Between the Swastika and the Sickle. The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer. James R Edwards, (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2019)
As a young PhD student in 1974, James Edwards was consulting a commentary on the Gospel of Mark published in 1937, written by the German New Testament scholar, Ernst Lohmeyer. The Foreword to the 1951 second edition written by one of Lohmeyer’s research assistants contained the intriguing comment that Lohmeyer had “been carried off by a higher power to a fate yet unresolved.” This led Edwards to begin a decades long detective hunt, as he pursued the truth about what happened to Lohmeyer. Why had nothing been heard of him after his arrest by the Russian occupying forces in 1946?
In 1979, during a visit to East Germany to meet with Christians, Edwards tells of his embarrassment and shock at the reaction of those at the meeting when he asked about the fate of Ernst Lohmeyer. The meeting immediately closed down, the atmosphere became charged, and Edwards was taken for a long walk. It was explained that the very mention of Lohmeyer’s name could incriminate and endanger those who were at the meeting, living as they did in a State controlled by a paranoid intelligence service, pervasive surveillance, and a web of unknown informers.
Over the years Edwards continued to visit East Germany to find answers to the unresolved fate of Lohmeyer. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he was able to have many open conversations with Lohmeyer’s daughter Gudrun, and others who knew Lohmeyer at Greifswald University. He also gained access to many previously secret files and a vast collection of Lohmeyer’s correspondence with his wife (sometimes several per week over decades). Utilising all this primary material, and his full grasp of the range and depth of Lohmeyer’s publications and academic contributions, Edwards has produced a quite remarkable book, and one which required to be written – for several reasons.
First, Ernst Lohmeyer was never other than an opponent of National Socialism and Nazi ideology. In preaching, academic scholarship, social and administrative responsibilities he called out the ideological scholarship in theology and biblical studies produced by highly respected scholars in the service of Nazi views. In particular it was Lohmeyer, almost alone in German New Testament academic scholarship who insisted that the Christian faith has deep, essential and natural rootedness in the Jewish faith. It is not possible to be a Christian and also be antisemitic he argued.
One of the leading Nazi sympathisers was Gerhard Kittel, the editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. For decades this multi volume Dictionary was one of the most influential scholarly resources in New Testament study, its production was in process throughout the five middle decades of the 20th Century, and Kittel edited the first 5 volumes. Kittel’s book, The Jewish Question, published in 1933 as Hitler came to power, is an unflinching attempt to justify antisemitism to German intellectual culture, including the Church. It represents blatant skewing of biblical studies and theology to support Nazi anti-Jewish ideology, and in its echoing of Nazi philosophy and social norms, it demonised Jews as decadent, dangerous and, as aliens, requiring a social solution. It is a chilling piece of academic distortion in the interests of an aberrant political ideology. Alongside such anti-Semitic sentiments, and Kittel’s unabashed approval of depriving Jews of human rights, property rights and residency rights, the very different and defiant words of Ernst Lohmeyer, written to Martin Buber are from a different theological and moral world: “The Christian faith is Christian only insofar as it bears the Jewish faith in its heart…” Edwards exposes this ideological conflict in a central chapter which well illustrates the looming shadows and encroaching darkness in 1930’s Germany. The wise courage and intellectual clarity of Lohmeyer’s position was morally charged and resourced from a mind resonant with values quite counter to the Nazi vision of a racially purified volk.
A second reason this book needed writing was to rehabilitate Lohmeyer as a man of integrity, courage, intelligence and high citizenship. There are tensions and ambiguities in a life lived in Germany before and during World War II. Lohmeyer had fought in World War 1, he then developed his academic career as a major NT scholar, was conscripted in his late 40’s and served on the Russian front during the second World War. He returned a broken man to Griefswald, and recovered a sense of purpose as President elect of the University in 1945. But in 1946 was arrested, imprisoned, and soon after disappeared. No one knew definitively of his fate till after 1989 when various files became available following the fall of communist control of Eastern Europe.
The opportunity to right a great wrong opened up. Edwards worked with Lohmeyer’s family to uncover the truth and to provide the evidence which eventually exonerated Lohmeyer and restored to him the honour and appreciation due to a man who stood against evil and defended truth against those who wanted to create their own truth and weaponise it. Edwards has written a clear, evidenced account of a man who made decisions on moral grounds, and whose very humanity and compassion to his country's enemies constituted some of the evidence against him. The book climaxes with the moving story of Lohmeyer’s posthumous Inauguration as President of Greifswald University in 1996. This was a just recognition of an honour delayed by systemic injustice, and a public honouring of a man whose very existence a paranoid state tried to erase from history.
A third reason for this book is to do due honour to a scholar who, had he lived, could well have rivalled Bultmann in influence over NT studies (with whom he had serious arguments about the nature of the Gospels). Further, in ways requiring at least equal courage, integrity and spiritual maturity, Lohmeyer resisted Hitler, Nazi ideology and anti-Jewish policies, at least as much as Bonhoeffer. Reading Edwards account of Lohmeyer, it is clear that this was a man of immense moral stature and intellectual power, whose faithfulness to Christ led him into direct conflict with the powers that destroyed him. Bonhoeffer and Niemoller tend to be the celebrated examples of Christian resistance to Hitler – but the quiet integrity and theological faithfulness of Lohmeyer, in sermons and publications, ran like an eroding undercurrent against the ultimately transient foundations of Nazism.
My own interest in the history of New Testament interpretation means I was always going to read this book; and it is a fine book. It is hard to categorise it. Here is a biography, written by someone who has lived with the subject’s academic corpus, voluminous correspondence, multiple conversations with family and near associates of Lohmeyer, and who is himself a noted American NT scholar. The result is a narrative that is persuasive, deeply informed, sympathetic but not uncritical, resulting in a portrait of a man and the worlds he inhabited at home, in academy, in political upheaval and as one incapable of mere expediency in matters of the mind and soul.
Here also is history as judicial review. Edwards helped recover the honour of a good man, and his family; he has gone a long way to filling that troubling lacuna in the unresolved fate of a scholar whose disappearance and execution is one further tragic consequence of state power exercised in the interests of state security against its own people; it’s called tyranny. The account of Nazi Germany prewar, and the infiltration of universities and the subverting of moral intelligence are not irrelevant in a world where moral intelligence is again suspect and populism founded on making citizens afraid of those who are different is shouting its poison again.
This book is a salutary human story of perseverance in the seeking of justice and the rehabilitation of one who was judicially murdered for political reasons. The sections of the book detailing how the buried truth was uncovered are sobering in their descriptions of the lengths an oppressive state will go to eliminate those who think independently, and to silence those whose moral values have decisive and consistent purchase on their behaviour. In a brilliant comment Edwards notes, Lohmeyer lived out “what it means to be a moral human being in a world in which morality and humanity had almost ceased to exist.” (259)
Amongst the treasured documents of the Lohmeyer archive is the last long letter he wrote to his wife Melie, from Cell 19. Its contents are profoundly moving as he reviews his life, his driven ambition and academic obsessiveness, his failures in his deepest relationship of love, and the moral ambiguities and defeats of being a Wehrmacht Officer with power of life and death in occupied zones. Edwards shows great sensitivity and insight as a biographer handling the fragile testimony of a man at his most vulnerable. This final chapter is wonderfully well written, and invites the reader to temper judgement with compassion for a man whose inner struggles were made the more anguished by his own conscience and the moral impossibilities of being a Christian in charge of a military unit facing its own obliteration. I have seldom read a more knowing exposition of how redemption arises from the gift of suffering, and how all true loves are regenerated when acknowledged failure encounters forgiving grace. Lohmeyer, then, was a man of granite intellectual and moral integrity. Not perfect, but good in the most meaningful ways that word can be used of a human being.
Here finally then, is a book that is both lucid and moving, composed by someone who cares about the subject, and provides an appreciative and critical account of a life lived as well as it could be. Lohmeyer lived in a world still not so far away that we should become complacent or unguarded about the consequences for peoples and communities, when unchecked populism is impatient with a moral commitment to the common good. As Edwards comments, “Lohmeyer refused to be infatuated with fashionable falsehoods that prey on all intellectual disciplines.” The moral vigilance and ethical courage of Lohmeyer are important light switches in an overshadowed world.