| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 645 words from this article are provided below; about 944 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Kevin Spicer. Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin. DeKalb: Northern Illinois-University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 252. $36.00.
Manfred Gailus. Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des protestantischen Sozialmilieus in Berlin. (Industrielle Welt, number 61.) Cologne: Böhlau. 2001. Pp. x, 735. €75.50.
The city of Berlin provides the backdrop for two recent works on the churches under Nazism. They bear fruitful comparison: Berlin is an obvious setting, as Germany's largest and capital city, for an investigation into local history of the political, cultural, or social kind. Both Kevin Spicer in his work on the Catholic milieu in Nazi Berlin and Manfred Gailus in his book on the Protestant milieu of the same period explore the ways in which religious communities responded to, or participated in, the challenges of the Third Reich. For Gailus, the choice of Berlin is much easier to defend: not only was the city famously "red," it was also "blue"—as in Prussian, Protestant blue. Gailus reminds us of the city's long history as the most important Protestant metropolis on the continent, and of its obvious relevance for a study of Protestantism and Nazism at the local level. For Spicer, the choice of Berlin is somewhat less obvious, given the historically small Catholic community there and the relatively stronger Catholic dioceses that existed in the historic strongholds of southern and western Germany. Nonetheless, as the diocese that lay in the capital of the Third Reich, its analysis is an important undertaking for helping further illustrate the kinds of tensions and strategies the Catholic Church navigated during the Nazi years. Ultimately, Spicer's book is less an investigation into milieux than Gailus's work, which, by comparison, is not only much longer but also more theorized and contextualized. There is nonetheless much to compare, both in method and ultimately for what the books tell us about the larger ramifications for the place of Christianity in the Nazi state and worldview.	1
Spicer's work does for the local level what other works, such as Georg Denzler's recent Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort: Katholische Priester, Bishöfe und Theologien im Dritten Reich (2003), have done for the national level: survey a politically and theologically variegated landscape, one in which no easy answers can be arrived at. Spicer demonstrates the ways in which the actions of the local bishop and his clergy were circumscribed both by the totalitarian potential of a police state and by the ideological proclivities of a religious system that shared, as a minimum, the nationalist and antibolshevist agenda of that state. Spicer does take a hard look at pro-Nazi voices within the priesthood—and indeed promises a whole book on this topic in the future. But the very fact that there were such "brown priests," however few in number, leaves the reader wondering about the conceptual viability of Spicer's larger arguments, particularly as they concern the nature of totalitarianism. Spicer contends several times that the very existence of the Catholic Church constituted a kind of resistance to the Nazi regime, which, according to totalitarianism theory, was by definition opposed to any institutional rivals, be they secular or religious. The implication by default is that there were "farsighted" clergy who understood the elemental tension that "had" to exist between such a state and a church within it, and those clergy who "compromised" and actively sought cooperation with Nazism, or more problematically still, active involvement within the movement. From an historical point of view such a conceptual framework hinders Spicer's ability to enter the worldview of "brown priests" on their own terms. Explanations for their involvement in Nazism must therefore reside in notions of heresy or blindness. There were as well those in the middle, minimally accommodating themselves to Nazism so they could simply defend their church from further outside aggression.	. . .

There are about 944 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.