Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

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Brandon Bloch

Reinventing Protestant Germany

Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

Brandon Bloch

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English

Harvard University Press
05 August 2025

Protestantism & Protestant Churches

Series: Harvard Historical Studies

A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for their earlier complicity with Nazism.

Germany's Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For many Protestant leaders, pastors, and activists, national and religious revival were one and the same. Even those who opposed the regime tended toward antidemocratic attitudes. By the 1950s, however, Church leaders in West Germany had repositioned themselves as prominent advocates for constitutional democracy and human rights.

Brandon Bloch reveals how this remarkable ideological shift came to pass, following the cohort of theologians, pastors, and lay intellectuals who spearheaded the postwar transformation of their church. Born around the turn of the twentieth century, these individuals came of age amid the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and were easily swayed to complicity with the Third Reich. They accommodated the state in hopes of protecting the Church's independence from it, but they also embraced the Nazi regime's antisemitic and anticommunist platform. After the war, under the pressures of Allied occupation, these Protestant intellectuals and their heirs creatively reimagined their tradition as a fount of democratic and humanitarian values. But while they campaigned for family law reform, conscientious objection to military service, and the protection of basic rights, they also promoted a narrative of Christian anti-Nazi resistance that whitewashed the Church's complicity in dictatorship and genocide.

Examining the sources and limits of democratic transformation, Reinventing Protestant Germany sheds new light on the development of postwar European politics and the power of national myths.

By: Brandon Bloch
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 783g
ISBN: 9780674295438
ISBN 10: 0674295439
Series: Harvard Historical Studies
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 05 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Reviews for Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy

Brandon Bloch offers compelling new insights into the ideological transformation of twentieth-century Protestantism, a process as essential to the establishment of West German democracy as it was complex and contradictory. By tracing Protestants' distinctive regard for the state, postwar denial of support for Nazism, and internal dissension, Bloch expertly elucidates the relationship of Christianity to nationalism in a country where their entanglement facilitated genocide. -- Maria D. Mitchell, author of The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany Brandon Bloch’s carefully argued book illuminates the central role of Protestant pastors and theologians in twentieth-century German politics, from fervent nationalists to apologists for dictatorship, from central figures in the post-1945 peace movement to defenders of democracy. This volume reveals like no other the contradictions and continuities that defined these intellectuals so central to Germany’s turbulent modern history. -- Peter C. Caldwell, author of Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989 An astonishing story, deeply researched and lucidly argued. Brandon Bloch reveals how a generation of German Protestant pastors and lay intellectuals, steeped in a tradition of illiberal nationalism and unwilling to confront their Church’s complicity with Nazism, nevertheless refashioned themselves as champions of West German democracy after the war. Masterfully reconstructing the legal, ideological, and moral debates that nurtured this transformation, he shows that Protestant contributions have left a complicated legacy for German society today. -- Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism