Central European History (2023), 56, 71–91 doi:10.1017/S0008938922000309
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Democratic Illusions: The Protestant Campaign for Conscientious Objection in the Early Federal Republic of Germany Brandon Bloch University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Email: bjbloch@wisc.edu
Abstract During the early-Cold-War controversy over West German rearmament, the Protestant Church emerged as a center of activism for the right of conscientious objection to military service, departing from decades of precedent. This article uses the dramatic about-face of the Protestant Church to throw new light on how West Germans reimagined democratic politics after Nazism. Building on recent challenges to paradigms of postwar liberalization, it argues that illusory narratives of the Nazi past played a key role in West Germany’s transition to democracy. Protestant activists for the right of conscientious objection drew on an imagined legacy of anti-Nazi resistance to reframe the idea of “conscience,” long associated with patriotic loyalties, as a uniquely Protestant contribution to democratic culture. In doing so, they came to identify their church as a pillar of West German democracy, even as they ensconced tendentious accounts of the Nazi past in postwar law and politics. Keywords: ideology; political history; post-1945 Germany; religion; war
Asking “Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved,” Martin Luther’s 1526 treatise concluded resoundingly in the affirmative: “For the very fact that the sword has been instituted by God to punish the evil, protect the good, and preserve peace is powerful and sufficient proof that war and killing … have been instituted by God.”1 Luther’s contention, penned amid the confessional wars of the early Reformation, appeared equally true to German Protestant nationalists of the nineteenth century. Beginning during the Napoleonic occupations and extending beyond German unification in 1871, a chorus of pastors and lay intellectuals invoked the divine mission of the German nation in its struggle against foreign domination from without and Catholic subversion from within. The First World War radicalized church-based nationalism, with Protestant pastors emerging as early enthusiasts of the war and continuing to extol the promise of a divinely endowed victory long after the domestic mood soured. German defeat left the Protestant milieu unreconciled to the Weimar Republic, while churchgoing Protestants formed a key bloc of the Nazi electorate.2 During Martin Luther, “Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Robert C. Schultz, vol. 46: The Christian in Society III (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1967), 95. 2 The literature on Protestant nationalism in modern Germany is vast. For helpful overviews, see Manfred Gailus and Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten. Konturen, Entwicklungslinien und Umbrüche eines Weltbildes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), and Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 1
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938922000309 Published online by Cambridge University Press