In the previous post I mentioned this book. There were good reasons for doing so. Amongst the most constant if controversial and significant Christian voices in Germany throughout the 1930's, and until his death by execution in 1945, was the German Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Famous for his involvement with the resistance movement, Bonhoeffer remains implicated in plans and actions which led to the notorious assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler. The various judgments of posterity as to the extent of his specific involvement and on the moral and theological principles he followed, remain undecided and fiercely contested.
What is beyond doubt was his opposition to National Socialism on theological grounds. The claims of the Nazi party and of Hitler and his propagandists he believed were nothing short of blasphemous, and required of the church the same level of resistance as first generation Christians faced in the face of the totalitarian and religious claims of Caesar. Hitler required nothing less than total allegiance, and the fusion of those political and religious claims were denounced as tantamount to idolatry by the Christians who eventually formed the Confessing Church. The issues were political, but they threatened the theological integrity and spiritual freedom of the entire German people. Hence the title of Barnett's book; the struggle was nothing less than For the Soul of the People.
Victoria Barnett is one of the world's leading authorities on the thought and historical context of Bonhoeffer. Her acccount, which includes interviews with over 50 survivors of the Nazi years, is a carefully considered analysis of what goes so wrong in a nation's cultural and political life that catastrophic and destructive forces are detonated. Out of such research and expertise she worked for decades with the international team of scholars editing The Works of Dietirch Bonhoeffer. Her analysis of 1930's Germany, and of what led a nation to such catastrophic conflicts and subsequent programmatic evils such as Auschwitz, must not be lightly set aside by anyone open to the evidence of those historical realities from which such consequences derive.
When parallels are drawn between the 1930's in Germany, and recent events in our own day, they can too easily be dismissed as exaggerated or even ruled out as invalid. But a reading of Barnett's book is a sobering reality check for those who argue that we have learned the lessons of the past and we are better than those earlier generations who saw their democratic freedoms dissolved by the acids of an ideology founded on making Germany great again.
Her book is also a warning to those who simply dismiss the comparison as ludicrous and an hysterical reaction to a form of politics that has become necessary in order to halt the bogeyman of "liberal progressivism". Barnett demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the strategies and rhetoric of Hitler and his party machine appealed to populist emotions of resentment, neglect, powerlessness and deprivation; and they promised the reversal of the causes of resentment and neglect, and a recovery of power and material prosperity. Sound familiar, in Western democracies today? When there is an upsurge of complaint and claim that the culture is degenerate and needs to be cleansed, and old values recovered, that too is an echo of 1930's Germany.
If we consider the discourse and developments in western liberal democracies in recent years, there are further ominous echoes to be heard and pondered; pervasive and recurring anti-immigrant rhetoric, rising statistics for hate crimes against minorities, demeaning of the judiciary and branding judges the enemies of the people, reversing freedoms and tightening rules by which the poor and vulnerable can be helped and cared for at public expense, finding scapegoats for social ills and "our" failed hopes, turning some media into instruments of state propaganda and seeking to silence opposition and criticism, laying blame for present ills on others than ourselves whether in Brussels, North Africa, Mexico or anywhere else distant and alien enough to be made into a plausible threat. These are not novelties of 21st Century tensions and anxieties. We've been here before, and it wasn't good.
In this book Barnett doesn't make connections from 1930's Germany to our 21st Century times of cultural flux and political ferment. The book is 25 years old. But its analysis remains relevant to situations like the present in which extremes of language, reactionary politics, nationalistic revivals all point to a different and no less dangerous kind of climate change. An environment previously friendly to freedom and trust, liberal thought and progressive thinking, now encounters opposition which challenges the very nature of those freedoms, institutions and structures on which for several generations the world's security ultimately has depended.
Social improvement and cultural correctives are an inescapable part of healthy and responsible human life and society. But when such correctives are driven by fomented discontent and scapegoating of others for any and each social reversal, then echoes from a time and place no longer familiar, need to be identified and named. The relevance of Bonhoeffer for our times may well be in his absolute rejection of all claims to authority and power and public allegiance which are attached to political ideologies and their accompanying mytholgies. These are claims to which the church cannot concur, and indeed must resist in the name of the One whose Lorsdship is cruciform and whose power is life-giving.
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