The Spiritual Situation in Germany

In his new book Between Heaven and Earth (Harper and Row, 1965), Helmut Thielicke, the Hamburg theologian who was imprisoned by the Nazis, answers questions from Americans as to whether the collapse of Germany in 1945 brought about a religious revival and whether this revival has continued. This is Thielicke’s comment:

“It is exceedingly difficult to say anything about a revival and the course it may have taken. After all, what really happens in people’s hearts and therefore what is spiritual or merely psychological emotion remains hidden from human eyes.

“This much is certain, however, and that is that after the collapse people in Germany went through a period of tremendous shock. When everything that had happened came out and countless people were suddenly and in very different ways led into a great silence (either into the troubled silence of the new situation under the occupation or the dreadful silence of the new concentration camps), the majority undoubtedly felt that a tremendous judgment had fallen upon us. Many people even spoke of the ‘blessing of the zero hour,’ the time when things have hit absolute bottom and God gives the chance of a new beginning in the midst of the ruins and the dead. I cannot here analyze the whole complex of feelings and existential experiences which filled us at that time, and yet I dare say that the general feeling was that of visitation and judgment.

“Externally this was apparent in the fact that the churches were crowded and that people literally cried out to the church for some word which would explain and point the way out of the situation. In this hour we also established the evangelical academies which sought on the basis of the gospel to point out roads to a new order and to a new self-understanding in the previously ideological country which had suddenly become a no man’s land. It appeared to be a precious and fruitful hour in our history. The soil of men’s hearts had been plowed and there was great readiness to repent. And there were times when I thought that now the hour of awakening might have come. Anybody who lived through these hours in the pulpit was moved by the way in which people listened.

“And yet this hour, this kairos, passed by; people ate and drank, married and were given in marriage—and everything remained as it had always been. Why was this so? We dare not answer this with speculations and psychologizing. We have no right to specify the exact reasons why the manifest grace of God was again withdrawn from us.

“And it seems to me to be clear in what direction we should look for these reasons, namely, in the direction of human guilt and human failure.

“I believe, for example, that the church at that time did not find the message for the hour. There were some very unpleasant ‘seizures of power’ and self-assertion on the part of the ‘old guard.’ Not infrequently services were rewarded with offices and occasionally someone who really had exceptional charismatic gifts was made an ecclesiastical bureaucrat, where he naturally failed. Instead of the preaching of repentance and salvation we had the proclamation of a collective guilt and a hysteria of self-accusation which was in need of psychological understanding rather than having any theological justification, and this led to a hardening of men’s hearts. Despite the times, from many pulpits we heard only very conventional, pallid sermons which did not reach men’s hearts and left them cold. We seemed to be denied a prophetic awakening.

“But from a totally different and altogether unexpected side there came something which in my judgment constituted an obstruction in the spiritual situation. When I speak here of the procedures of denazification as they were handled particularly by the Americans, I beg you to believe that today I can speak about this completely without anger. I have long since realized that a military government coming in from the outside simply could not understand certain things in an occupied country and that this was not changed by the fantastic amounts of printed information materials which the army carried with it. At that time (1947) I preached a sermon about and against these forms of denazification which was later published along with a polemical exchange of letters (Die Schuld der anderen, Göttingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht, 1948) and also reprinted in American papers. It was precisely the reaction of American Christians to this that so happily showed me how innately helpful, fair, and self-critical people are in this country.

“What was the matter with those forms of denazification?

“If I may express it in rather rough and simplified form, I will put it this way. The Americans at first regarded the entire German people—with only a few exceptions—as one band of more or less thoroughgoing Nazis. Figuratively speaking they had the whole German people fall in three deep and then ordered everybody who had had anything whatsoever to do with the Party to step to the left. They then added to this group a rather large number of other people. In Württemburg, for example, this included everybody who had a title that ended with ‘… rat,’ such as Studienräte, Regierungsräte, Veternärräte (schoolmasters, government counselors, veterinarians). It was thought that these people must have had a specially close connection with the system. Many thousands were sent into concentration camps. Since I had suffered some unpleasantness during the Third Reich, I was among the few men who were allowed by American permission to visit these camps and could speak to those who were interned in them. There I learned to know something about the inward and the outward state of affairs. Here I am concerned only with the inward attitude of people.

“The fact that very many were unjustly deprived of their positions and a good portion of them were imprisoned in itself led to a certain hardening of mind. Also contributing to this was perhaps the fact that many people had placed high hopes in liberation by the Americans, that they looked upon them as representatives of a Christian nation which would proceed in love and justice to show a nation of neopagans what true humanity is. In the face of such hopes any disillusionment would be sorely felt and would result in a loss of prestige for—a wrongly understood—Christianity.

“But far worse than this and something which really brought with it what we have called a spiritual obstruction was the following. Innumerable people—I believe the greater part of the German people—were therefore dismissed from their jobs and professions. (At that time one could see formerly wealthy businessmen and high officials performing the manual labor of cleaning up the streets and rubble heaps.) In order to get back their positions and a livelihood, they had to undergo a process of denazification which required a testimonial. These testimonials were called Persilscheine (Persil was a well-known soap company which advertised that its soap would produce dazzling white laundry). The consequence was that everybody who was affected sat down and wrote letters to every possible irreproachable non-Nazi begging him to testify that he had had only a formal relationship to the Party, that he had really gone out of his way to protect the Jews, that he had always been cursing Hitler, and that he had just missed by a hair being sent to a Gestapo prison or concentration camp. And because the non-Nazis had sympathy for the many who were now being unjustly punished, they quite willingly handed out these Persilscheine (hopefully not too many to those who were really guilty!). Then these people could read some heart-moving words about their innocence, their heroism, their secret martyrdom. And all along we were all guilty and should have been arrested (if not by men then certainly by God). Many people had ten, twenty, and more such testimonials. Never in their lives had they seen such a flattering picture of themselves, since this is the kind of thing you read only in death notices and memorial addresses. When a man read this stuff he was able to recover his self-conceit!

“Can you imagine what this method of denazification meant inwardly, ‘spiritually’? A people who seemed to be just at the point of grasping its guilt and should have been hearing the message of forgiveness were suddenly carried away by a gigantic stream of self-justification. It did not require the ‘blood of the Lamb’ to rise ‘white as snow’ from the water of reconciliation. No, the thing got washed automatically, gleaming white—with Persil!

“There are many books on the history of the church in postwar Germany. They tell of Kirchentagen and evangelical academies, of synods and addresses to the congregations. But hardly anywhere can one read anything about this ‘spiritual obstruction’ (at least I have not come across it). Therefore I wanted for once to give an account of how I must look at all this. I have quite simply told you a bit of postwar history as I myself experienced it, since you asked me whether there had been a ‘revival.’

“I say all this not in order to throw the blame on the Americans of that time. It is not my business here to draw up an account of guilt. I know what I did that was wrong. I too wrote Persilscheinen until my fingers were sore in order to save as many as possible whom I considered relatively harmless sinners. But should I not have enclosed a pastoral letter which would have said to the recipient: ‘We are all guilty and in need of the forgiveness which no appeal board can give us’? Should I not have written to him: ‘I seek to wash you clean before men, but what will happen to both of us when we stand before the Last Judgment and we are asked to give an account of the years past’? ‘It is our guilt that we are still living,’ said Karl Jaspers. This may sound a bit overpathetic, but there is something to it.

“We have all, each in his own way, contributed to that ‘spiritual obstruction.’ And yet there is no value in making merely general, wholesale confessions of sin. If the confession of guilt is to be taken seriously, it must be very specific and personal. The ultimate personal and specific distinctions will be made at the Last Judgment. My purpose has been, and could only be, merely to indicate what these distinctions mean here by illustrating from my own experience something of recognizable guilt. If God does not grant an awakening, then we can never simply say that he has denied us his grace. No, rather we must always confess that it is we ourselves who are blocking God’s way to us.

“In closing I can only thank you for having shown such fraternal interest in the fortune of my country. We have not forgotten that it was the Christians—and especially the American Christians—who stretched out their hands to us after the war and provided us and our children with food and clothing. All of us who went through those years will treasure in our hearts this act of helping love. During these last several hours which have evoked in me so many moving memories, I have felt a great gratitude that it has been possible to speak to Christians as I have here to you. Here there has been no need politely to retouch the picture or to beat about the bush. Nor does shame need to keep us from speaking. For we can take even the most painful things and set them down in the light of eternity in which we all stand together. We face one another not as strangers but as brothers. This is what I shall never forget about these hours.”—From Between Heaven and Earth, by Helmut Thielicke (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 177 ff. Used by permission of Harper and Row.

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