Download - Catholics, the Jews and Democratization in Post-war Germany, Munich 1945-65

Catholics, the Jews and Democratizationin Post-war Germany, Munich 1945–65*

Anthony Kauders (Universita¨t Munchen)

The following paper sets out to examine the nature and meaning of Catholicdiscourse on democratization, the Jews and the Nazi past in Munich from 1945to 1965. In particular, it seeks to address three interrelated aspects of post-warVergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung (coming to terms with the past): first, the possiblecausal nexus between the espousal of liberal democratic values on the one hand,and facing the magnitude of Jewish suffering on the other; second, changes inCatholic perceptions of the ‘Jewish question’ in Germany; and third, the extentto which the language used after 1945 accorded with older practices datingback either to the Weimar Republic or to the Third Reich.

When in April 1950 one B. Sagalowitz reported to the World Jewish Con-gress that ‘perhaps the gravest handicap for the safeguarding and consolidationof the young German democracy . . . may be found in the widespread [sic]absence of a factor which might be described as “public conscience”’,1 he wasvoicing an opinion that could be found in most Jewish circles, whether in WestGermany or elsewhere.2 Thus theAllgemeine Wochenzeitung des Judentums, inthis area at least a fairly representative voice of West German Jewry, repeatedlyestablished a causal connection between democracy and restitution, betweenthe return to aRechtsstaatand the remembrance of genocide, between thenewly established order and minority rights. More often than not, however, thenewspaper was averse to specifying the precise meaning of democracy, relyingon assumptions that were common to writers and readers alike, though hardlytaken for granted in the population at large.

In 1955, for example, the paper praised those who had fought Hitler duringthe Third Reich as the guarantors of democracy, while towards the end of thatyear Henrik van Dam, head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, held that

* I would like to thank the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism,Hebrew University, Jerusalem for its generous financial support, and in particular Dr Leon Volo-vici and Dr Simcha Epstein. I would also like to thank the journal’s three anonymous readersfor their helpful comments.

1 Central Zionist Archives (CZA), C2 773, April 1950, Report by Dr B. Sagalowitz on ajourney to Germany undertaken on behalf of the World Jewish Congress, p. 7.

2 The belief that treating the past in a certain way is constitutive of democracy (without defin-ing democracy in any precise manner) is still part of modern Jewish identity in Germany. See‘Schoa-Mahnmal ist Lackmus-Test fu¨r deutsche Demokratie’, Interview with Michel Friedman,in Israelitisches Wochenblatt(Zurich), 13 Nov. 1998, p. 4.

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only a state determined to protect itself as well as its symbols, one that had noillusions about who was responsible for the catastrophe, would stand a chanceof exorcizing the ghosts of the past, adding that democracy must ensure its inde-pendence from economic well-being.3 Van Dam was also the author of one ofthe more detailed pieces on the subject. Writing in June 1959, he claimed that the

existence of an organized Jewish community in Germany, particularly in light of themost recent past, was a fundamental factor of democracy, where this much misusedword is not taken to be a specific technique of running the state, but rather as thewillingness to grant groups and individuals spiritual and physical independence as anatural condition for a human existence.

Van Dam reiterated this judgement some months later, when he stated that theconsequences of Jews abandoning Germany as a result of a return to ‘politicalbarbarity’ did not require a lot of imagination, one being aware that both demo-crats and Christians would soon follow suit and that the outside world wouldnot leave these events unanswered.4

Munich’s Jewish community seconded such views. In 1958, ProfessorBaruch Graubard, who frequently engaged Jews and Gentiles in controversialdiscussions, deplored the superficial abhorrence towards antisemitism in Ger-many, even though the latter constituted a danger to life and property andundermined the fabric of society.5 Graubard implied that without fighting Jew-hatred the nation’s future was at stake, a theme he repeated in various forumsthereafter. His definitions of democracy, though seldom systematic, bespokethe need to address the ‘Jewish question’ in its different guises, so that he oftenlinked the two without necessarily elaborating on the nature of their connection.

3 ‘Labile Demokratie’, Allgemeine Wochenzeitung des Judentums(AWZJ), 25 Feb. 1955;‘Schleichende Unterwanderung. Krisenfestigkeit der Demokratie?’,AWZJ, 9 Dec. 1955. Pollstaken by the Americans in the immediate post-war years testify to these fears: asked ‘whetherthey preferred a government offering “economic security and the possibility of a good income”or else one guaranteeing “free elections, freedom of speech, a free press and religious freedom”six out of ten persistently opted for economic security from February 1947 to January 1949,with half that number preferring guaranteed liberties’: Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt,Public Opinion in Occupied Germany. The OMGUS Surveys, 1945–1949(Urbana, Ill., 1970), p.41. See also Wolfgang Benz, ‘Postwar Society and National Socialism: Remembrance, Amnesia,Rejection’,Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fu¨r deutsche Geschichte, 19 (1990), p. 8.

4 ‘Moral und Politik’, AWZJ, 19 June 1959; ‘Pflicht zur Aktion. Volksverhetzung ein polit-ischer Tatbestand’,AWZJ, 15 Jan. 1960. See also inAWZJ‘Alte Bekannte’, 11 May 1962; ‘DieDemokratie sta¨rken!’, 16 July 1963; ‘Um Deutschlands Zukunft’, 3 Dec. 1965; and ‘Unerfu¨llteHoffnungen. Ein politischer Ru¨ckblick auf das Jahr 1965’, 21 Dec. 1965.

5 ‘Antisemitismus’, Munchner Ju¨dische Nachrichten(MJN), 22 Aug. 1958. I am only con-cerned with those ‘mainstream’ Jews in Munich and elsewhere who intended to remain in Ger-many, or who at least evinced an interest in the goings-on of German politics and society. Mostdisplaced persons (DPs), of course, were deeply hostile to Germany and merely waiting for thenext opportunity to emigrate to Palestine/Israel or elsewhere. On opposition to the possibilityof re-establishing a Jewish community on German soil, see the words of M. Bachman, possiblythe only Jewish member of Bavaria’s Ministry of Interior, who in March 1949 wrote that ‘leadingJewish organizations’ had concluded that ‘in the future there shall be no Jews in Germany.Those who will remain are uninteresting and of no consequence to Jewry, and are almost writtenoff’: letter to Staatsminister Ankermu¨ller, 2 March 1949, American Jewish Joint DistributionCommittee Archives (AJJDC), Jerusalem, Geneva 1, 5B, C-45.005, 45.




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West German leaders did not ‘want to see antisemitism in their country’, Grau-bard argued, yet they and others lacked the conscious will to distance them-selves from the Nazi past. What was missing, he maintained, was the readinessto ‘take defensive actions and stand up for democracy’.6 Following the eventssurrounding the desecration of Cologne’s synagogue during Christmas 1959,Graubard and others once again took up the affinity between individual libertyand democracy in post-war Germany. An editorial in theMunchner Ju¨discheNachrichten, for example, referred to the fact that no effective law existedagainst Jew-hatred because antisemitism was not seen as a ‘betrayal of humanrights’, as treason against a humane state and its inhabitants; because it wasseen as an exceptional case and not as jeopardizing ‘real patriotic feeling’.7

But it was left to Professor Graubard to address the subject with all the urgencyhe had evinced on previous occasions:

But the Greek philosopher Democritus says: ‘The people must defend the law like itscity walls.’ This is precisely what the German people failed to do in the years after1933, and this is what has to be made clear to the young. It is therefore equally crucialto furnish the term ‘brotherhood’ with more exact and concrete detail. If only one wereto explain to them [sc. the young] in the manner of Aristotle what the law and stateentail, they would see that the problems are not merely important in their religiousramifications but also on a personal and political level.8

While most Jewish leaders and the Jewish press failed to spell out the exactnature of democracy, their records indicate that they instinctively embraceddemocracy of an Anglo-American provenance, namely liberal democracy.Indeed, a majority of them would have backed General McCloy’s invocationthat Jews had to be accepted as equal citizens in order for any people to passthe acid test of democracy (Feuerprobe der Demokratie).9 Surveys of Americanconceptions of democracy as articulated in post-war Bavaria, moreover, indi-cate that individual rights were always of paramount importance. In a report

6 ‘Alte und Neue Definitionen’,MJN, 23 Jan. 1959. See also ‘Wiederholungen—wie wir siegewohnt sind’,MJN, 30 Jan. 1959, where Graubard writes: ‘Democracy means readiness, vigil-ance, the will to maintain freedom.’

7 ‘Die unsinnige Welt’,MJN, 8 Jan. 1960. See also, ‘Das Wort ist nicht ohne Bedeutung’,MJN, 5 Feb. 1960.

8 ‘Die Erfahrungen der ‘Woche der Bru¨derlichkeit’, MJN, 30 March 1961. See also ‘Fragenund Antworten. Gedanken zur Woche der Bru¨derlichkeit’, MJN, 25 March 1960: ‘I do not knowwhat today’s youth and the German public consider to be democracy. Does democracy mean. . . the ballot on election day . . . or the . . . freedom of the individual or the right to do everythingthat is deemed admissible according to general conceptions of what is possible in an organizationof human beings . . . or does it mean more than this, namely the right of a group to live freelyand to go about its business in line with its particular nature?’

9 Frank Stern,Im Anfang war Auschwitz. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschenNachkrieg(Gerlingen, 1991), p. 264; Josef Foschepoth,Im Schatten der Vergangenheit. DieAnfange der Gesellschaften fu¨r Christlich-Judische Zusammenarbeit(Gottingen, 1993), p. 82;Y. Michal Bodemann, ‘Staat und Ethnizitat: Der Aufbau der ju¨dischen Gemeinden im KaltenKrieg’, in Julius H. Schoepset al. (eds.), Judisches Leben in Deutschland seit 1945(Frankfurt/Main, 1988), p. 62; Ulrich Brochhagen,Nach Nurnberg. Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigungin der Ara Adenauer(Hamburg, 1994), p. 44. See ‘Schoa-Mahnmal ist Lackmus-Test fu¨rdeutsche Demokratie’.




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by HICOG (High Commissioner for Germany) of July 1946, for example, threeof the seven ‘minimal essentials of democracy’ appertained to the protectionof individual rights against encroachments by the state, and Lucius D. Claywas to emphasize this approach one month later, when at a meeting of ministerpresidents from the US Zone of Occupation he exclaimed that ‘somethingwhich is always dear to the hearts of Americans is the provision which is madein the constitution for the protection of the right of the individual’.10 Similarly,in a draft of Military Government for Bavaria entitled ‘Public Relations Aspectsto Teaching Individual Germans Democracy’ it was recommended that USofficials make use of the ‘Definition of Democracy’ taken from the March 1947edition of Life magazine, which comprised the following points (note that theones reproduced here were the first four to be mentioned):

Democracy means personal worth: Every human being is precious in his own right andis always to be regarded as an end, never as a means merely . . . The State is made forman, not man for the State . . . Democracy means freedom: All men should participateactively in selecting leaders, in shaping the laws and in discharging the responsibilitiesof government. Every man should be free to think and speak, to write and create, toapprove and criticize, to assemble and organize . . . Democracy means equality: It recog-nizes no races, castes, or orders commissioned by God or qualified by their own attri-butes to exploit, govern or enslave their fellow human beings . . . Democracy meansrule of law . . .11

The US occupation forces thus promoted a notion of democracy that wasbound to be welcomed by Jewish men and women in West Germany, especiallywhen the kinship between democracy and the repudiation of state-sponsoredpersecution was made explicit, such as in this last document. Advocacy ofliberal democratic values by Jews and Americans, then, more often than notimplied an effort to allude to the symbolic link between human rights, memoryof violations thereof (the Holocaust), and a healthy democracy. In fact, it couldbe argued that for the first group such an attitude came naturally in consequenceof antisemitism and premeditated mass murder, while for the second it did soas well, in keeping with ideals that had come to pervade US society long beforethe advent of Hitler.12 And while it must be kept in mind that numerousAmericans were not at all enthralled by the sight of down-trodden displacedpersons, whose appearance often compared unfavourably with that of ‘civili-

10 Annette Zimmer,Demokratiegru¨ndung und Verfassungsgebung in Bayern. Die Entstehungder Verfassung des Freistaates Bayern von 1946(Frankfurt/Main, 1987), p. 341. See alsoHermann-Josef Rupieper,Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie. Der amerikan-ische Beitrag 1945–1952(Opladen, 1993), p. 422.

11 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Mu¨nchen (BHStAM), Office of Military Government Bavaria(OMGBY), Education and Cultural Relations Division, 10/49–2/11. Similar draft proposals ondemocracy can be found in the same folder.

12 For the German-Jewish propensity to vote for liberal democratic parties before Hitler, seeMartin Liepach,Das Wahlverhalten der ju¨dischen Bevo¨lkerung. Zur politischen Orientierungder Juden in der Weimarer Republik(Tubingen, 1996). For reasons why this tendency was onlylogical, see Anthony Kauders,German Politics and the Jews. Du¨sseldorf and Nuremberg, 1910–1933 (Oxford, 1996).




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zed’ Germans, there were many instances of empathyas well as repeatedreminders by US officials that ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ required thatJews be treated as equal members of society.13

In July 1946 Field Horine, a US civilian who had taken charge of RadioMunich, wrote a letter to Dorothy Thompson of theNew York Post, in whichhe expressed his doubts as to whether the radio station’s 100-hour broadcastweek would make any impression on the public. Horine based his pessimismon a church service he had attended, one that he believed was being repeatedevery Sunday, ‘with minor variations on the theme, from hundreds of pulpits’.He conceded that one would have to take ‘a rather dim view of the future’given that the preacher had blamed the League of Nations for the war; exhortedthe congregation to vote for the Christian Social Union (CSU) as the only partybased on ‘Christian principles’; referred to brown and red terrorism as ‘virtuallysynonymous’; and provided a ‘clever disparagement’ of ‘British parliamentar-ism’.14 In much of the secondary literature on the Catholic church after thewar, one finds similar assessments of the unwillingness of Catholics to accountfor the historical causes of National Socialism or to come to the aid of a fledg-ling democracy.15 In particular, church officials often warned against a form

13 On GI hostility to DPs, see, for example, the 1946/7 report by Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein,Adviser on Jewish Affairs in the US Zone, AJJDC, Geneva I, 6A/2, C45.069: ‘More ugly inci-dents are developing between DP’s and GI’s. Although top-level military policy is all that canbe reasonably expected, the average young American soldier is not equipped to understand theproblems of these Jews.’ See also the letter by Abraham Klausner to Irene, 6 April 1946, CentralArchives for the History of the Jewish People, P-68, Klausner Archives III. As Julius Posnerreported, the average Allied soldier ‘expected cannibals and encountered friendly old men andsweet girls, especially many of the latter type, since the men were away; and so he opined thatthe expressions (of an anti-German bent) in the press were nothing but propaganda’: JuliusPosner,In Deutschland 1945–1946(Jerusalem, 1947), p. 6. On positive comments regardingthe DPs, including those by General Eisenhower, see Samuel Gringauz, ‘Our New GermanPolicy and the DP’s. Why Immediate Resettlement is Imperative’,Commentary, June (1948),pp. 509–10. For Jewish criticism of DP behaviour, see the remarks by Dr Samuel Haber, thenin charge of the Joint Committee in the US Zone, who suggested that DPs ‘should make strongefforts to regain the sympathies of the Army’: AJJDC, Geneva 1, 6B/2, C 45.106, B. Sapir toDr N. Reich and M. Lukaczer, 25 May 1948.

14 Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), Historisches Archiv, RV/24.0, letter from Horine to DorothyThompson of theNew York Post, 7 July 1946; see also Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte (IfZ), AnnualHistorical Reports, Military Government for theLandof Bavaria, Fg 01/1: July 1945–June 1946,p. 24: ‘The Catholic priests have given strong support to the Christian Social Union. They havetold the people that they “would burn in hell” if they did not vote Christian. Such support islegal yet it leads the way to one-party government in Bavaria where the population is predomi-nantly Catholic.’

15 See, for example, Maria Mitchell, ‘Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians andNational Socialism, 1945–1949’,Journal of Modern History, 2 (1995), pp. 283–4, 286, 291;Joseph Foschepoth, ‘Zur deutschen Reaktion auf Niederlage und Besetzung’, in Ludolf Herbst(ed.), Westdeutschland 1945–1955. Unterwerfung, Kontrolle, Integration(Munich, 1986), p.152; Ernst Klee, ‘Persilscheine und falsche Pa¨sse. Die Kirchen als Nazi-Fluchthelfer’, in WalterH. Pehle and Peter Sillen (eds.),Wissenschaft im geteilten Deutschland. Restauration oder Neu-beginn nach 1945(Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 75 ff; Werner K. Blessing, ‘“Deutschland in Not, wirim Glauben . . .” Kirche und Kirchenvolk in einer katholischen Region’, in Martin Broszatet al.(eds.),Von Stalingrad zur Wa¨hrungsreform. Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland(Munich, 1989), pp. 63–4, 106. Other groups within West Germany, including Protestants, liter-




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of denazification that would not distinguish between those who had perpetratedcrimes and those who had merely joined Nazi organizations in order to keeptheir jobs or ‘prevent worse things from happening’. These clerics also com-plained that many Germans were facing the prospect of starvation, radicaliz-ation and proletarianization as a result of Allied disorganization and ill-will,both of which stemmed from an inability to appreciate the Christian messageof forgiveness at a time of acute dislocation.16 Despite numerous pronounce-ments on the ‘Jewish question’, however, there were no express efforts to fleshout possible ties between democracy andVergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung.

In post-war Munich, Catholics also explained the Third Reich with referenceto metaphysics, cumulative secularization and the effects of relying on ‘enlight-enment ideology’. Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, for example, used theoccasion of All Souls’ Day 1946 to condemn the ‘spiritual morass in the oldand new world, the betrayal of marital fidelity, the mass murder of unborn life,the confused state of moral terminology and in consequence the decline ofpublic morality . . . the beatification (Seligpreisung) of the flesh in art and litera-ture, in the cinema and theatre’.17 In a similar vein, theMunchner KatholischeKirchenzeitung. Bistumsblatt der Erzdiozo¨se Munchen-Freising (MKK)con-tained various castigations of this aberration of human evolution. In an editorialof March 1946 entitled ‘Unsere Schuld’ (Our Guilt), the paper maintained thatthe events surrounding Hitler’s reign had been foreshadowed by develop-ments that replaced ‘earnest Christian faith’ with all kinds of ‘Weltanschauung’.18

A few months later, an article in theMKK cast this interpretation of the past

ary figures, and politicians of all stripes, exhibited similar instances of the ‘German discourseof victimization’. See, for example, Helmut Dubiel,Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte. Dienationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des deutschen Bundestages(Munich andVienna, 1999), pp. 40ff; Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, ‘Auch keine Stunde Null. Westdeutsche Sozio-logie nach 1945’, in Pehle and Sillen (eds.),Wissenschaft, p. 33. See also the articles by PeterDudek, ‘Kontinuitat und Wandel. Wirtschaftliche Pa¨dagogik im Nachkriegsdeutschland’, p. 65and Klaus R. Scherpe, ‘Die Renovierung eines alten Gebaudes. Westdeutsche Literaturwissen-schaft 1945–1950’, pp. 162–3 in Pehle and Sillen (eds.),Wissenschaft; Yule Heibel,Recon-structing the Subject. Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945–1950(Princeton, N.J.,1995), pp. 3–4; Wilhelm Hoegner,Der schwierige Aussenseiter. Erinnerungen eines Abgeord-neten, Emigranten und Ministerpra¨sidenten(Munich, 1959), p. 223; Jean Solchany, ‘Vom Anti-modernismus zum Antitotalitarismus. Konservative Interpretationen des Nationalsozialismus inDeutschland 1945–1949’,Vierteljahreshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, July 1996, pp. 373–94.

16 ‘Gemeinsamer Hirtenbrief nach beendeten Krieg’, Fulda, 23 August 1945, in Rolf Rendtorffand Hans Hermann Henrix (eds.),Die Kirchen und das Judentum. Dokumente von 1945–1985(Paderborn and Munich, 1988), p. 235; Bernhard Lehmann,Katholische Kirche und Besatzungs-macht in Bayern 1945–1949 im Spiegel der OMGUS-Akten(Munich, 1994), pp. 152ff; MonthlyReports of the Military Governor U.S. Zone (National Archives, Washington; IfZ, Dk 101.006),October 1945: ‘Many clergymen of both the Protestant and Catholic churches have tended totake the denazification of both laymen and themselves with marked ill-grace. Appeals on “moral”grounds for a modification of denazification policies have had prominent sponsors amongchurch leaders.’

17 Archiv der Erzdiozo¨se Munchen und Freising (AEM), Gedruckte Predigten und Schriften,4–9–223/9, Faulhaber, ‘Das achtfache Selig der Bergpredigt. Allerseelenpredigt im Bu¨rgersaalzu Munchen’, 3 Nov. 1946.

18 ‘Unsere Schuld’,MKK, 17 March 1946.




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in identical terms, subjecting the ‘corrosive influence of rationalism’, whichresembled a ‘lifeless infection’, to a stinging critique.19 Dr Joseph Koenig,writing in the same paper in autumn 1947, summed up this line of argumentwhen he held that the ‘declaration of absolute personal freedom’ was a productof the enlightenment, and, in so far as it no longer conformed to the authorityof God, a good example of degenerate natural law (eines entartetenNaturrechts).20

We should also note that the CSU, which in the early years of its existencefrequently represented Catholic political thought, was not averse to profferingcomparable analyses.21 In its basic programme of November 1946, issued inadvance of the state elections, we read that the ‘disorder (Zerruttung) of publicand private life’ imposed by the legacy of National Socialism was ‘lastly causedby [humanity’s] desertion of the divine order . . .’22 Likewise, a pamphlet ofthat same month, containing the ‘Thirty points of the union’, issued a warningto all Bavarians as yet oblivious to the forces that had engendered catastrophe:‘In light of the ruins of our cities, shaken by the spiritual degeneration(Entartung) and the emotional decay that have enveloped our people, we assertthat every social order unheedful of creation’s divineUrgrund invariably leadsto chaos and ruin.’23 Munich’s CSU, in many respects the forerunner of laterdevelopments within the party, was equally concerned that the electorate recog-nize how much the world was ‘in the midst of a frightful crisis’ and that theworld wars, dictatorships and upheavals in state and economics thus far wit-nessed were ‘merely an outward sign of thisWeltenkrise’.24 An undated elec-tion poster from the Bavarian capital, furthermore, suggests that this malaise

19 ‘Vom Wesen des Menschen, seine Gefa¨hrdung und Erlo¨sung’, MKK, 28 July 1946.20 ‘Christentum und Kapitalistische Weltordnung’,MKK, 5 Oct. 1947.21 For the CSU’s political thought, see Karl Heinz Keil, ‘Wie christlich kann Politik sein? Zur

Parteiengeschichte der BVP und der fru¨hen CSU’, Diplomarbeit, Universita¨t der BundeswehrMunich, 1992, pp. 97–9; Barbara Fait,Die Anfange der CSU 1945–1948. Der holprige Weg zurErfolgspartei(Munich, 1995), pp. 10ff; Isa Huelz,Schulpolitik in Bayern zwischen Demokratisi-erung und Restauration in den Jahren 1945–1950(Hamburg, 1970), p. 35; Barbara Fait andAlf Mintzel (eds.), Die CSU 1945–1948. Protokolle und Materialien zur Fru¨hgeschichte derChristlich-Sozialen Union, 3 vols. (Munich, 1993).

22 IfZ, Dn 042, leaflet ‘Das Grundsatzprogramm der Christlich-Sozialen Union in Bayern’,Munich, 15 Nov. 1946. See also IfZ, 720/1 (Nachlaß (NL) Mintzel), ‘Parteiorganisationen–Landesverband: Gru¨ndung der CSU’, ‘Bamberger Denkschrift zur Schaffung einer politischenEinheitsfront aller Christen Deutschlands’, p. 1 (the culprits in this draft include materialism,empiricism, positivism, Marxism and Darwinism); BR, Schallarchiv Dok. 15052, speech by FritzSchaffer on ‘Entfernung der Symbole des Dritten Reiches’, part of BR programme of July 1945(in this case the culprit was ‘evil’ (das Bose)); Archiv fur Christlich-soziale Politik (ACSP),Munich, Flugblattsammlung, Folder 1945–48, ‘Aufruf der christlich-sozialen Union an alleDeutschen’, 1946 (here atheism (Religionslosigkeit) occasioned the ‘satanic’).

23 IfZ, Dn 042, pamphlet ‘Die Dreißig Punkte der Union’, Munich, November 1946 (mytranslation); for the English version see BHStAM, OMGBY, Civil Administration Branch,13/150–3/1.

24 IfZ, FH, Dokumente zur Fru¨hgeschichte der CSU, 1945–1948, ‘Programm’, CSU Munich,1946; also in IfZ, 132/1 (NL Baumgartner). See, for similar examples, Stadtarchiv Mu¨nchen(StAM), ZS, 393/1, leaflet CSU Oberbayern (Munich), no date, ‘Worum geht es bei denGemeindewahlen?’




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be overcome through the combined efforts of men and women determined toreinstate ‘purity and fidelity amongst the sexes’, as well as ‘honour, rectitude,reliability, reverence towards God, respect for one’s parents!’.25

Both the Catholic church and CSU in Munich also spoke out against denaz-ification. Cardinal Faulhaber, for example, repeatedly called on the Allies andthe German administration to remember the well-nigh hopeless situation ofthose who had wished to divest themselves of Nazi influence; succeeding indoing so, Faulhaber maintained, would have entailed bitter poverty.26 He there-fore appealed to those responsible for denazification to hasten the purge ofundesirable political elements so as to relieve millions of Germans of theirexcruciating uncertainty and idleness, which could only lead to eventual prolet-arianization and radicalization.27 The editor-in-chief of theMKK, LorenzFreiberger, took this argument one step further when he contended that thoseMunich burghers who had been treated unfairly by theBefreiungsgesetzwereno longer responsive to anti-Nazi legislation in education and other areas ofsocial life, something Freiberger thought only reasonable given the ‘strange’(seltsamen) denazification methods that had been employed.28 Many within theCSU leadership, meanwhile, concluded that fellow-travellers (Mitlaufer), thosewho had joined the NSDAP and were now being punished for their ‘politicalmistake’ (politischer Irrtum), should be granted amnesties and thereby sparedpossible prosection.29

Munich’s lord mayor, Karl Scharnagl, who also co-founded the BavarianCSU and received advice from his brother, Suffragan Bishop Anton Scharnagl,advanced another familiar argument in favour of leniency, one that could claimjudicial logic and common sense as its progenitors. Writing to Colonel Keegan,Head of Military Government for Munich, following the suicide of a ‘denazi-fied’ (unemployed) municipal official, he opined that justice as fairness impliedthat each individual case be treated separately: ‘We . . . are in agreement withyou that the Nazi spirit should be radically exterminated in the German people.We only make the request that our knowledge of conditions of the personsinvolved be given first consideration in determining the means and choosing

25 StAM, Plakatsammlung, Fiche 61, No. 49, ‘Frauen und Ma¨dchen!’26 ‘Kardinal Faulhaber u¨ber die Entnazifzierung’,MKK, 26 Jan. 1947.27 BHStAM, Abt. V, NL Pfeiffer 119, Faulhaber to Dr Ehard, 4 March 1947, also found in

AEM, NL Scharnagl 131.28 ‘Katholik und Entnazifizierung’,MKK, 23 March 1947.29 For the CSU in Bavaria, see IfZ, ED 720/36, ‘Die CSU Fraktion berichtet’, ‘CSU im Bayer-

ischen Landtag’, 20 Oct. 1950 ‘Entnazifizierung’; IfZ 720/1, ‘The Position of Prime MinisterSchaeffer of the Bavarian Christian Social Union’, Field Intelligence Study 24, Office of Stra-tegic Services, Mission for Germany, 27 Sept. 1945; BHStAM, NL Pfeiffer 101, CSU leafletfor state elections, 1 Dec. 1946; ACSP, NL Mu¨ller, 288: ‘Einwande der O¨ ffentlichkeit gegendas Denazifizierungsverfahren und Minister Dr Pfeiffer’, compiled 12–22 Aug. 1946; JosefMuller, Bis zur letzten Konsequenz. Ein Leben fu¨r Frieden und Freiheit(Munich, 1975), p. 322.The best book on denazification in Munich and Bavaria is Lutz Niethammer,Die Mitlauferfabrik.Die Entnazifizierug am Beispiels Bayerns(Berlin and Bonn, 1982).




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the methods for attaining this goal.’30 Catholic liturgy and political consider-ations were also at the forefront of Scharnagl’s speech of May 1945, at a timewhen the precise nature of denazification had not yet been made public.According to the prominent Catholic politician, ‘Not the German people, yes,not even the great mass of the Party members’ were to be held accountable,but rather only ‘that circle which (had) understood how to terrorize by theirmeans of power’. Like many of his co-religionists in Munich and Bavaria,Scharnagl summarized his view on earlyVergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung in termsof a specific way of retelling the past and of envisioning the future: ‘Becauseof the repeated and great emphasis on Christian principles as the main guidein the leadership of the states and peoples one may surely expect this judgement[blaming the leadership rather than the people], for “There is more joy inHeaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine who needednot repentance.”’31 Presumably, the sinner here was the average German whohad already repented, whereas the remaining ninety-nine had not had the privi-lege of going through purgatory, i.e. only those who had experienced NationalSocialism and who had then wrested themselves from its evil influence wereworthy of genuine respect.32

More important for our purposes, however, is that in the post-war years fewstatements on democracy emanating from Catholics in the church and membersof the CSU contained recognizable allusions to the ‘Jewish question’, eventhough many of these statements were pronounced in their support for individ-ual human rights. Contrary to what might have been expected, most Catholicleaders were conscious of the need to reintroduce ‘humanistic’, even ‘liberal’values into politics in order to surmount the Nazi legacy still festering in theminds and hearts of the people. Although one may wish to dismiss theseendeavours to achieve ‘democracy’ as the outcome of political expediency—after all, clerics and politicians had little choice in a state occupied by foreigntroops—the sheer number of statements upholding human rights (in news-papers, party programmes and church journals) suggests that Allied personnelhad not only done a fine job in elevating certain persons to prominent positionswithin the CSU, but had also been not too wide of the mark in expecting thechurch to play an important role in fostering certain principles in post-warMunich and Bavaria. To be sure, there were abundant signs that Catholicsconfronted the past by pointing toGermanvictimhood, that is, by comparing

30 BHStAM, NL Pfeiffer, 52, letter dated 10 July 1945.31 StAM, Burgermeister und Rat (BUR), 2063/1.32 See also the comment by the Protestant church leader Hans Assmussen, whose words

implied a privileged position for murderers in the overall quest for a greater understanding ofevil: ‘If the danger of a misunderstanding were not so great then I would add that God is ableand . . . willing to shed light on the connections which exist between Heinrich Himmler’s mur-ders and the position of a normal American citizen . . . For although each person is responsiblefor his or her actions, it is equally certain that humanity is one, that guilt (Schuld) is alwaysrooted in the whole of mankind’: Hans Assmussen, ‘Die Stuttgarter Erkla¨rung’, Die Wandlung,January 1948, p. 21.




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Jewish suffering with German suffering in an effort to remind the outside worldof mass martyrdom in Dresden, Hamburg and East Prussia.33 Field Horine’sdespondency upon hearing sermons of exculpation was not confined to mem-bers of Radio Munich or Military Government Bavaria. It is evident, moreover,that many Catholics had not suddenly discovered their great love for democ-racy, which remained a concept many had trouble espousing.34 Nevertheless,these caveats, significant though they are, should not keep us from appreciatingthe degree to which individual rights—a salient feature of liberal democracy—played a prominent role in Catholic versions of a ‘new Germany’.35

In the very first post-war issue of theMKK, for example, human dignity(Menschenwu¨rde) was proclaimed to be one of the paper’s primary concernsin regard to educating its readership.36 Similarly, Cardinal Faulhaber entreatedhis listeners in November 1945 to change their ways so that spiritual life wouldbe redirected from the ‘mad ideas of theLebensborn’ to the ‘humane and Chris-

33 On a national level, see, for example, Moses Moskowitz, ‘The Germans and the Jews:Postwar Report’,Commentary, 1, 2 (1946), p. 11; Hannah Arendt,Besuch in Deutschland(Berlin, 1993 [1950]), p. 26; Hans Speier,From the Ashes of Disgrace. A Journal from Germany1945–1955(Amherst, Mass., 1981), pp. 40, 53; Elisabeth Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman:Memories of Germany’s “Crisis Years” and the West German National Identity’,AmericanHistorical ReviewApril 1996, p. 368. Robert Moeller seems to exaggerate the importance ofidentifying with the expellees from the East as well as with German soldiers in Soviet prisoncamps as the primary focus of ‘victimization’. Usually it was hunger, the loss of relatives anddestroyed homes that gave rise to perceptions of victimhood. Robert G. Moeller, ‘War Stories:The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’,American Historical Review,October 1996, p. 1013. For contemporary attempts to stress German suffering, see AndreasHillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung de deutschen Reiches und das Ende deseuropaischen Judentums(Berlin, 1986) and Georg Schwaiger, ‘Zusammenbruch und Wieder-aufbau’, in Schwaiger,Das Erzbistum Mu¨nchen und Freising im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert(Munich, 1989), p. 374. For Catholics in Munich and Bavaria, see ‘Vergelten oder Vergeben?’,MKK, 26 Jan. 1947; ‘Europa. Zum Beginn der Konferenz in Moskau’,MKK, 9 March 1947;‘Die Toten rufen! Zum Konferenzbeginn in London’,MKK, 23 Nov. 1947; ‘Hat Deutschlandzu wenig gesu¨hnt? Versuch einer religio¨sen Deutung des Zeitgeschehens’,MKK, 11 April 1965;Rudolf Morsey (ed.),Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, vol. XXVI:AktenKardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917–1945, Part II: 1935–1945. Bearbeitet von Ludwig Volk(Mainz, 1978), document 953, pp. 1049–50; IfZ, 720/1, ‘Bamberger Denkschrift’, p. 38;BHStAM, Abt. V, NL Pfeiffer 101, draft of speech by Anton Pfeiffer, 7 June 1947.

34 See, for example, Hans Woller,Gesellschaft und Politik in der amerikanischenBesatzungszone. Die Region Ansbach und Fu¨rth (Munich, 1986), p. 134; Blessing, ‘Deutsch-land’, p. 64; Heide Fehrenbach,Cinema in Democratizing Germany. Reconstructing NationalIdentity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. 93, 102, 128; Gisela Schwarze,Eine Regionim demokratischen Aufbau. Der Regierungsbezirk Mu¨nster 1945/6(Dusseldorf, 1984).

35 ‘In eigener Sache’,MKK, 7 Oct. 1945. See also IfZ, Annual Historical Reports, MilitaryGovernment for theLand of Bavaria, Fg 02/1: July–September 1947, ‘Religious Affairs’, p.148: ‘An encouraging note is also seen in the publication within the Catholic church press ofarticles on tolerance. An example of this is the editorial policy followed by thePassauerBistumsblattand theMuenchner Kirchenzeitung.’

36 I am comparing one aspect of democracy that Jewish, Catholic and Allied officials couldhave agreed on, namely the protection of individual human rights. Had I wished to compareother aspects, such as participatory elements, popular sovereignty or the separation of powers,I might have found differences that would not necessarily reflect on how Jews were treated afterthe Shoah. The consideration of popular sovereignty, for example, would inevitably lead backto the question of how the ‘popular will’ might be checked, i.e. how minority rights are tobe guaranteed.




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tian laws of humankind’.37 In subsequent years both the Catholic paper andMunich’s clergy went on to elucidate their commitment to individual rights. Inearly 1959, some months before events in Cologne would highlight antisemitictendencies within the population, a piece in theMKK asked whether NationalSocialism was still alive and well in Germany. Had Germans been more steepedin ‘natural rights theory’ as opposed to ‘legal positivism’, the author reasoned,had they embraced the idea that every human being, regardless of race andreligion, was equal before the law irrespective of the prevailing governmentor social system, Hitler would never have been able to triumph.38 JuliusDopfner, who succeeded Joseph Wendel as Cardinal of Munich-Freising in1961, was equally adamant in sustaining a creed that, while lacking referencesto ‘liberalism’, sounded very much like a traditional evocation of minorityrights against an all-powerful state. According to Do¨pfner,

democracy . . . is particularly well suited to protect the human dignity (Personenwu¨rde)of its citizens . . . Democracy is not allowed to be only a formal principle and system,in which majority rule decides on matters of right and wrong. The people united in ademocracy enjoys genuine democracy only if it agrees on fundamental values whichcannot be abrogated through a mere show of hands. To put it simply: One cannot voteas to whether a majority decision can nullify freedom of religion, freedom of the press. . . and the other great freedoms known to humankind.39

Now, as much as it would be fallacious to surmise that such notions stemmedfrom Locke, Kant or US directives on political correctness, we should nonethe-less note that not all of these conceptions of ‘natural rights’ were culled fromThomas Aquinas or neo-Thomist tracts.40 In CSU documents, for instance,there is ample evidence to allow for Catholicand other influences on demo-cratic theory. Early programmes, party propaganda and literature regularlyincluded sections on the significance of theRechtsstaat; on classic liberal free-doms; on the precedence of parliamentary procedure in Western democracies;on opposition to an omnipotent state; and on the dangers of collectivism in anage of the masses.41 In particular, theFragen der Zeit(FdZ), a CSU periodical

37 ‘Religiose und soziale Lebenswerte des Marienkultes. Ansprache des Kardinals auf demMarienplatz in Munchen, 18. November 1945’,MKK, 2 Dec. 1945.

38 ‘Lebt in Deutschland noch der Nationalsozialismus?’,MKK, 15 March 1959.39 Monacensia Library, Munich, O Mon 580: Julius Kardinal Do¨pfner, ‘Die Freiheit als Auf-

gabe und Gefahr unserer Zeit’, Silvesterpredigt 1962/63.40 For Christian appeals to natural law theory, see Otto Vollnhals, ‘Weltbedeutung der Demo-

kratie’, Der Bogen, 12 (1946); Arthur Fridolin Utz, ‘Die Krise im modernen Naturrechtsdenken’,Neue Ordnung, June 1951; Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, ‘Staatliches Unrecht unduberstaatliches Recht’,Neue Ordnung, December 1948; Hans Dieter Schelauske,PhilosophischeProbleme der Naturrechtsdiskussion in Deutschland. Ein U¨ berblick uber zwei Jahrzehnte: 1945–1965 (Cologne, 1968); Leo Strauss,Natural Rights and History(Chicago, 1953), pp. 163ff.

41 See, for example, IfZ, Dn 042: leaflet ‘Wa¨hler der Jungen Generation!’, Munich, 1949;leaflet ‘Das Grundsatz-Programm der Christlich-Sozialen Union in Bayern’, Munich, 30 June1946; leaflet ‘Die Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern—ein Spiegelbild echter Demokratie’,Munich, 1946; IfZ, Dn 042, pamphlet ‘Die Dreißig Punkte der Union’; IfZ, FH 56, Dokumentezur Fruhgeschichte der CSU, 1945–1948: letter CSU Munich, 1945/6, ‘Mu¨nchner und Mu¨nchne-rinnen!’; StAM, ZS 393/1, leaflet CSU Munich, ‘Christlich-soziale Union Mu¨nchen’, 5 Jan.1946; StAM, BUR 2066, Karl Scharnagl, ‘Trauerkundgebung im Krematorium Mu¨nchen, 4111Urnen der Insassen des KZ Dachau’, 5 Aug. 1945. For similar assertions from a party that




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founded in 1946, and theBayerische Rundschau(BR), a bi-monthly edited byone of the party’s pre-eminent leaders, Josef Mu¨ller, contained numerous art-icles in which personal liberty figured prominently.42 To take but two examples:Martell, a frequent contributor (under a pseudonym) to theBR, appropriated‘American’ language in early 1947, when he remarked that ‘freedom of speechis one of the four freedoms proclaimed by the United States without whichthe world cannot survive’. This freedom, Martell continued, was the ‘basis ofdemocracy’ and as such required special care; it was also the basis ofZivil-courage, a fragile good in every society, but especially so in the wake of dic-tatorship.43 F. K., by contrast, combined Anglo-Saxon traditions with Christianethics in an attempt to ground individual human rights in present-day Europe.As a means of circumventing the inherent weakness of positivist law, F. K.maintained, British and American thinkers had introduced norms of natural lawthat were prior to whatever legal precepts existed otherwise. Concomitantly,the ‘occidental-ChristianSittengesetz’, based as it was on an ultimateWertord-nung that men and women could appeal to, promoted the idea of ‘personality’,out of which arose the freedom to choose (i.e. conscience) as well as the knowl-edge that human beings were bound to each other.44

Much of this Catholic literature, then, assumed that professing ‘naturalrights’, whether out of reverence for Christian theology or in response to aworld-wide liberal democratic ethos,45 was crucialpreciselybecause of themurderous policies of the Nazi re´gime. In other words, Catholics in Munichand environs also acknowledged the relationship between human rights and thepast, just as their Jewish and American counterparts had done and continueddoing. Yet one inference, an inference that both Jews and US officials madetime and again, was largely missing: that liberal democracy after the SecondWorld War obliged those who had survived to combat Jew-hatred and to reflect

competed for Catholic votes in the immediate post-war years, see Bavarian Party material inIfZ, 048, Schriftenreihe der Bayernpartei, No. 1, ‘Politische Grundsatze der Bayern-Partei, Kreis-verband Oberbayern’, Munich, articles 2 and 4; as well asWeiß-blaue Hefte, Folge 5, 1949,‘Bayern muß Bayern bleiben! Programmatische Rede des Landesvorsitzenden der BayernparteiDr. J. Baumgartner auf der 2. Landesversammlung der Bayernpartei in Passau . . .’, 10/11 June1949. On the Bavarian Party, see Ilse Unger,Die Bayernpartei. Geschichte und Struktur 1945–1947 (Stuttgart, 1979) and Konstanze Wolf,CSU und Bayernpartei. Ein besonderes Konkur-renzverha¨ltnis. 1948–1960(Cologne, 1982).

42 Among many,FdZ: ‘Kulturpolitik der Union’, FdZ, 2 (April, 1946) ; ‘Ist das Demokratie’,FdZ, 3 (April, 1947);BR: ‘Demokratie—Schlagwort und Wirklichkeit’,BR, 1, 2 (May, 1946);‘Wege zu einer neuen Erziehung’,BR, 2 (January, 1947); ‘Die Paradoxie unseres demokratischenZustandes’,BR, 12 (June, 1947); ‘Die Demokratie als Ordungsprinzip’,BR, 1 (January, 1948).

43 ‘Die Freiheit der Rede’,BR, 6 (March, 1947).44 ‘Entscheidungen des Gewissens’,BR, 5 (July, 1946). For the primacy of divine law over

natural law in the Christian Middle Ages, see Ernst Cassirer,The Philosophy of the Enlighten-ment(Princeton, N.J., 1979), p. 241. See also J. B. Schneewind,The Invention of Autonomy. AHistory of Modern Moral Philosophy(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 17ff.

45 On the democratic ethos after the Second World War, see Giovanni Sartori,The Theory ofDemocracy Revisited. Part One. The Contemporary Debate(Chatham, 1987) and Samuel P.Huntington,The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century(Norman, Okla.,1993).




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on the causes of the Shoah; that there indeed was alogical nexus betweenliberal democratic government on the one hand, and treating the Jews both asvictims of German antisemitism and as fellow citizens, on the other. Theremainder of this section will be devoted to the question of why Catholicsseldom commented on this possible connection. It is hoped that by offeringanswers, we shall also trace continuity and change in Catholic perceptions ofthe ‘Jewish question’ in Germany.

* * *One way of looking at texts from the past is to approach them as examplesof context and political manoeuvre, so that the embeddedness of language isdistinguished from attempts to preserve and/or transcend existing discourse.46

Before we move on to add flesh to the bones of these concepts, let me hazarda few preliminary remarks: firstly, while the ‘Jewish question’ rarely if evermade the headlines, it was not absent from the minds of men and women inMunich. Unlike some scholars, therefore, I would want to emphasize the pres-ence of debate, however much ‘repression’ and ‘guilt’ precluded protractedquarrels of the sort found during the screening of the television soapHolocaustin the late 1970s or during theHistorikerstreit of the mid-1980s.47 Secondly,had I ventured to analyse Catholic philosemitism in post-war Munich, I wouldhave been forced to peek into every nook and cranny in order to discoverostensibly favourable expressed opinions on the Jews, and even then not muchwould have come of it. Hence even without reservations on the subject of post-war philosemitism, the sources do not warrant extensive comment on the matteras far as Munich’s Catholics from 1945 to 1965 are concerned.48 Thirdly, it

46 Defaming a Jew was not only a move embedded within a given context, but also oneconcerned with generating specific results, any of which was related to questions of power, ideo-logical commitment and special interests. By asking both how far actors were accepting orrepudiating the prevailing conventions of socio-political debate and how far their appeals wereacts intended to persuade, influence or denigrate certain groups or positions we are neitherenjoined to ‘empathize’ with historical figures, nor to ‘analyse’ these patients of the past, noreven to be intimately familiar with their biographies; rather, we are able to deduce their stand-point on the ‘Jewish question’ from the role of their language in the wider debate. For a fullerdiscussion of these theoretical issues, see James Tully (ed.),Meaning and Context. QuentinSkinner and his Critics(Cambridge and Oxford, 1988), especially pp. 8–9. For a deconstruc-tionist critique of these concepts, see Jonathan Culler,On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticismafter Structuralism(London, 1983), pp. 122–4, 129.

47 For two influential works that analyse silence and repression in post-war Germany, seeAlexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich,Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektivenVerhaltens (Munich, 1967) and Ralph Giordano,Die zweite Schuld, oder, Von der LastDeutscher zu sein(Hamburg, 1987). For works that challenge the notion that debate was absent,see Michael Schornstheimer,Die leuchtenden Augen der Frontsoldaten. National-sozialismusund Krieg in den Illustriertenromanen der fu¨nfziger Jahre(Berlin, 1995), p. 217 and HelmutDubiel, Geschichte, (Munich and Vienna, 1999), especially the conclusion.

48 I plan to deal with the imponderables of ‘philosemitism’ elsewhere. Frank Stern, whosework on post-war German–Jewish relations is in many ways the most searching and influential,has been instrumental in delineating a correlation between pro-Jewish statements and wishingto curry favour with Allied and international opinion. In his view, ‘philosemitism emerged asthe moral legitimization of the democratic character of the second German republic in the phaseof its establishment and the attainment of its sovereignty’. By repeatedly expounding their pro-




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should be apparent that Catholic politicians had an altogether different agendafrom Catholic clerics preaching to and writing for a specific audience. Theformer hoped to affect the electoral behaviour of both Catholics and Protestants,the latter hoped to keep the faithful within the fold. Fourthly, it is often neces-sary to differentiate between what Catholics saidqua Catholics and what theysaid qua Bavarian or German Catholics. Again, political discourse was muchmore mindful of local, regional and national sensibilities, while the church,though by no means oblivious to such considerations, was simultaneouslyconcerned with issues of dogma and the relationship betweenEcclesiaandSynagoge. Finally, change did occur, if slowly and in stages;Vergangenheits-bewaltigung, in whatever form, did not have to wait for clever historians tolament its absence.

Karl Scharnagl, lord mayor of Munich before 1933 and after 1945, addressedthe populace on a number of occasions after the war. An extant draft of onesuch speech, delivered on the first day of 1946, offers some insight into Schar-nagl’s perception of the public’s mood some eight months after the cessationof hostilities. Conjuring up the dying moments of Nazi Germany, the draftspeaks of the senseless and despicableEndkampfwhich had hung over the city.Yet some time after being written, the word ‘despicable’ was deleted. Next,conjuring up the prerequisites of peace, the draft speaks of cleansing the‘baneful legacy’ which National Socialism had brought on and for which allGermans had to answer. Yet, again some time after being written, the passage‘all Germans have to answer for’ was deleted.49 Over two years later, this timeduring the consecration of the new synagogue on 20 May 1947, Scharnagl

Jewish stance, post-war leaders came to appreciate that one’s democratic credentials were bestserved through this kind of rhetoric, thereby ‘instrumentalizing’ what Stern and others wouldcall philosemitism. Aside from the curious idea that these men and women were exploiting anotion that had already been discredited and that thus hardly required further abuse, this interpret-ation is not related to economic, social or cultural causation, but rather to the make-up of differ-ent mind-sets as they conceived philosemitism in the post-war Federal Republic. Yet I wouldargue that philosemitism in West Germany, laden as it is with innumerable associations in theaftermath of Auschwitz, is no longer viable as an object of research unless, firstly, it is definedin great detail as it applies to different groups, periods and locales; secondly, it is examinedwith recourse to psychological studies of prominent and less prominent figures, who, becausethey bequeathed sufficient biographical information, allow for a thorough investigation of thenature of pro-Jewish enunciations; and, thirdly, the historian refrains from approaching the sub-ject with an a priori view that elides the matter by assuming that philosemitism resemblesantisemitism in disguise. See especially Stern,Anfang, pp. 17 and 265. See also these works byStern: ‘From Overt Philosemitism to Discreet Antisemitism, and Beyond’, in Shmuel Almog(ed.),Antisemitism through the Ages(Oxford, 1988), p. 401; ‘The Historic Triangle: Occupiers,Germans and Jews in Postwar Germany’,Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fu¨r Deutsche Geschichte, 1990,pp. 67ff; ‘German–Jewish Relations in the Postwar Period: The Ambiguities of Antisemitic andPhilosemitic Discourse’, in Michal Y. Bodemann (ed.),Jews, Germans, Memory. Reconstruc-tions of Jewish Life in Germany(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), pp. 78ff.

49 StAM, BUR 2069, 1 Jan. 1946, New Year’s speech to Munich populace. For the same draftwith no deletions, see StAM, BUR 2066. See also his speech on concentration camp inmates,which criticizes those who denied the horrors in these camps, but at the same time concedesthat not every inmate was a ‘pitiful victim of political persecution’: StAM, BUR 2066, 15 July1945, ‘Unsere Stellungsnahme zu den KZ.-Haftlingen . . .’.




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called on his townspeople to ‘share in equal measure the joy of the membersof the IKG [Jewish community] upon the restoration of the house of God, justas we shared suffering with them in the past (wie wir damals das Leid mit ihnenteilten)’.50 While Scharnagl contended with possible reactions to his speech inthe first instance, he had two publics on his mind in the second. In his NewYear’s address he anticipated the depths of patriotism; yet religious ceremonydemanded solidarity with the Jewish victimsand the public at large. Bothexamples, in short, conformed to the general discourse of the time in that theyincluded disapproval of violence and aggression as well as the tendency tofocus on memory, whether ‘national’ or ‘parochial’.

In October 1946, Catholic politicians August Haußleiter and Ludwig Sporerengaged in a discussion on how to incorporate disapproval of radicalism intothe CSU programme. After pointing out the dangers of antisemitism and itspotentially anti-Christian thrust, Haußleiter proposed that the following para-graph be included in the Christian-Social platform: ‘Therefore we reject force-fully every form of racial hatred, and especially antisemitism, as a disgracefulrelapse into a bygone age of barbarism.’ Sporer, however, did not approve ofthis phrase. In a long response, he requested that the word ‘antisemitism’ beremoved since ‘we are not guilty and thus not compelled to apologize’. Hethen added that the ‘Jewish question’ was one that had not yet been disposedof. ‘I am no antisemite’, he continued, and he had not been ‘one in the pasteither’. But what irritated Sporer was the number of Jews in Bogenhausen (partof Munich) and other locations. Still more important, it appears, was the poss-ible need to speak out (for reasons of ‘self-preservation, dignity and self-respect’) against certain demands that might arise as a result of changes inpublic opinion. ‘We have to be careful now’, he concluded, ‘otherwise it soundslike prevailing taste (Zeitgeschmack). A time may come, when other thingsare fashionable again’. With no (recorded) reactions to his interjection, Sporerrecommended changing the clause, which then read: ‘Therefore we reject everyform of racial hatred.’ Gone was ‘antisemitism’; gone, too, were the words‘forcefully’, ‘disgraceful’, and ‘barbarism’.51

Strangely enough, however, the CSU pamphlet of November 1946, whichadumbrated the party’s thirty points, now included an insertion (following Spo-rer’s altered phrase) according to which ‘every form of antisemitism is neces-sarily directed against the origins and essence of Christianity’.52 It goes withoutsaying that this addition was neither meant to please the Americans (who werenot party to these debates), nor to score points with the Christian-Social con-

50 Juliane Wetzel,Judisches Leben in Mu¨nchen 1945–1951. Durchgangsstation oder Wieder-aufbau?(Munich, 1987), p. 21.

51 Fait and Mintzel,Die CSU 1945–1948. Protokolle, vol. I, pp. 711, 740–1.52 IfZ, Dn 042, ‘Die Dreißig Punkte der Union’. For similar examples of CSU opposition to

racism, see IfZ, FH 56, CSU Mu¨nchen, ‘Rundschreiben’;ibid., CSU, ‘Programm der Christlich-Sozialen Union’; StAM, BUR 2069, 22 May 1946, speech by Scharnagl, ‘Ein Jahr Wieder-aufbau’.




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stituency. Rather, it revealed the extent to which much of the language onthe ‘Jewish question’ in the post-war years, including Sporer’s remarks, hisopponents’ remarks, and remarks coming from the church and the generalpublic, tried to steer clear between the Scylla of excessive contrition and theCharybdis of utter silence. From the point of view of many Catholics inMunich, one way of achieving this compromise was to retain older interpretationsof antisemitism, while not moving beyond what was deemed tolerable in the con-text of Germansuffering. Older interpretations included, above all, the rejectionof violent Radauantisemitismus, a form of rowdy behaviour that usuallyinvolved the destruction of life and property; resistance to racist ideas inasmuchas they threatened the foundations of Catholic belief; and the insistence thatJew-hatred was often the direct outcome offoreign Jews inhabiting the land,Jews whose difference was also overt in their economic proclivities. All threeelements can be construed as residues from the Weimar era: no racisma laStreicher, no anti-Catholicisma la Rosenberg and Ludendorff, and no immi-gration of corrosive, alien, and radicalOstjuden.53

Let us return to Karl Scharnagl one last time. In April 1949 Munich’s formerlord mayor (he had been succeeded in 1948 by the Social Democrat ThomasWimmer) visited the United States, when he gave an interview to theVoiceof America. Amongst the questions posed, one referred to the growing influenceof antisemitism in Bavaria. Scharnagl confessed that no doubt ‘there [had] beena certain increase in antisemitic feeling’. It differed, however, ‘considerablyfrom the rabid antisemitism practised under Hitler, which was bent on the per-secution and extermination of Jewry for definitely racial reasons’. The ‘underly-ing motives’ of present-day antisemitism, so Scharnagl opined, were ‘economicdissatisfaction’ which had its roots ‘in the fact that large numbers of Jewsreside[d] in Germany and Bavaria with no intention of taking up permanentresidence or becoming an integral part of [the] German economy but [were]merely waiting to emigrate’. This situation in turn gave rise ‘to friction betweenthe native population and the Jewish refugees’.54 Scharnagl was not alone in

53 On pre-1933 Catholic languagevis-a-vis antisemitism, see Kauders,German Politics and theJews, with further bibliographical references; Walter Hannot,Die Judenfrage in der katholischenTagespresse Deutschlands und O¨ sterreichs 1923–1933(Mainz, 1990); Olaf Blaschke,Katholi-zismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich(Gottingen, 1997); Christiane Reuter,‘Graue Eminenz der bayerischen Politik’. Eine politische Biographie Anton Pfeiffers (1888–1957) (Munich, 1987), p. 54; AEM, 8 Theol. 3378/1, Faulhaber sermon of 1925, ‘DeutschesEhrgefuhl und katholisches Gewissen’; on Faulhaber’s language in 1933, see AEM, 8o Hom.Conv. III, ‘Christentum und Germanentum. Silvesterpredigt in St. Michael zu Mu¨nchen am 31.Dezember 1933’; BHStAM, NL Pfeiffer 325, ‘Die Judenfrage’.

54 BHStAM, OMGBY Landdirector, 13/130–2/6 Interview with David Burger, 14 April 1949.On other questionable comments by Scharnagl, see Klaus-Dietmar Henke and Hans Woller,Lehrjahre der CSU. Eine Nachkriegspartei im Spiegel vertraulicher Berichte an die amerikan-ische Militarregierung (Stuttgart, 1984), p. 57.




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intimating a connection between Jewish DPs and popular disenchantment.55 ACSU leaflet from Munich, for example, complained about racketeers(Schiebergestalten) and black market hyenas (Schwarzmarkthya¨nen),56 a com-plaint echoed by an unnamed CSU politician who held that DPs were a poten-tial ‘source of infection’ (Ansteckungsherd) for upright German citizens andthe cause of ‘a very dangerous and regrettable new wave of antisemitism’.57

The infamous Mo¨hlstraße in Munich, where black marketeers and small shop-keepers worked side by side, also evoked the wrath of many a citizen.58

Yet what many of these statements wished to imply, namely that a ‘new’antisemitism was raising its ugly head, ignored the continuity which existedbetween pre-1933 and post-1945 rhetoric on the ‘Jewish question’.59 Thus, amember of the US Radio Section Control Command in Munich, surely unawareof how pertinent some of his comments turned out to be in retrospect, indicatedthat antisemitism was making itself felt again towards the end of 1945:

There are rumors circulating to the effect that ‘thousands of Eastern Jews (especiallyopprobrious to anti-Semites in Germany) are going to be moved into Munich’ . . . TheGerman predilection to seek a scapegoat—plus the years of Goebbels’s propaganda—naturally cannot be overcome within a brief period of only several months, and meas-ure[s] which tend to re-stimulate anti-Semitism should at least be carefully weighedbefore being put into effect.’60

55 On DPs in Munich and environs, see Wetzel,Judisches Leben in Mu¨nchen; AngelikaKonigseder and Juliane Wetzel,Lebensmut im Wartesaal. Die ju¨dischen DPs (DisplacedPersons) im Nachkriegsdeutschland(Frankfurt/Main, 1994). On reactions to the DPs, see RonaldWebster, ‘American Relief and Jews in Germany, 1945–1960’,Leo Baeck Institute Year Book(LBIYB), 1993, p. 296 and Constantin Goschler, ‘The Attitude towards Jews in Bavaria afterthe Second World War’,LBIYB, 1991, pp. 448–9. On US hostility towards the DPs, see CentralArchives for the History of the Jewish People, Klausner Archives, III and VII; AJJDC, Jerusa-lem, Geneva I, 6A/2, C 45.069.

56 StAM, ZS, CSU Munich, December 1946, ‘Hunger, Not und Elend . . .’57 ACSP, NL Muller, 297, report signed ‘Ham.’, 14 April 1947 ‘Zur Frage der DP’s’. On

government documents dealing with DPs and various centres of black-market activity, seeBHStAM, StK 113798, letter from Wilhelm Hoegner to Aumer of 18 Feb. 1946;ibid., letterfrom Landrat Dr Kessler to Hoegner of 13 March 1948; Staatsarchiv Mu¨nchen, Polizeipra¨sidiumOberbayern, 616, letter from Landespolizei Landkreis Alto¨tting to Landespolizei Oberbayern of14 Nov. 1947;ibid, letters from Bezirksinspektion Starnberg, 19 Oct. 1948, BezirksinspektionMunchen-Land, 26 July 1948, Bezirksinspektion Traunstein, 5 July 1948; StAM, BUR 2506and 2511, letters from the police president of Munich, Franz Xaver Pitzer, to the district governorand lord mayor.

58 On the notoriety of the street, see Werner Bergmann,Antisemitismus in o¨ffentlichen Kon-flikten. Kollektives Lernen in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik 1949–1989(Frankfurt/Main, 1997), p. 158, fn. 234 and Willibald Karl,Die Mohlstraße. Keine Straße wiejede andere(Munich, 1998).

59 On the theme of a ‘new’ antisemitism, see CZA, C2 755, comments by the vice-chancellorof Frankfurt University, Professor Franz Bo¨hm, to Dr Gerhard Jacoby, 5 June 1950, p. 4; BR,Historisches Archiv, HF 13584, Ernst Landau on the Bad Reichenhall Conference of LiberatedJews in the American Zone of Occupation, 8 March 1947, ‘Antisemitismus-auf-Gummisohlen’;Bernhard Wasserstein,Vanishing Diaspora. The Jews in Europe since 1945(London, 1997),p. 164.

60 BR, Historisches Archiv, RV/24.0, Radio Section Control Command, 17 Dec. 1945, ‘RecentLiving Quarters Requisitioning in Munich and Concomitant Psychological Effects upon the Pub-lic’, p. 7.




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The Catholic journalist F. K. agreed with this assessment, using slightly differ-ent terms. In a lead article on antisemitism in theBayerische RundschauofFebruary 1947, he described the atmosphere after the war as being inimical toJew-hatred, following widespread admission that many Germans, by lookingaway, had been partially responsible for the Holocaust. These developmentsnotwithstanding, antisemitism had not disappeared, and F. K. now tendered theview that the large number of foreign Jews in Bavaria was to blame. Unlikethe tiny remnant of local Jews, ‘whose existence could never generate newantisemitism’, those who had been repatriated from the east, some of whommade no bones about their ‘justifiable resentment’ towards the ‘entire Germanpopulation’, prevented many of his compatriots from appreciating the natureof antisemitism as an ‘intellectual problem’ (geistiges Problem).61 Yet, whereasthe US official mentioned the history of anti-Ostjudensentiment in his analysisof the situation, his opposite, a Catholic journalist, posited the straightforwardlink between economic instability and the influx of eastern Jewish masses onthe one hand, and the inability to vanquish antisemitism on the other.62 LikeKarl Scharnagl and Ludwig Sporer, F. K. took for granted the spontaneousreaction of most Germans, whose natural aversion to foreign Jews was appar-ently unrelated to their equally spontaneous acceptance of German Jews. Inspite of his recognition that antisemitism still presented an ‘intellectual prob-lem’, then, he did not ascribe the behaviour of many in Munich and elsewhereto the ‘German predilection to seek a scapegoat’, nor to a well-establishedanimosity towardsOstjuden, nor even to Goebbels’s propaganda. Instead, F. K.sought to construe the ‘new wave’ of Jew-hatred as a phenomenon whoseunderlying reasons were clear cut and explicable from a post-1945 perspectiveonly, thereby disclosing the degree to which Catholics unwittingly subscribedto earlier positions on the ‘Jewish question’.63

61 ‘Antisemitismus. Gefahren und Aufgaben’,BR, 3 (February, 1947).62 On eastern Jews and antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, see Kauders,German Politics

and the Jews; Trude Maurer,Die Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918–1933(Hamburg, 1986); LudgerHeid, Maloche—nicht Mildta¨tigkeit. Ostjudische Arbeiter in Deutschland 1914–1923(Hildesheim, 1995); Donald L. Niewyk,The Jews in the Weimar Republic(Manchester, 1980).

63 One might add that some ‘German’ Jews in Munich also remained caught up in the rhetoricof a bygone age when they insisted that eastern Jewish victims of the Holocaust be deniedaccess to positions of power in the post-war community. The language of the Weimar Republic,even pre-1914 perceptions of the so-calledOstjude, made it difficult for many to accept thelessons of Auschwitz. See BHStAM, MInn 80938, Bayerisches Hilfswerk (Siegfried Lewin,Gescha¨ftsfuhrer), letter to Bay. Staatsministerium des Innern, 30 Oct. 1952, Anhang ‘WelcheBedenken bestehen gegen die Betreuung der Glaubensjuden durch die Israelitische Kultus-gemeinde Mu¨nchen?’. See also letter of 24 Jan. 1952 by Karl Hefter, ‘Ju¨dische Gemeinde,Munchen und das dort bestehende Wohlfahrtsamt’; BHStAM, MK 49566, letter from LucianKozminski, July 1956, ‘An alle Glaubensgenossen in der Bundesrepublik!’;ibid., ‘Rund-schreiben der Kultusgemeinde’, 24 Jan. 58;ibid., ‘Rundschreiben der Kultusgemeinde’, 20 June1958; BHStAM, MK 49565, letter from Richard Steindecker of 9 Sept. 1951. For secondaryliterature, see Peter L. Mu¨nch, ‘Zwischen “Liquidation” und Wiederaufbau’. Die deutschenJuden, der Staat Israel und die internationalen ju¨dischen Organisationen in der Phase der Wieder-gutmachungsverhandlungen’,Historische Mitteilungen, 1 (1997), pp. 81–111, especially p. 102,and Michael Brenner, ‘East European and German Jews in Postwar Germany, 1945–50’, inBodemann (ed.),Jews, Germans, Memory, pp. 49–63.




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In short, I would argue that many Catholics in Munich were unwilling tomake the connection between liberal democratic values and fighting anti-semitism because, firstly, they had internalized an image of the Jews that sawthem not as victims but as wrongdoers; secondly, they had come out of thewar with the impression thatthey had suffered immeasurably, as Catholicsunder a hostile and godless re´gime,64 and as Germans under a barrage of bombsand more; and thirdly, they had, in the process of appropriatingvolkischstereo-types in the Weimar Republic and becoming part of the dissociation that leftNazi Germany virtually without Jews, acquiesced in the persuasion that Germ-ans and Jews were two separate entities and that therefore each group’s memorywas detached from the other’s. Conversely, many Catholicsdid acknowledgethe impact Hitler’s crimes had had on post-war redefinitions of society. In thefirst ten or so years after 1945, however, coming to terms with crimes against‘liberal democratic’ valuesqua crimes against the Jews was for the mostpart missing.

* * *In this final section of the paper, I shall once more attend to the issue ofcontinuity in Catholic thinking on the Jews. However, given that there is morematerial on the ‘Jewish question’ from theMunchner Katholische Kirchen-zeitungand other church sources than from the CSU (particularly with respectto the 1950s and 1960s, at which time the party was anyway turning into aVolksparteithat attracted Protestant politicians and voters), I will also be ableto examine the changes which occurred in the two decades after the SecondWorld War, specifically in terms of theological discourse on the ‘Jewishquestion’.

For a start, one element divorcing church pronouncements from politicallanguage in the immediate post-war period is the accentuation on Christian asopposed to ‘German–Jewish’ relations. Cardinal Faulhaber’s pastoral letter ofFebruary 1946, for example, contained many passages that touched on churchhistory as well as Christian responses to Jewish suffering, never once implyingthat Germans had been implicated both as victims and as perpetrators. Faul-haber compared the arrests of Jews with the torments Christians had enduredat the time of the catacombs. As then, so too during the Third Reich suchinhumanity was the work of ‘demons from hell’. But at the same time, evenas Jews were being shipped off to Theresienstadt, ‘brave love’ enabled somecitizens to provide these wretched creatures with a warm blanket or two. The

64 See Kauders,German Politics and the Jews; Hannot,Die Judenfrage; Blaschke,Katholi-zismusabove. A good example of this approach can be detected in the words of StadtpfarrerDr Muhler, himself a former inmate of Dachau concentration camp. On the occasion of the tenthanniversary ofKristallnacht, he confided in Dr Julius Spanier, head of the local Jewish com-munity, that up until November 1938 it had still been possible to call antisemitism a ‘politicalmatter’ (politische Angelegenheit). After that, however, it ‘became clear’ that ‘houses of Godwere involved’. ‘And the Jewish house of God’, he continued, ‘is a house of God, a house ofprayer. There too one prays to the one and true God.’ BR, Schallarchiv, Dok. 13 152, StadtpfarrerDr Muhler onKristallnacht, 6 Nov. 48. See also ‘Um die Gestalt Pius XII’,MKK, 5 May 1963.




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transports to the east, Faulhaber concluded, had been orchestrated with no ‘pre-liminary examination of personal guilt’, simply on the grounds of race, andtherefore had also affected Christian ‘non-Aryans’, who, the Cardinal was wontto recall, had been baptized in the name of Christ.65 Similarly, a number ofarticles in theMKK intimated that Christians had been the only ones intent onsaving Jews from Hitler’s clutches. In October 1945, a piece entitled ‘Judendanken Katholiken’ described how the Jewish community of Roermond, Hol-land had collected 180 pounds sterling for the restoration of various churchesin a gesture of gratitude for the help they had received from the Limburgprovince clergy.66 One month later, the paper reported on a papal receptiongranted to the head of the World Jewish Congress, ‘who in the name of theorganization of Jewish communities’ thanked the Catholic church for its effec-tive aid to the Jewish populations of wartime Europe.67 In case that was notenough, theMKK proclaimed in spring 1947 that ‘one may establish withoutexaggeration that nearly the total remnant of Israel located in the liberatedcountries—however small that number might be—owed its survival to Christians’,whose acts showed them ‘worthy before the God of Israel and his Messiah, aswell as before world history’.68

Various articles in subsequent years dealt with the theological relationshipbetween Christians and Jews as against the heroic feats of individual Christians.It is here, again, that continuity outweighed change, at least in the first decadeafter the war. Lorenz Freiberger, editor of theMKK, invoked familiar notionsin early 1948 when he wrote about the Jews as being forever ‘inscribed in thebooks of our holy liturgy’. ‘To us you are the chosen people . . . and at thesame time the people for whom Christ wept. You are the gospel’s shadow (derSchatten des Evangeliums).’ And, as if to elucidate this point, Freibergerrecalled the denial of Jesus’s divinity, which was the ‘lost hour of your history’.Instead of grace and the gospel, ‘the rigidity of the law and Talmud’ set in.Freiberger went even further, however, in offering the following parable ofJewish history: ‘Ghetto and gold and the stake and bank palaces and gas ovensand hallelujah are the way-stations of your past.’ The age-old curse fromMatthew 27:25 (‘His blood be on us and on our children’), interpreted as aresponse to pride in the face of patent truth, was also divulged.69 In December1949, theMKK treated Edith Stein’s conversion to Christianity in much thesame way, for any break with Judaism meant separation from the Jewish tribe(Sippengemeinschaft), meant a radical parting with a form of existence thatcompletely negated Christ (der ganzen Christus verneinenden Daseinsform des

65 ‘Hirtenbrief Fastenzeit 1946’,Amtsblatt fu¨r die Erzdiozese Mu¨nchen und Freising, 2 (1946).66 MKK, 14 Oct. 1945.67 ‘Notizen’, MKK, 25 Nov. 1945 . See also ‘Pius XII empfing ehemalige KZ.-Insassen’,MKK,

6 Jan. 1946.68 ‘Christen und Juden’,MKK, 27 April 1947.69 ‘Brief eines Christen an die Juden’,MKK, 25 April 1948. See also ‘Wenn Du es doch

erkannt hattest’,MKK, 18 July 1948.




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Judentums).70 Even those early discussions which rejected antisemitism did soin conjunction with Christian teachings. On the occasion of ‘BrotherhoodWeek’ in March 1954, Professor Johann Michl spoke to the community of StBenno in Munich about early Christian documents on the Jews. According totheKirchenzeitung, Michl maintained that Jew-hatred had no foundation in theNew Testament, though he refused to make concessions to the prevailingZeit-geist by compromising on matters of truth (konjunkturbedingte Abstriche).71

Likewise, following a meeting of the local Society for Christian–Jewish Co-operation, the paper announced that no Christian document had ever accusedthe Jews of deicide; collective responsibility for the death of Jesus, moreover,could never be extrapolated from the deeds of a minority. Yet the author thenwent on to list a number of common tenets, amongst them the image of thewandering Jew, the Augustinian doctrine of the Jews’ misery bearing witnessto Christian truth, and the certainty that it was only a question of time beforethe Jews, too, would experience divine illumination.72

It is in the early 1960s, however, that more and more commentaries on the‘Jewish question’ move away from these themes to focus on mutual respect andunderstanding. The theologian Heinrich Spaemann, for example, condemnedChristians who refused to grasp that ‘Jesus would have been crucified in anypeople’, and that by handing him over to the Romans, the Jews had acted asa proxy, representing the sins of all of humanity. Although Spaemann too spokeof the ‘blanket covering their hearts’, he stressed that it was up to Christiansto embrace and love the Jews as their ‘older brothers’ in the name of God.73

In March 1963, Professor Heinrich Fries of Munich University conveyed themessage of contemporary Christian–Jewish dialogue being marked by unityrather than dissent, since both Christians and Jews were ‘advocates of brother-hood in the world’, whose calling derived from the ‘knowledge of God asfather of all human beings’.74 Similar words came from Father Legault. In alonger contribution entitled ‘We and the Jews’, the clergyman examined thegoings-on in Rome, where a special secretariat at the Vatican was busyreformulating the church’s positionvis-a-visthe Jews. Legault welcomed thesemoves as a step in the right direction. Paraphrasing the text of Cardinal Bea,he asserted that all the nations had been guilty of Christ’s death, and that indi-vidual Jews calling for Jesus’s execution in Roman times did not justify con-

70 ‘Geschichte einer ju¨dischen Bekehrung . . .’,MKK, 11 Dec. 1949.71 ‘Die Woche der Bru¨derlichkeit’, MKK, 28 March 1954. This annual event had been estab-

lished by the Societies for Christian–Jewish Co-operation (Gesellschaften fu¨r Christlich-judische Zusammenarbeit).

72 ‘Das geheimnisvolle Volk. Gedanken aus der Tagung der Gesellschaft fu¨r christlich-judischeZusammenarbeit im Kloster Scha¨ftlarn’, MKK, 5 Nov. 1955. See also ‘Wo Abraham seinenBrunnen grub’,MKK, 7 Feb. 1960; ‘Warum Schweinefleisch fu¨r uns nicht verboten ist?’,MKK,1 May 1960; ‘Gebet fu¨r die ermordeten Juden und ihre Verfolger’,Amtsblatt fu¨r die ErzdiozeseMunchen und Freising, 7 (1961).

73 ‘Das Zeichen Israel’,MKK, 5 Aug. 1962.74 ‘Christlich-judisches Gesprach dient der Einheit’,MKK, 24 March 1963.




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demning the Jews of today. He then advised priests and catechists to preachrespect and compassion for a people who gave birth to Christianity’s spiritualforebears and to the Son of Man.75 Finally, in March 1965 theKirchenzeitungran a piece on the nature of brotherhood, which gave an overview of recentdevelopments in the area of Jewish–Gentile relations:

Since the first Brotherhood Weeks, which were still under the impact of recent eventsand at first tended to strive for reconciliation between German people and racially Jewishpeople in the spirit of both Testaments, serious change has set in. Words of friendship,of mutual respect, of openness towards the undeniably alien (den an sich Fremden), thewholly different human being are being heard everywhere, in the political realm, in thereligious realm.76

What is of interest in this last quote also applies to other statements byCatholics onGerman-Jewish contrariety. Like members of the CSU, Mun-ich’s Catholic clergy was part of a discourse that separated Germans fromJews even as it distanced itself from National Socialist ideology. In many anaccount on the Shoah, strong words were used in decrying the crimes of theThird Reich, some of which appeared as early as the late 1950s, well beforetrials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt attracted considerable media attention.77 TheMKK, for example, published a number of articles devoted toVergangenheits-bewaltigung, detailing the ‘monstrosities’ of mass murder against the Jewsof Europe and showing no mercy towards those who had committed theseatrocities.78 Yet at the same time, Freiberger and others betrayed animpatience with supposedly incessant demands on national memory. Hencethey repeatedly insisted that everyone had a right to make political mistakes(politischer Irrtum); that most Germans had denounced National Socialism;that talk of an ‘unmastered’ past was unjustified and corresponded to the‘false Christian sentimentality’ of a half-naked Mary Magdalene weeping ‘infront of her cave of penance’ (Bußerinnenho¨hle); and thatVergangenheitsbe-waltigung, which was ‘lumped into the coffee every morning, cooked intothe soup every mid-day, and spread onto the sandwich every evening’, ham-

75 ‘Wir und die Juden’,MKK, 1 Dec. 1963.76 ‘Wo die Bruderlichkeit beginnt’,MKK, 14 March 1965. It should be added, however, that

some Catholics (and possibly many, had they published their views) did not easily relinquishhope that the Jews would eventually see the light. See, for example, ‘Feigheit vor dem Feind?Das Schicksal der Konzilserkla¨rung uber die Juden’,MKK, 22 Oct. 1965.

77 The Eichmann trial began in mid-1961; the Auschwitz trials in late 1963. For accounts ofand reactions to both, see, for example, Ju¨rgen Wilke et al., Holocaust und NS-Prozesse. DiePresseberichterstattung in Israel und Deutschland zwischen Abneigung und Abwehr(Cologne,Vienna and Weimar, 1995); Thomas Wandres and Gerhard Werle,Auschwitz vor Gericht.Volkermord und bundesdeutsche Strafjustiz(Munich, 1995); Jeffrey Herf,Divided Memory. TheNazi Past in the Two Germany’s(Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1997).

78 See, for example, ‘Schaftstiefel und germanische Hormone’,MKK, 11 Feb. 1958; ‘Dasdeutsche Volk und der Nazismus’,MKK, 15 Feb. 1959; ‘Begegnung mit Israel’,MKK, 24 Jan.1960; ‘Anti . . . ablegen!’,MKK, 20 March 1960; ‘Gebet und ta¨tige Suhne. Erklarung der deut-schen Bischo¨fe zum Eichmann-Prozeß’,MKK, 18 June 1961; ‘Die mo¨rderische Idee’,MKK, 18June 1961; ‘Israel, Nasser und Raketen’,MKK, 31 March 1963.




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pered efforts to ‘master’ the future.79 In an overview of the subject writtenin January 1965, Freiberger warned that an endless debate on National Social-ism could have the opposite effect and would lead some to question othernations’ crimes against Germans. In fact, his country had braved the ‘terribleconsequences of Hitler’s re´gime and the years of revenge’ much better thanthe fall of the monarchy (Kaiserherrlichkeit) in 1918. ‘Excluding the Jews’,Freiberger argued, Germans had suffered most from the repercussions of Nazifrenzy. It was therefore time to acknowledge what had been achieved and toconquer what lay ahead.80

On a conscious intellectual level, then, many Catholic clerics in Munich sawthemselves as separate from the Jewsin the aftermath of coming to terms withthe past: that is, initially, by establishing a Christian–Jewish dichotomy; next,by accepting the Jew as the ‘other’; and, finally, by treating German memoryas discrete from Jewish memory. The first move was conventional and notconfined to Germany; the second was novel and indicated a radical break withthe past; the third was widespread and not unique to Catholics. Furthermore,while members of the CSU refrained from articulating theological notions ofChristian–Jewish dissimilarity, they often displayed political ideas of an equallytraditional complexion, as shown above. They, too, solicitedGermanmemorywhen dismissing endless efforts to practiseVergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung at theexpense of future prosperity.81 The difference between both Catholic groupslay in their specific roles in post-war Munich: while clerical language reflectedgeneral discourse, it was also able to transcend that discourse, owing to itsreflective, non-competitive character. The CSU, by contrast, was less fit tostretch available norms of behaviour, owing to itspolitical, competitive charac-ter. Some Catholics, therefore, despite holding fast to many common sureties,resembled those powers in the public sphere, such as the press, which increas-ingly came to contemplate the Holocaust as an assault on individual human

79 ‘Ist politische Bekehrung gestattet?’,MKK, 28 Feb. 1960; ‘Gedanken eines jungenDeutschen zu dem Film “Exodus”’,MKK, 22 Oct. 1961; ‘Verfa¨lschung des Zeitgeschehens. ZuHochuths Drama’,MKK, 1 March 1964; ‘Hat Deutschland zu wenig gesu¨hnt? Versuch einerreligiosen Deutung des Zeitgeschehens’,MKK, 11 April 1965.

80 ‘Bewaltigung der Vergangenheit. Ein Ru¨ckblick in die letzten 20 Jahre’,MKK, 24 Jan. 1965.On distinguishing between Germans and National Socialists, see BR, Schallarchiv, Dok. 20 526–27, Cardinal Do¨pfner’s speech at Dachau, May 1965, which became much more forceful, evenbitter when he ranted about current indifference towards ‘destructive forces’ in works of litera-ture and the cinema.

81 See, for example, IfZ, Dn 042, Broschu¨ren, Werbematerial, Plakate, p. 9, speech by Franz-Josef Strauss, 1 Nov. 1965, ‘Zur außenpolitischen Lage der Bundesrepublik’. For socio-philosophical support of this case, see Hermann Lu¨bbe, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschenNachkriegsbewußtsein’,Historische Zeitschrift, 3 (1983), pp. 583–4; and Friedrich Nietzsche,Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fu¨r das Leben(Frankfurt/Main, 1988 [1874]), pp. 12ff.




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rights.82 This transformation did not mean, however, that ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’were no longer perceived as being separate; both sides tended to think so, andin this respect not much may have changed.

It may be claimed, therefore, that what some people within the Catholicestablishment set in motion in the late 1950s, namely the realization thatliberal democratic values demanded a fresh look at the Holocaust as wellthe acceptance(as opposed to the denial) of Jews as being ‘other’, contrib-uted both to greater tolerance and to the cementation of ‘German–Jewish’irreconcilability. Yet this irreconcilability was no longer related to pre-1933modes of thought whose monism disparaged co-existence. Rather, it was onewhose acceptance by Catholics owed much to the pluralism of West Germany’semerging liberal democracy.

82 On the thesis that the UlmEinsatzgruppentrials (1958), along with other events of the late1950s and early 1960s, brought about a sea change, see Herf,Memory, pp. 268, 390–1; PaulPassauer, ‘NS-Prozesse und historische Forschung’,Tribune. Zeitschrift zum Versta¨ndnis desJudentums, 2 (1995), p. 122; A. J. Nicholls,The Bonn Republic. West German Democracy,1945–1990(London and New York, 1997), p. 191. AJJDC, Geneva I, SLH Files, Country Report1961: ‘The Eichmann trial was very well covered by the press and particularly by television. Itwas an eye opener for many Germans, particularly the young.’




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