The German Genius

basically monologues, and he went on to argue that “I-Thou” relations were needed in order to help people know how to have a relationship with God. This led him to favor the Hasidic tradition, where life was lived as a community.
    Buber was given an honorary professorship at Frankfurt in 1930 but resigned when Hitler came to power. The Nazis banned him from teaching, and he left Germany in 1938 for Jerusalem, where he eventually became a professor at the Hebrew University. After the war he was awarded the Goethe Prize, the Erasmus Prize, and the Israel Prize.
    T HE N AZI F ORM OF C HRISTIANITY
     
    For a while after taking office, Hitler was careful to offer some comfort to the churches. He confided to Goebbels that the best way to treat them was to “hold back for the present and coolly strangle any attempts at impudence or interference in the affairs of state…” 37 In reality the Führer was contemptuous of the Lutheran clergy, “insignificant little people…They have neither a religion they can take seriously nor a great position to defend, like Rome.” 38
    Catholicism, however, as this comment makes clear, was a different matter. Hitler recognized the Catholic Church’s institutional force and, despite the fact that Pope Pius XI had condemned Mussolini’s species of fascism in 1931 as “pagan worship of the state,” the Führer signed a concordat with the Vatican two years later. On the Vatican side, the agreement was chiefly the work of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state and the future Pius XII, who had been nuncio in Munich in the 1920s and had lived in Berlin. Pacelli managed to retain autonomy for the German see and some control over education, at the price of diplomatic recognition for the new regime. *
    The Nazis moved swiftly in religious education. New regulations stipulated that all parents must enroll each of their children in religious instruction. Seven Catholic feast days were sanctioned as public holidays, and Nazi Party members who had left the church were ordered to rejoin. Until 1936 the German army stipulated that every serving soldier must belong to either the Catholic or Evangelical denominations. 39
    But a lot of this, in retrospect, can be seen as tactical maneuvering. Many thought that the real founding moment of Nazism was the Nietzschean “death of God.” 40 More recently, however, Richard Steigmann-Gall has shown how the National Socialists—Hitler as much as anyone—never really followed through on their earlier intentions, in particular the much-advertised attempt to introduce, or reintroduce, “pagan” ideas. Instead, the original plan of the Nazis in the religious sphere was for a concept expressed as “positive Christianity,” which had three key ideas: “the spiritual struggle against the Jews, the promulgation of a new social ethic, and a syncretism designed to bridge the confessional divide between Protestant and Catholic.”
    Hitler, like many leading Nazis, held the view that Jesus was not a Jew and that the Old Testament should be discarded from Christian teaching. 41 The second aspect of Positives Christentum (Positive Christianity), its social ethic, was embodied in the phrase “public need before private greed.” This perhaps inevitably glib slogan enabled the Nazis to present themselves in an ethical-moral light in regard to their supervision of the economy. They could advertise as one of their main aims the desire to end class strife in Germany and create, or more properly re -create, a “People’s Community,” an organic, harmonious whole. 42 The final element of Positive Christianity, the attempt to create a “new syncretism,” was in some ways the most important aspect, because many leading Nazis viewed the divide between Catholics and Protestants as the greatest stumbling block to the national unity they needed. Himmler put this view most clearly when he said, “We have to be on our guard against a world power which makes use of Christianity and its organisation to oppose our own national resurrection by methods of which we’re everywhere conscious.” He added that he was anti-clerical but not anti-Christian. 43 The elevation of the Volk , the community, as a mystical, almost divine entity, was the main device to overcome sectarian divide and, at the same time, a political maneuver to combat the rival analyses of Marx and the materialist economists of the West. 44 More than theology, or paganism (which many