Nazified, e.g., removing the Old Testament because it was Jewish or even getting rid of Christianity all together because it was scientifically outdated.

The records from Magdeburg reveal a high level of struggle within the local churches and their governing bodies between 1933 and 1938 over Christianity, i.e., the struggle between the “German Christians” and the “Bekennende Kirche”. "Bekennen" means confessing or professing the ideals of Christianity in this case, but "bekennen" can also convey the sense of coming out and admitting one's responsibility. Many of these letter are from people who were interested in bringing the churches and their evangelical mission in line with Hitler and the Nazi State, but there are also letters (so far fewer) from people invoking a kinder and more tolerant Christianity. They made no bones about how Nazism contradicted Christian teachings and bluntly expressed their mistrust of the Nazi State. There are even cases of Germans questioning the Nazi sterilization programs as early as 1933.

In one case, there was a letter justifying the Nazis' eradication of the communists because of their “enemy” status. From this first culling of the materials, not too many Germans invoked Christianity in response to the violence in the earlier period that is my focus. They did invoke Christianity in the early Nazi period, but that in turn led to a rift within the churches. Interestingly, few seemed to question German or Nazi treatment of Jews or the persecution of political opponents. Why not remains an interesting question. What is just the more pressing material needs of everyday life? Was it the Christian individual's focus on one's own Christian community? the understanding that the others did not belong? the appeal of Nazism? ignorance? apathy? What had happened to Christian notions of compassion for others among Christians in general? Why did fear of one's standing before God in final judgment not urge more to worry about their actions or inaction on earth and in the world around them? These are questions worth pondering for our own understanding of the contemporary world and the visions of our own communities as well.