Bonhoeffer, Niemoeller… to Lichtenberg


The "subtleties" of how you can stand for... (from Haaretz)


The Poisonous Well of anti-Jewish Rhetoric

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller and Karl Barth - all fierce opponents of Nazism - could not divorce themselves from a poisonous theological anti-Semitism, although they paradoxically condemned anti-Semitism as un-Christian.
by Mordecai Paldiel

Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is famously remembered for his reported response to the Kristallnacht burning of German synagogues, 71 years ago this coming Monday, when he commented to a colleague, “If the synagogues are set on fire today, it will be the churches that will be burned tomorrow.”

It is not clear what he meant by this. Perhaps he was simply warning of the Nazis’ intention to target the churches as well, without any reference to the distress of the Jewish people. For, in June 1933, three months after the Nazi rise to power – after the publication of the first anti-Jewish laws, which dismissed all Jewish teachers and professors from their positions – Bonhoeffer wrote, in a church periodical, that ever since the Jews had “nailed the Redeemer of the world to the cross,” they had been forced to bear an eternal “curse” through a long history of suffering, one that would end only “in the conversion of Israel to Christ.”

At the same time, Bonhoeffer, who is often remembered as a staunch and courageous anti-Nazi, initially and half-heartedly excused the Nazi regime for its anti-Jewish measures. “Without a doubt the Jewish question is one of the historical problems which our state must deal with,” he asserted in the same article, “and without a doubt the state is justified in adopting new methods here.” The only instance in which the Church was, in his words, obligated to object would be if the state took steps to prohibit missionary work by the Church among Jews.

The post-war exculpatory words of another anti-Nazi theologian, Martin Niemoeller, are displayed in many Holocaust museums and often quoted. Indeed, he lamented that he did not speak out on the Jewish issue at the time, “because I was not a Jew.” Sadly, the record shows that Niemoeller did speak out about the Jews – though not in their defense. In a 1935 sermon, he spoke of the Jews as a people that “can neither live nor die, because it is under a curse which forbids it to do either.” He also noted, in case his meaning is in doubt, that whatever the Jews take up “becomes poisoned, and all that they ever reap is contempt and hatred,” because the world “notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way.” As for the future, he added, the Jewish people must continue to suffer for the crime of deicide, and indeed, “now it bears the curse.”

Karl Barth was another staunch anti-Nazi Protestant theologian who dipped into the well of anti-Jewish rhetoric, while at the same time condemning anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, he too charged the Jews with the death of Jesus – something they undertook not “in foolish over-haste” or misunderstanding, but, he asserted, as a “deliberate” act. Then, in 1942, from his base in Switzerland, in his theological work “Church Dogmatics,” Barth castigated Judaism as a “synagogue of death,” a “tragic, pitiable figure with covered eyes,” a religion characterized by “conceited lying,” and the “enemy of God.” If the church needed the Jews, he felt, it was only as a negative symbol, for they are a mirror of man’s rebellion against God, against which Christians must continually struggle.

The Catholic cleric Bernhard Lichtenberg reacted differently. As Kristallnacht was taking place outside, with synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses and other institutions under attack, he declared from the pulpit of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin: “Let us pray for the persecuted ones, the non-Aryan Christians and the Jews … Outside, the temple is in flames. That too is a place of worship to God.”

He included all Jews in his prayers, not only (as did some others) ones who had been baptized. In mid-October 1941, Lichtenberg responded this way to an anti-Jewish publication by Josef Goebbels: “This pamphlet states that every German who supports Jews with an ostensibly false sentimentality … practices treason against his people. Let us not be misled by this un-Christian way of thinking, but follow the strict command of Jesus Christ, ‘You shall love your neighbor as thyself.'”

He was arrested a short time later, and in his interrogation by the Gestapo, he admitted having prayed for the Jews, and added, “I totally reject the ‘evacuation’ [i.e., deportation] with all the accompanying measures, since it stands in opposition to the Christian command of ‘Love your neighbor as thyself.’ And I consider the Jews also as my neighbor since they too were created in the divine image.”

In March 1942, Lichtenberg was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Berlin Bishop Konrad von Preysing told him the Gestapo had offered not to re-arrest him upon his release, on the condition that he remain silent, but Lichtenberg declined to accept. He died while being transported to Dachau, and appears on Yad Vashem’s list of Righteous Among the Nations.

In 1978, Emil Fackenheim wrote, “How different would Bonhoeffer’s struggle have been if he had repudiated the ‘Christian tradition of the curse’ from the start! How different would Jewish fate have been in our time had his whole church repudiated it!”

Bonhoeffer, Niemoeller and Barth – all fierce opponents of Nazism – could not divorce themselves from a poisonous theological anti-Semitism, although they paradoxically condemned anti-Semitism as un-Christian. They joined the chorus of those who pilloried the Jews, even if it was for reasons the Nazis cared little about, such as because of the Jewish refusal to acknowledge the Christian messiah. Therefore, they too must bear responsibility for contributing to the climate that made possible the burning of synagogues during Kristallnacht.

Mordecai Paldiel, a former director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem, is a consultant for the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.