Oberrheinische Sozietät, Ev.-theol. Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg, WS 2018/19

Ev.-theol. Fakultät Heidelberg, Kisselgasse 1

18. Oktober 2018

Prof. Dr. Johannes Ehmann, Heidelberg

Dr. Caroline Klausing, Mainz

Prof. Dr. Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, Karlsruhe

Dr. Christoph Picker, Landau

20.00 s. t.

Debate: Learning from the Church Struggle. Panel discussion

Rolf-Ulrich Kunze

8 theses for discussion at the Evang. Sozietät, 18.10.2018

On the motivation of my study on the Baden State Church during the Nazi era.

1. for some time now, we have been standing at a turning point in the public handling of the topic of National Socialism. The AfD revisionism ("memory-political turn"), which is in parts argumentatively not right-wing populist, but right-wing extremist, drastically demonstrates this. We have to find new ways of approaching the Nazi period in contemporary and church history, otherwise this topic will slip away from us. The AfD already sits on public advisory boards of memorial institutions.

2 The very well researched history of the Baden State Church in the Nazi era is an example of how strongly moral ex-post evaluations have led to a black-and-white view of the church struggle that no longer knows any shades of gray. This dichotomous division into good and evil is part of the historically correct, but no longer historical, way of speaking about the NS. The discourse hegemony of this representation and its omnipresence in school history lessons since the 1990s has something to do with the success of right-wing populism insofar as it deters rather than enlightens young people in particular.

On the intention of my work

3 The question of whether the Baden state church was intact or destroyed during the Nazi period is for me merely an entry point into the discussion of the tradition of interpretation of a Baden Sonderweg, which has been established since Klaus Scholder. The ecclesiastical conditions in Baden are not so different from Hanover, Württemberg and Bavaria in terms of everyday life and rule that one could distinguish these rural churches from the Baden development, certainly not in terms of church politics. It would be best to dispense with the distinction intact/destroyed after a critical comparison, because it is misleading.

4 My real interest is the change of evangelical milieus, the connection of social structure and mentalities, in the Nazi period and beyond the church struggle and its Baden specifics. The methodological example for this is Frank-Michael Kuhlemann's Bielefeld Habil. thesis on the Baden pastors 1860 to 1914. I am particularly interested in the development of mentalities in the church-positive confessional environment and among the DC standing in the liberal tradition.

5 The traditional grouping in the church struggle (BK, Mitte, DC) may not only not fit for Baden, but is not suitable at all. If one looks at the entire Nazi period - i.e. not only up to the BTE - these groups do not play the role for the church-political and theological identity construction that church struggle historiography has long attributed to them. For that, there are too many changers and those who cannot be assigned.

Methodology

6 My approach is essentially discourse-analytical and follows the self-image constructions in church journalism. A historical discourse analysis of theological texts has yet to be done. It allows for a communication-theoretical understanding of patterns of relevance formation as well as strategies of valorization by focusing on the sender-receiver relationship.

7 I consider classic social-historical short-cuts in the style of Manfred Gailus to be misguided and regressive, not only with regard to the Berlin pastorate he studied. Here again and again aprioristic value judgments about the social structure are retroprojected onto the history of mentality: since the cultural turn, historical research has gone further. There are socio-moral milieus and their significance, but already in the first third of the 20th century, due to the flagrant erosion of milieus through growing social mobility, they no longer determine the formation of mentalities to the extent that only German social history assumed.

Outlook

8 If the Protestant ecclesiastical contemporary history is to have a future, it must say goodbye to morally comfortable favorite interpretations. This includes finally facing up to the deep ambivalence in the history of the BK, which has not existed as a great synthesis until now only because Protestant theology is afraid of the gray areas that come to light here in a completely unreformatory way. The BK does not at all correspond to the high moral tone of the EKD policy papers since the 1960s.