GERMAN LESSONS

Imagined intersections of the church, family and personal histories sketched below lie behind German Lessons.

Church History

Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in March 1939, is a central figure in the relationship between the Catholic Church and National Socialism.

During the period of the Nazis’ rise to and consolidation of power in the 1930s, Pacelli was Cardinal Secretary of State, responsible for the Vatican’s dealings with foreign states. He assumed this role after an extended period in Germany, where he was Papal Nuncio (Vatican ambassador, at first to Bavaria and then to Germany as a whole) from 1917 to 1929.

It is Pacelli’s role as Pope during the Second World War that has drawn the most critical attention. Beginning with Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play Der Stellvertreter: Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Representative: a Christian tragedy), Pacelli’s response to the Holocaust has been subjected to trenchant criticism. Books such as John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (see note [1]) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair argue that Pacelli failed in his moral duty to defend the Jews of Europe from mass murder. A more sympathetic, but still critical, treatment of Pacelli is provided by Paul O’Shea in A Cross Too Heavy: Pope Pius XII and the Jews of Europe, while Ronald J. Rychlak’s Hitler, the War, and the Pope is an attempt to refute many of the accusations brought against Pacelli. An assessment from a Jewish perspective can be found on Yad Vashem.

On 4 March 2019 Pope Francis announced that, in the interests of objective historical analysis, the Vatican Archives on the Pontificate of Pius XII would be opened on 2 March 2020, eight years ahead of schedule (reference). For an initial report on the newly opened archives, see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-find-evidence-pope-pius-xii-ignored-reports-holocaust-180974795/.

The Vatican’s response to the Holocaust understandably stands at the centre of the criticisms of its stance towards National Socialism. However, the Church’s actions leading up to and immediately following the Nazis’ accession to power in 1933 are also of significant interest. It is this early period of Church-Nazi relations that forms the historical background to German Lessons.

Prior to March 1933 the Church was a vigorous opponent of National Socialism. Hitler feared this opposition, and once in office made overcoming it one of his highest priorities. He raised with Church representatives the prospect of a concordat (a legal agreement specifying the rights of the Church in Germany in areas such as the appointment of senior clergy and the administration of Catholic schools), something Pacelli had tried unsuccessfully to achieve with earlier German national governments, including the government of the Catholic Chancellor Heinrich Brüning (March 1930-May 1932). In return Hitler sought a withdrawal of Catholic opposition to his regime, from both the Catholic political parties (the Centre Party and the Bavarian People’s Party) and the Church hierarchy.        

This tactic proved remarkably successful. On 23 March 1933 the votes of the Catholic political parties were crucial in passing the Enabling Act, which empowered Hitler to govern for the following four years without recourse to parliament. On 29 March 1933 the German episcopate issued a public statement formally withdrawing its opposition to National Socialism, paving the way for Germany’s 20 million Catholics (around one third of the population) to support the new regime with a ‘clear conscience’. A concordat between the Vatican and the German Reich was signed on 20 July and ratified on 10 September 1933, helping to give Hitler the international recognition he craved (reference).

An overview of the Church’s response to National Socialism would be incomplete without mention of the encyclical issued in March 1937 by Pius XI, with input from Pacelli (original reference in German • translated version in English). Written in German under the title Mit brennender Sorge (With burning concern), the encyclical was smuggled into Germany, printed in secret, distributed clandestinely to parishes and read from the pulpit of thousands of churches on Palm Sunday. While silent about the treatment of the Jews and other minorities, the encyclical pointedly accused the Nazis of cultivating a cult of personality, of making idols of race, Volk and state, and of constantly breaching the terms of the concordat. The encyclical infuriated Hitler and provoked reprisals from the government, but it was too little too late to have a marked impact on the relationship between Germany’s Catholics and the Third Reich, or to serve more broadly as a rallying cry against Hitler’s regime.

Family history

As a young man in the 1930s my father studied to be a priest. He went straight from school to the seminary, first in Sydney and then to Genoa in Italy. He returned to Australia in the mid-1930s and rejoined life outside the seminary.

In Genoa one of my father’s fellow seminarians was a German, Ludwig Lohmer. Ludwig taught my father some German, and they became firm friends.

When I started to learn German in high school my father told me a little about Ludwig. He said that they had lost contact, but he was planning a trip to Europe and would try to locate his old friend. But my father died before be could make this trip.

After my mother’s death several years later I found among her papers two letters written in German and addressed to my father. One of the letters was from Ludwig; four pages of closely written but quite legible handwriting (see a scan of Ludwig’s original letter • see translation). The letter describes Ludwig’s life since his ordination to the priesthood in 1937: a difficult period in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland before the war, an easier period (primarily due to the lack of language difficulties) in eastern Germany during the war, flight from the Soviet army in 1945, and a demanding job ministering to displaced German Catholics in south Germany after the war. Ludwig thanked my father for a care package already received, but stressed the difficult material conditions he and those around him continued to face two and a half years after the war (‘what we get on our ration cards is too little to live and too much to die’). He respectfully asked if my father or other ‘good Australian Catholics’ could provide additional help. I assume my father responded positively, but I have no documentary evidence of this.   

The second letter was from a woman (Anna Wipper) who worked for the Catholic charity Caritas in Stuttgart (see a scan of Anna’s original letter • see translation). Frau Wipper had also received a care package from my father, and thanked him in moving terms for his kindness. She also gave details of her life: the death of her father in the First World War, the loss of her mother in the interwar years, and the death of her last remaining family member, a brother, in an air raid in the last days of the Second World War. She thanked my father for ‘building a bridge’ to a defeated and despised country and its people.

It was through Caritas that my father and Ludwig Lohmer resumed contact after the war.    

In German Lessons I make use of the relationship between my father and Ludwig to establish the fictional context for Frank Hannaford’s trip to Germany. However, neither Father Klein’s character nor his relationship to National Socialism is based on Father Lohmer.  

Personal history

I spent the 1979-80 academic year as a philosophy student in Tübingen, a small town in the southwest of Germany. The University of Tübingen, founded in 1477, is one of Germany’s oldest. Many well-known people have studied or taught there, including Johannes Kepler, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alois Alzheimer, Ernst Bloch, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), and Hans Küng.

While German Lessons is set in the Catholic Rhineland, a different part of the country from Tübingen and its majority Protestant environs, I had Tübingen and its atmosphere in mind when describing the fictional town of Siebenkirchen. The scenes in the ‘mensa’ (student refectory) draw heavily on my memories of meals taken and conversations had in the main mensa in Tübingen’s Wilhelmstraße and in the small mensa (Prinz Karl) in Hafengasse. The river that runs through Siebenkirchen is modelled on the Neckar, a substantial river which rises in the Black Forest and passes through Tübingen, Stuttgart and Heidelberg before flowing into the Rhine at Mannheim. The market-place and the narrow lanes of Siebenkirchen’s old town also owe much to Tübingen. And in depicting the friends and acquaintances Frank Hannaford makes at the university and in the organisation of young Catholic men, I drew on memories of the students, German and foreign, whom I met at the university and in Rechberghaus, a student dormitory in Tübingen’s northwest.

Notes

[1] Subsequent to the publication of Hitler’s Pope Cornwell modified his criticisms. He is quoted as saying that Pacelli’s "scope for action was severely limited; [n]evertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did." The Bulletin, Philadelphia, 27 September 2008.