{"id":22144,"date":"2017-01-17T02:44:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T06:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=22144"},"modified":"2017-01-16T19:36:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-16T23:36:00","slug":"seeking-god-holocaust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2017\/01\/seeking-god-holocaust\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking God in The Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

PARIS \u2014 As we pass the halfway mark of our travel course<\/a> on the history of World War I, I\u2019m starting to think more about the spring course I\u2019ll be teaching on World War II. To help me with that preparation, I\u2019ve been reading Peter Fritzsche\u2019s new book,\u00a0An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Fritzsche,<\/a>A fixture on Best of 2016 lists<\/a>,\u00a0An Iron Wind\u00a0<\/em>is Fritzsche\u2019s spellbinding attempt to understand how both Germans and those they conquered and slaughtered \u201ccame to intellectual grips with the most terrible conflict in modern history.\u201d In the process, he raises the kinds of questions that Christians, like all people, still wrestle with:<\/p>\n

The dilemmas of choice, responsibility, and witnessing\u00a0that World War II exposed still structure the intellectual world we live in today. In the most dramatic way, the war posed existential questions about the solidarities among men and women, the human capacity to accept evil, the existence of God, and the shortcomings of witnessing, many of the elements that make up our own postmodern sensibility.\u00a0Whenever we return to the terrible years 1939\u20131945, we are forced to wonder about what it is that makes us human and frail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In order \u201cto listen and to analyze how people made sense of the deadliest war in modern times,\u201d Fritzsche makes use of what he modestly calls \u201cordinary documents that observers created for themselves.\u201d In truth,\u00a0he draws on a stunning, multinational array of primary sources, ranging from novels like Jean Bruller\u2019s\u00a0The Silence of the Sea\u00a0<\/em>(surreptitiously published under the nom de plume Vercors, in the middle of the German occupation) to the reports and diaries of Swiss doctors and nurses who went to the Eastern Front on a humanitarian mission and witnessed dehumanization.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve been most struck \u2014 because of the questions raised and the evidence deployed \u2014 by the chapter on theological wrestling. To recover Jewish debates about God, suffering, and hope, Fritzsche turns often to the archives heroically preserved by Emanuel Ringelblum and his colleagues<\/a> in the Warsaw Ghetto. To recover such discussions from the German side, he draws on two sets of mimeographed newsletters, containing ideas exchanged by devout Christians serving in the Wehrmacht.<\/p>\n

Remarkably, both persecuted and persecutor found God in the midst of the Holocaust \u2014 even as the latter entirely ignored the suffering they helped to inflict on the former.<\/p>\n

\u201cDiffusive Christianity\u201d<\/h2>\n

No doubt the events of 1914-1918 \u201cexposed basic failings in major social institutions.\u201d Yet Fritzsche concludes that \u201cindividual men and women emerged from the war abused, victimized, but still very much human.\u201d Its sequel, however, \u201cexposed something else.\u201d What took place in Europe between 1939 and 1945 \u201cerased whole horizons of empathy as people crouched within their own little worlds of tenuous security.\u201d In short, it \u201cmade men and women look smaller\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if Fritzsche is right that WWII showed humanity to be \u201cindifferent\u00a0to the fate of others, particularly Jews,\u201d we must acknowledge that some came to the same conclusion about God.<\/p>\n

Now, Fritzsche doesn\u2019t overstate the religious effects of WWII. He follows Richard Schweitzer<\/a> in arguing that WWI had primarily produced neither atheism nor revival but a \u201cdiffusive Christianity,\u201d whose adherents \u201cdid not feel the need to avow God in their everyday lives but also did not question his presence or existence.\u201d For the most part, finds Fritzsche, WWII reinforced this.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the\u00a0Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz feared that too many of the war\u2019s participants \u201cfound a\u00a0comfortable existence \u2018in the ruins of the ethical world, in the ruins of faith,'\u201d where they \u201cturned to worship their \u2018own tribe against the enemy tribe\u2019 in \u2018place of the overthrown gods.'\u201d He hoped that the trauma of war would nevertheless \u201c\u2018renew\u2019 the entire \u2018tradition of Western Christianity.'\u201d But for most of Europe under Hitler, Fritzsche concludes that the \u201cviolence of the occupation was evidently never so great as to create \u2018foxhole\u2019 conversions, nor so unsettling when human suffering was contemplated as to force the issue of the existence of God as such.\u201d<\/p>\n

With two significant exceptions: at least a few Germans and most Jews went through an agonizing reappraisal of God\u2019s existence and God\u2019s relationship to humans.<\/p>\n

Seeking God in Suffering<\/h2>\n

I won\u2019t try to review this chapter at length, but \u201cThe Life and Death of God\u201d points to some surprising similarities between Jewish and German attempts to think about God in light of the war \u2014 and to an enormous gap.<\/p>\n

First, the war did cause some to reject faith altogether. Fritzsche cites estimates that \u201cabout one-third of Holocaust survivors, most of them Orthodox, lost faith in God, and almost no nonbelievers became believers in the same period.\u201d While some initially hoped that the suffering would precede the return of the Messiah, others found it impossible to sustain faith \u201cdespite everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet for most Jewish believers, \u201cGod remained present in the catastrophe.\u201d The poetry of Psalms and Lamentations, the laws of Deuteronomy, and the story of Job helped yet another generation of God\u2019s Chosen People make meaning of his silence in the face of evil.<\/p>\n

\"Yitzhak<\/a>
Katzenelson died in Auschwitz in 1944 \u2013 public domain\/National Library of Israel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More unusually, \u201cthe events of 1942 and 1943 did make\u00a0more pertinent the idea of a crippled God who stood in for his horribly wounded people\u2026\u201d The most striking example of the theme comes from poet Yitzhak Katzenelson, who wrote of the Jewish people, \u201cThey are God!\u2026 A great and vast nation of Jesuses\u2026 not only Jesuses of thirty years of age, but old and venerable Jesuses\u2026 infant and child Jesuses\u2026 murdered Gods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oddly, the experience of certain Christians in the Wehrmacht led them to a similar conclusion\u2026 though not to empathy for their victims.<\/p>\n

To a troubling extent, the Nazis did convince<\/a> some Germans (especially the youth) to see National Socialism as \u201ca highly relevant moral and ethical current, and an alternative to Christianity,\u201d and so to \u201c[reject]\u00a0the Judeo-Christian God of mercy and love and the humanistic ethic that had developed as a common part of European civilization.\u201d But most Germans contrived ways to reconcile their \u201cdiffusive Christianity\u201d with their participation in \u2014 or bystanding during \u2014 the Nazi race war. And some responded to the violence by engaging in serious theological reflection.<\/p>\n

The conservative army officers whose letters circulated in the\u00a0Sternbriefe\u00a0<\/em>newsletter found that their piety isolated them from fellow soldiers. Nevertheless, they initially fused faith with German nationalism; biblical imagery of light overcoming darkness was applied to the struggle against Bolshevism, for example. But when the actual war in the Soviet Union went wrong, they began to see God\u2019s judgment on their nation. \u201cGod doesn\u2019t need our people,\u201d wrote one such officer after the defeat at Stalingrad, \u201cas little as he needed the chosen people in the Old Testament!\u201d<\/p>\n

More intriguing still are the excerpts from another Christian newsletter, the\u00a0Rundbriefe,\u00a0<\/em>whose writers were former students of scholars associated with the Confessing Church. These young army officers were already prone to see Kirche<\/i> and Reich<\/i> in tension, and never interpreted early German victories as supporting evidence for the claim inscribed on their belt buckles: \u201cGod with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, they hoped that the experience of war would bring about the conversion of ordinary soldiers. Focused on the \u201cimpotent suffering\u201d of the freezing, starving comrades around them, they began to see such soldiers<\/p>\n

as almost Christlike figures. God affirmed his presence amid the misery the soldiers endured, but this meant that he could not or would not alleviate the afflictions of the faithful, a motif Jewish quarrelers with the Lord outlined as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Failure of Empathy<\/h2>\n

Despite this remarkable parallel, Frietzsche reports that even these German letters are conspicuously silent on the Shoah itself: \u201c\u2026the calamity of war was usually understood as something German soldiers shared with other belligerents, but it is not imagined\u00a0in scenes of the mass murder of the Jewish people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Memorial<\/a>
One example of the failure of empathy: this plaque hangs outside a school in Paris; it commemorates the thousands of Jewish children who were deported by French police and sent to their death in the extermination camps (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Chris Gehrz)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This silence is just one example of a theme running through all of An<\/i> Iron<\/i> Wind<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The violence of the war was so extensive that people tried to contain it by separating themselves from the fate of others. World War II revealed the broad collapse of structures of empathy and solidarity in a way that World War I never did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We might want to believe that Christians like the Rundbriefe<\/i> authors were exceptions to this rule. But even as they joined Jews in seeing a vulnerable God suffering alongside those made in his image, this key difference remains:<\/p>\n

Jews were in a much better position than Christians to see the hypocrisy of Christian injunctions to show mercy and love, because they were on the sharp receiving end of Christian anti-Semitism or indifference.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new book helps us understand how Europeans on both sides of World War II turned to faith to make meaning of unfathomable violence and suffering<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2794,"featured_media":22146,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2974],"tags":[2990,706,1301,2820,1581,2956],"class_list":["post-22144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chris-gehrz","tag-empathy","tag-germany","tag-holocaust","tag-judaism","tag-world-war-i","tag-world-war-ii"],"yoast_head":"\nSeeking God in The Holocaust<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A new book helps us understand how Europeans on both sides of World War II turned to faith to make meaning of unfathomable violence and suffering\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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