‘the New Church’ Marred by Accepting of Nazi ‘facts’

The New Church and The New Germany. By Dr. Charles S. Macfarland. The Macmillan Company, New York, $2.25. Reviewed by Dr. David De Sola Pool.

The story which Dr. Macfarland tells is that of the struggle within the German Protestant Church that has been precipitated by the Nazi attempt to coordinate the church into the Nazi state. With unbounded admiration one reads of the superb courage and eloquent reality of religious faith of those clergymen who refused to introduce Hitler’s state policies into the church, and who protested against the Nazi “German Christianity which substitutes for God the worship of men-blood-race-nation-state.” One reads too with strange sympathy of the lot of the Jewish convert to Christianity in Germany who can find a refuge neither in church nor in synagogue. But it is disturbing to learn that the Protestant Church in Germany has not at any time taken a firm stand against anti-Semitism. Dr. Macfarland writes that “so far as is known there had never been any visible or vocal Church protest against the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party before it came into power.” In view of that, it is a pity that Dr. Macfarland has been content to accept the “information” given him by such German Protestants as have never protested against Nazi anti-Semitism, without having obtained from German Jewish sources a corrective of its derogatory and untrue propaganda charges.

CIRCUMSTANCES, EXPLANATIONS

Thus, though Dr. Macfarland makes it quite clear that he personally abhors Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsession, he has been persuaded that “there are extenuating circumstances and explanations of Hitler’s violence.” Explanations there assuredly are; but what are the extenuations? Are they the allegation which Dr. Macfarland repeats which identifies “certain members of the Jewish race with wrong doing in particular spheres of human life?” We know of Hitler’s identification of Jews with everything which he detests. But on what exact facts and statistics is this cryptic condemnation based? The only ones known to the reviewer are those furnished by the number of arrests made by the Nazi police-scarcely an unimpeachable figure. Dr. Macfarland might have exercised a healthy scepticism in the face of this cloudy defamation arising from German Protestants whose judgment is so warped that Hitler’s association of Jews with some of the institutions which injure the moral life of the community finds ready response even among churchmen who by no means share his violent prejudice.

Again, the “facts” given to Dr. Macfarland in Germany have trapped him into saying “It must be admitted that the presence of the Jews, though relatively few in number, did cause a real economic, cultural, social and institutional problem in Germany, as it has to a lesser degree in other nations.” Surely on second thoughts he will reject the thesis that Jews, “though relatively few in number,” and though part and parcel of German life for centuries, can not take part in Germany’s economic, cultural, social and institutional life without causing a problem; as he assuredly also would not wish his words to be interpreted as meaning that an American citizen of Jewish faith constitutes a problem for American business, culture, society and institutions. Since the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, Americans have not held that taking part in the life of a modern state has been a purely Christian or Protestant prerogative in which the Jew can not share without rasing a problem.

MORDANT COMPARISON

Dr. Macfarland finds it embarassing to express judgment on Jewish sufferings in Germany because of some conditions which prevail in the United States. For he writes, “It should be frankly admitted that German neglect of restraints upon immigration brought in large numbers of Jews in the years immediately following the war who would very probably not have been admitted to the United States.” Aside from the fact that this statement is based on misleading and exaggerated Nazi statistics, it sets up a comparison with America’s most illiberal tradition. How far this American tradition can stand comparison with German anti-Semitism is revealed in Dr. Macfarland’s report that “A professor in the University of Berlin tells me that they have had Jewish students who actually came there because they were excluded from the universities of their choice in the United States.” How mordant is this revelation of an anti-Semitism in American universities more restrictive than it was in even German universities up to a year ago.

It is deeply disturbing that one can find “explanatory and extenuating circumstances” in conditions in America which are a challenge to America’s own sense of right and in the analogy of America’s lynching of the Negro. For Dr. Macfarland unhesitatingly admits that the spirit, the method and practise of the Nazi treatment of the Jews has been all wrong. Yet his informants in Germany have done their best to convince him that the Jews in Germany, just one per cent of the population, constitute a problem which the state had to meet and a threat of demoralization to the German nation. One feels that it is not imperfect sympathies but imperfect knowledge of the Jewish situation in Germany which has misled him into repeating Nazi slanders which negate his own religious spirit of human brotherhood.