Jews in the Christian gaze: Munich's churches before and after Hitler

Kauders, Anthony

Abstract

Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced völkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the ‘Jewish question’ as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of ‘the Jew’ (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although German-Jewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and ‘Germans’.

Citation

Kauders, A. (2000). Jews in the Christian gaze: Munich's churches before and after Hitler. Patterns of Prejudice, 34(3), 27-45. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220008559145

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Mar 25, 2008
• Publication Date: 2000-07
• Deposit Date: Aug 2, 2023
• Journal: PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE
• Print ISSN: 0031-322X
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 34
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 27-45
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220008559145
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00313220008559145