Frankfurt School, 1935 (1): the German Confessing Church and other issues of the day

Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968)

The Frankfurt School's flagship journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was in its fourth year of publication in 1935 and its third year of being published in exile, as it would be from then on.

A considerable part of each of the three 1935 issues was devoted to book reviews in a wide variety of subjects, including philosophy, social sciences, psychology, history and economics. The focus of the journal's mission was to apply theoretical/philosophical perspectives to those fields, especially sociology. Philosophy takes first place in the book review section, and each of the three 1935 numbers of the journal feature has a review by Herbert Marcuse as its first item.

The two primary contemporary historical problems with which the journal dealt in 1935, as in the previous two years, were the National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship in Germany and the world economic crisis. So the reviews and articles provide a fascinating look at some of the leading thinkers of the time grappling with those issues, without the benefit of today’s hindsight.

The single most interesting review to me from the 1935 issues is one from the 2/1935 edition by Erich Trier, with a long additional comment by journal editor Max Horkheimer, on a number of books dealing with the situation of the German Christian churches under the Third Reich. The Hitler regime tried to consolidate all German Protestant churches under the umbrella of the German Evangelical Church formed in 1933, with mixed success. Many congregations insisted on remaining independent of the state-directed body; this dissenting group became known as the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), of which Martin Niemöller was one of the most famous leaders.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1994)

The books Trier reviews include Georg Wobbermin’s Deutscher Staat und evangelische Kirche (1934), which argues in favor of the infamous “Aryan paragraph” of the Nazi-sanctioned German Evangelical Church, and Fritz Veigel’s Die Braune Kirche (1934), which celebrates the National Socialist era for having brought the opportunity for German Protestantism to have a "brown [i.e., Nazi] church" that fully represents the "German soul."

But he also reviews two books by the Protestant theologian Karl Barth, Die Kirche Jesu Christi (1933) and Offenbarung, Kirche, Theologie (1934). Barth was already an advocate of the Bekennede Kirche from outside Germany. He would go on in later years to emphasize the central problem that the Holocaust poses for Christian theology and the Christian churches. In the 1933 book, Barth was saying that all German Protestant Christians brought shame on themselves "before God and the angels" by allowing the Nazi takeover to occur. However, it could at the time have been understood to indicate an unwillingness to challenge the Hitler regime itself that he also emphasized that the Protestant ecclesiastical opposition (not yet known in 1933 as the Bekennede Kirche) was directed at "the theology that today seeks its refuge with National Socialism, not at the National Socialist state and social order." Given Barth’s later history and his role at that time in organizing the dissenting Protestants, one has to wonder if this wasn’t diplomatic phrasing to avoid official accusations of subversion aimed at the dissenting Protestant church project. In the 1934 volume under review, Barth attacked the view of a prominent Catholic theologian who argued that the Third Reich represented a blessing of God for spiritual state of the time.

Horkheimer’s additional comments are framed in the context of traditional Marxist-materialist atheism, seeing the church as offering the oppressed "pie in the sky when we die", though Horkheimer doesn’t use that phrase here. His main point is that he sees no hope that the dispute within German Christianity at that time will lead people to take effective action against the Hitler dictatorship. Christian religious dissent being useless against the Nazi state, he suggests that it can easily be tolerated with the Nazi system. He thinks anti-Nazi dissent – and, more broadly, opposition to the negative effects of capitalism – is hindered by trying to channel it in religious terms.

The Bekennede Kirche didn’t stage a mass revolution against the dictatorship; but neither did anyone else. In fact, important and practical opposition figures were motivated by their Christian understanding of freedom and right. And the preservation of a Christian viewpoint not submitting to the ideology of the Nazi dictatorship played a vital role in preserving the values that would prove vital in constructing the postwar West German state, and also in the democratic opposition in East Germany. Many examples since that time, including the liberation theology that played a major importance in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, have shown Horkheimer’s hardline view about the uselessness of religion in movements of genuine social progress to be, at best, far too pessimistic.

Some of the reviews deal with pseudo-scholarly propaganda pieces, like Eberhard Fahrenhorst's Geist und Freiheit im System Hegels (1934), which tries to interpret Hegel's philosophy in the light of Nazi racial theories of "the power of blood", and a selection of Hegel quotations from Felix Meiner called Hegel heute (1934), to provide proof-texts to bolster Nazi dogmas. Or, more specifically in Meiner’s case, to support the radical conservatism of Moeller van den Bruck, from whom the Nazis took the term "Third Reich." Another review deals with a new journal, Zeitschrift fürDeutsche Kulturphilosophie (1934), which took as its mission a German-nationalist philosophy. It’s programmatic statement invokes a bastardized Nietzschian concept, saying in the words of Hermann Glockner, "Der deutsche Philosoph ist fromm, wie der Bauer fromm ist, wenn er über die Felder geht und die unterirdischen Kräfte fühlt." ("The German philosopher is pious, as the farmer is pious if he goes out into the fields and feels the subterranean powers.")

The latter is a good example of the Nazi Blut und Boden (blood and land) theme which was basically superficial romantic drivel. Not very surprisingly, that nonsense was more popular among urban dwellers than among actual farmers, who didn’t find it so easy to see their daily work in such an idealized way. In general, except for historical bogeymen like Karl Marx and other Social Democrats and Communists, Nazi academics and propagandists tried to twist the work of great historical German thinkers from Luther to Nietzsche to make them support elements of the Nazi worldview. Nietzsche’s quirky style made his works more susceptible to such manipulation but his actual philosophy had little in common with the Nazis, as evidenced not least by the fact that Nietzsche held the Nazis’ political predecessors, the ideological anti-Semites of his own time, to be basically the most contemptible human beings alive. In Hegel’s case, it was pure propaganda to twist his philosophy into proto-Nazism – even thought that has been a common reading in Anglo-Saxon work on Hegel, as well.

Among other philosophical volumes reviewed in 1935 is a book by Heinrich Rickert, Die Heidelberger Tradition und Kants Kritizismus (1934) advocates the development of Kantian philosophy in way that is consistent with its "German character,' in the sense of a nationalistic worldview.

Paul Ludwig Landsberg has a review in 1/1935 covering nine works promoting Nazi racial theories, including titles such as Eugen Fischer, Der völkische Staat, biologisch gesehen (1934); Oswald Menghin, Geist und Blut. Grundsatzliches um Rasse, Sprache, Kultur und Volkstum (1934) and Wilhelm Erbt, Weltgeschichte auf rassischer Grundlage. Urzeit Morgenland, Mittelmeer, Abendland und Nordland (1934). Seeing how authors were cranking out dishonest, anti-scientific drivel bolstering the Nazi theories of the day is a real cautionary tale about opportunism. Twelve years after those books were published, the Thousand-Year Reich they were supporting was destroyed and discredited throughout the world. And those who had eagerly supported it and endorsed its propaganda would have that to answer for the rest of their lives. If they had consciences, they must have been troubled, at the minimum. Landsburg says drily of Fischer’s racist Social Darwinism, for instance, that it goes "far beyond the jurisdiction of biology," i.e., his biological claims for his conclusions are nonsense.

It’s important to note that not every single book published in Germany during the Third Reich was some piece of Nazi Party propaganda. For instance, Landsburg in that review makes it clear that although Oswald Menghin endorsed a more cultural/mystical type of racist theory, he also made biologically sound criticism of the kind of biological racism promoted by Eugen Fischer.

Other reviews cover Nazi or Nazi-sympathetic theorists like Otto Hoetzsch, Carl Schmitt, Othmar Spann, Gotthard Ranke, and Conrad Steinbrink.

Among economic and sociological works considered are those by and about Arthur Burns (who was later to serve as chair of the US Federal Reserve 1970-1978), Stuart Chase, Lewis Corey, John Dewey, the Swiss "national economist" Julius Landmann, Lucien Laurat, Harold Moulton (first president of the Brookings Institute), Lewis Mumford, Joseph Schumpeter, Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Thorstein Veblen (founder of what is known as the “structuralist” schools of economics of which John Kenneth Galbraith and Jamie Galbraith are part), Ernst Wagemann, and Max Weber,

There are also reviews of books dealing with important figures in the history of the Germany and the German social-democratic movement such as Otto von Bismarck, Frederick Engels, Frederick II (Frederick the Great), Moses Hess, Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Arnold Ruge.

Tags: frankfurt school, karl barth