My longest trip this fall was first three days in Dresden, then another four teaching in Moscow, plus three days travel… Ten days. Wearying, but interesting.
The Dresden symposium was held at Hannah-Arendt-Institut-für-Totalitarismusforschung at the TU Dresden. Around fifteen scholars, all but myself from Germany, read papers over the theme. ‘Voelkisch’ religion is difficult to delimit. Here the focus was ideological movements and people who in different ways connected a craze for the Germanic-Nordic with racist ideas of the supremacy of such peoples.
My interest is the obvious examples of Protestants, who increasingly adapted their Protestantism to voelkish ideas. In the symposium, Professor Manfred Gailus, Berlin, spoke about a ‘Doppelglaube’ in National Socialist theological circles, which contained of Protestantism and voelkish ideas. In my study Roots of theological anti-Semitism I have clearly evidenced this by Walter Grundmann, who increasingly integrated a once quite pietist Protestantism with motives from Norse and Germanic ideology, and from ‘modern’ racial ideas. Grundmann says:
When the Germans today stand in defence against Bolshevism [. . .], when
they stand in the struggle for hereditary soundness and uprightness of life,
the Reich has really come among them, and its ruler is the Führer.
He continues: The fight against Bolshevism and for “hereditary soundness and uprightness
of life” is a sign that “the Reich has really come among them”. This choice of words, linked to gospel sayings with
the same wording, lends divine authorisation to the National Socialist rule, to Hitler, and to the racist project of attaining “hereditary soundness”, purifying the blood of the German people, according to the Nuremberg Laws. (1)
This syncretism is frightening and interesting. How can a Protestantism theologian synthesise these things, without totally losing his identity? I think Grundmann did lose it, but the process is interesting. No doubt he had ‘developed’ theologically to a more liberal stance, saying things in 1940 that he had never said 1930, is spite of his early membership in the NSDAP.
My own contribution to the work in Dresden was a paper with the title “Germanentum als Überideologie. Cooperation between Swedish and German theologians during National Socialism”. There I discussed cooperations between theologians in Stockholm-Uppsala-Lund on the one hand and the very brown university environment in Jena-Eisenach. This is an area which by far is not dealt with enough. And were fellow exegetes were deeply invoved. God willing, and time and purse permitting, I will publish a book on this theme. But first I need to make the paper I read in Dresden into a printable chapter in the volume frm the symposium.
The Moscow trip is another story. 150 pastors and leaders whom I was teaching during four intensive days. And in the evenings the fabulous Rublev icons and Repins art in the Tretjakov Gallery—and a few numbers of my favourite Chagall, plus the great names of 19th century European art in the Pusjkin Museum. And—not to forget—the beautiful rebuilt Dresden, which I definitely wish to visit again.
(1) Gerdmar, Anders. 2009. Roots of Theological Antisemitism. German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann. Ed Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Giuseppe Veltri. Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Leiden, Boston: Brill, page 552.