Uwe Siemon-Netto's Blog

FAITH MATTERS: Santorum was right to mention Satan

2012-02-26T19:15:00.001-08:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

On the eve of the Republican primaries in Michigan and Arizona I would like to direct an urgent appeal to Sen. Rick Santorum: “Please keep talking about Satan; somebody’s got to do it!” This is not meant facetiously. Even though I am neither a U.S. citizen nor a Roman Catholic I am pleading with Mr. Santorum not to waver in his civil courage, as the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have described Santorum’s intrepid display of faith.

The effete snobs of this world, to resuscitate one of Spiro Agnew’s priceless observations, poured barrels of rancor over the Senator when Matt Drudge discovered a thoughtful and erudite lecture Mr. Santorum had given at Ave Maria University in Florida discussing a 200-year assault by the “Father of Lies” on the institutions of the United States – first academia, then the Church, the culture and politics.

He was slammed from all sides, and perhaps most annoyingly by Father Edward Beck, a befuddled Catholic priest and television commentator who appeared on the O’Reilly Factor with ashes imposed cruciformly on his forehead. Clearly neither he nor O’Reilly had bothered to listen to all of the Senator’s theologically coherent remarks. Beck said Santorum’s words did not “appeal to people more in the middle;” Santorum was “to the right of most Catholics.”

One wonders at what seminary Rev. Beck had studied systematic theology and what his grade was in this discipline. Maybe he missed the part about the Devil as a real being locked in a cosmic struggle with the Creator. Maybe he followed liberal German and American theologians who had reduced Satan to mere allegory, no more than a symbol for the unpleasant things occurring in our era, the holocaust, for example, or – dare we mention it? – the wanton slaughter of 56 million unborn babies since Roe v. Wade in 1973?

If it seems unstylish to discuss this Father of the Lie, why then bother with Christ’s redemptive work on the cross? Was this indeed “divine child abuse,” as some feminist theologians liked to opine over a decade ago? In that case, why call yourself a Christian? Why, for some fluffy Higher Being’s sake, have your thinker’s brow contaminated with cruciform ash on the first day of Lent?

It’s not for me as a foreigner to say whether, politically speaking, Mr. Santorum is the best Presidential candidate for my host country. But there is a reason why this decent man, whose campaign is woefully underfunded, appeals to so many voters, Catholics, evangelicals and traditional Protestants alike, though perhaps not Protestants of a certain mainline genre. The reason is a deep-seated sense among ordinary people that something has gone very wrong with this once so decent society, and similar civilizations in Europe and Down Under.

The mass infanticide, the destruction of orders of creation, such as marriage as defined as a union between one man and one woman, and the appalling greed, are testimony to what Helmut Thielicke, another German theologian who defied Hitler, described as of “a fatality of guilt [Schuldverhängnis] brooding over the world, over its continents and seas,” in other words, the work of Satan. To mock this fatality of guilt, as liberal clerics such as Father Beck do, is theological malpractice of the worst kind, especially in Lent. They might not see it that way, but ordinary people do.

Back in 2008, Sen. Santorum correctly defined the current state of America – and, one might add, the entire Occident – as one of war: “not a political war, not a cultural war, but a spiritual war.” And then he asked, “If you were the Devil where would you attack?” Well, where? At the institutions that had made this country great. And the second of the institutions he listed was the Church, primarily the Protestant Church because it was instrumental in shaping America; actually with this remark Santorum paid implicit homage to Protestantism’s outstanding role in the history of this nation. But of course he was deliberately misunderstood as being “judgmental.”

Listening to him, I did not sense a hint of Schadenfreude in his rueful statement, “We look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country, and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.” Who could argue with Santorum on this point? He might have mentioned that in his own church, too, the Devil had been at work, to wit its sex scandals and the eagerness with which many Catholics are following Protestantism’s bad example. However, Santorum certainly has the support of as illustrious a Protestant as Archbishop Peter Akinola, the former Anglican primate of Nigeria, who called the consecration of an openly homosexual cleric as Episcopal bishop of Concord, N.H., a “Satanic attack upon the Church of Christ.”

Is Santorum right to stress matters of faith in his campaign? Of course he is. He is not imposing any kind of religion upon state the but honestly informing the voters where he stands. Four years ago, he quoted from a newspaper interview with then-Senator Barack Obama where he was asked: “What is sin?” Obama answered: “Being out of alignment with my values.” This prompted Mr. Santorum to tell his audience bluntly: “So now we have the first truly presidential candidate. Clearly defining his own reality.”

This is in synch with the motto of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the fearsome grand master of postmodernism: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Of course, Mr. Obama has said nothing illegal, but surely it is Sen. Santorum’s right and obligation to lay open to the voters the profound chasm gaping between him and the contemporary elites, including evidently the reigning President. One of these two views is Christian, the other ethically scarily ambiguous; this is Crowley’s belief system, which has led us to the societal brink we are staring at today

Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Capistrano Beach, Calif.

Foolishly Obdurate

2012-01-01T14:44:00.000-08:00

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

In "Europe Cries Wolf, Britain Calls its Bluff" (Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Dec. 27, 2011) Andrew Roberts baffled me with this haughty punchline: "King George VI actually rejoiced after the fall of France, writing in his diary: 'Personally I feel happier that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.'" Then Mr. Roberts states: "That is the true voice of Britons, and one that David Cameron has articulated superbly." Perhaps it is the proverbial Teutonic dearth of a sense of humor that made me chuckle at the wrong place here. But evidently this illustrious British historian fails to see the irony in the prospect that without allies to be polite to the U.K. might not have Bentleys that in reality are Volkswagens, or Rolls Royces produced for them by BMW. Given the obduracy of Robert's conclusion, mules might just be the fitting form of transportation for the money handlers of this island's financial service industries once it is unchained from cumbersome friends, provided Britain's demented animal rights lobby allows these stubborn beasts to be used for man's convenience.

(From the Letters to the Editor section of the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 31, 2011)

For once proud to be a German

2011-12-22T20:50:00.000-08:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

It’s been more than two years since my last visit to Germany, my native land. This time I traveled home at the height of the Eurozone crisis. I returned to California just before Christmas filled with pride in my compatriots.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not particularly proud of the fact that Germany is now the leading power in Europe. She has been thrust into this role much against her instincts and desires. It had been far too cozy to be prosperous, financially stable and the world’s leading exporter for decades, leaving the unpleasant chores of global direction to others, notably the victors of World War II.

Moreover, I am in no position to say whether or not Germany’s positions in the current global predicament are wise. But then nobody’s sapience seems to be reliable in the present situation, not even the sapience of Princeton-based Nobel laureates and other economic sages who keep telling the Germans to be less productive and more spendthrift, in other words, act against their better judgment and experience, supposedly for the common European good.

No, what made me proud was the discovery that Germans simply refused to reciprocate the hateful slurs of British tabloids whose “journalists” seem to have learned their craft by reading the polemics of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister.

There exists no equivalent in today’s German language for ethnic smears such as “krauts” and “huns” (for Germans), “frogs” (for the French), “wops” (for Italians) and “wogs” (for anybody hailing from territories east of Dover) that are common currency in British mass-circulation dailies, sometimes in the news pages and regularly in their blogs.

Over the years, the Germans have learned to laugh off these symptoms of the steady decline of England’s media standards that has been accelerating steadily ever since union folly and publishers’ greed have laid barren Fleet Street, that once spectacular bastion of the Angelo-Saxon journalism, which was my professional home for a while nearly half a century ago.

Nobody I talked to in Germany seemed to take offense when columnist Simon Heffer warned in the Daily Mail newspaper of “Germany’s economic colonization of Europe” and opined in a different article, “Where Hitler failed by military means to conquer Europe, modern Germans are succeeding through trade and financial discipline. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.”

Why do the Germans not care? “Well, the English have always been a little absonderlich; that’s why we love them so,” said Michael Rutz, the former editor in chief of a leading German weekly; the agreeable word, absonderlich, is usually translated as “strange” or “bizarre,” but actually has a more charming and subtle connotation.

The other day I discussed the benign reaction of Germans to British and other hatemongering with the editor of a highbrow political journal published in Washington. He said: “The difference is that the Germans still read.” This is true. Germany is less affected by media atrophy than most comparable Western nations. If a German does not know what’s going in in the world, it is his own fault because every major city has at least one but usually several local papers covering regional, national and international affairs, and, equally importantly, cultural events and thought, and then of course there exist national dailies and weeklies of superb quality.

The owner of a newsstand in Munich’s central railway station recently an editor friend of mine that his shop keeps an astounding average of 3,200 papers and periodicals on display.

Because of this Germans are in a better position to put international events in a proper perspective. Of course they did read that Eleftheria, the Athens daily, twice ran an image of Chancellor Angela Merkel in a storm trooper’s uniform on its front page. But they also read that thousands of Greek professionals are busily studying German to find jobs in Germany, where they are well received.

I was stunned to find that even modestly educated Germans seem to bear no malice against Greeks whose country they now have to bail out. Nearly 310,000 Greek immigrants live and work in Germany, and their number is rising. They make good, hard-working citizens, run wonderful restaurants, usually speak German well and delight the natives with their good humor.

In a 250-year old Cologne inn named “Em Kölsche Boor,” Pericles, a Greek waiter serving me a sturdy fare of broad beans and smoked bacon, regaled our table with this joke pertaining to his motherland’s economic predicament: By happenstance, three housepainters showed up at the same time at the portal of paradise, an Armenian, a German and a Greek.

Saint Peter told them, “This is a fantastic coincidence. The Pearly Gate needs a new paint job. Let me have your quotes.” The Armenian told him he would do it for €600. The German asked for €900. The Greek took Saint Peter aside and said, “€3,000.”

“Three thousand! Are you nuts,” Peter cried. The Greek smiled, “Think of it,” he said, “You’ll get €1,000, I’ll get €1,000. We give €400 to the German to keep his mouth shut, and the Armenian will do the work for €600.” The guests howled with laughter. It was fun to have Greeks in Germany.

I had come to Cologne on a 200 mph train from Paris where the general mood seemed morose. The railway unions had voted for one of their perennial Yuletide strikes intended to spoil the Christmas joy of the rest of the population; thankfully, though, this immense nuisance was eventually averted. Some Paris maîtres-penseurs, intellectuals and journalists of the most irritating sort, raised the specter of a new wave of “Germanophobie,” in response to Germany’s increasing power.

The Germans I questioned about this laughed it off, and rightly so. This alleged “Germanophobie” was a chimera in the minds of people utterly out of touch with this season’s dangerous realities. Down in southwestern France, where I have a home, I meet for my regular Saturday morning tipple with the mayors and councilmen of the surrounding villages. Their view of Germany was quite different.

“Tell your Chancellor to stand fast,” they urged me, “she must remain tough. We admire the Germans’ hard work and fiscal responsibility. If only we had followed their example years ago!”

These were not isolated voices. According to some polls, more than 70 percent of the French citizens feel that way, and this is also expressed in most of the blogs in the online editions of France’s national newspapers.

Of course the crisis might eventually catch with the Germans, whose unemployment rate is currently at a record low, and whose industry is booming due to massive demands from around the world for German products. But when I boarded my flight to California at Frankfurt Airport, a left behind smiling, contented compatriots preparing for a joyous Christmas and bearing good will against their less fortunate neighbors.

And this observation made me very proud to be a German.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Saddam’s Bio Arms – Wait Till Syria Falls

2011-09-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Ten years after 9/11, one captivating thought keeps crossing my mind: When the Assad tyranny in Syria finally collapses, will George W. Bush be vindicated? Will evidence be found that Saddam Hussein did actually possess mobile bio-weapons labs, and had them driven across the border ahead of allied forces advancing on Baghdad.

From my own research in the late 1990s, I strongly suspect this to be the case. Senior European civil servants, military and intelligence officers and especially scientists familiar with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs predicted that this was going to happen. They told me almost unanimously that sufficient amounts of biological agents to kill millions of civilians, could be manufactured inside trucks, which international weapons inspectors or invading forces would never find because they were extremely movable.

I conducted my research at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, at the United Nations in Geneva, the Italian Foreign Ministry, and the Iraqi National Congress in London well before Mr. Bush’s election in 2000.

Critics of the Bush administration, including conservatives, have accused it of having contrived proof of “transportable facilities for producing … BW (biological warfare) agents” as a pretext for invading Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented this argument before the United Nations Security Council.

The Bush administration’s critics charge that this information originated with an “asset” (informer) of the BND, Germany’s external in intelligence service and was not confirmed by a secondary source. The informer, codenamed “Curveball” by the Central Information Agency, was an Iraqi chemical engineer by the name of Rafeed Ahmed Alwan who had defected to Germany in 1999.

Alwan, who has since changed his name, told the conservative German newspaper, Die Welt, that he had no idea he was cooperating with a spy agency and that he regretted having triggered a war. According to a recent report by Die Welt, the BND warned he Central Intelligence Agency that it considered “Curveball” as emotionally unstable and therefore not reliable. The newspaper related that Colin Powell’s use of the details provided by “Curveball” seriously marred the relationship between the two allied spy agencies.

My intensive research began more than one year before “Curveball’s” defection to Germany. What alarmed me was an article by Columbia University Professor Richard K. Betts in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs titled, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction.” In this article, Betts, Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, dealt with “weapons of the weak – states or groups that militarily are at best second class.”

He wrote, “Biological weapon should be the most serious concern, with nuclear weapons second and chemicals a distant third.” These weapons, he went on, presented “probably… the greatest danger.”

“A 1993 study by the office of Technology Assessment concluded that a single airplane delivering 100 kilograms of anthrax spores – a dormant phase of a bacillus that multiplies rapidly in the body, producing toxins and rapid hemorrhaging – by aerosol on a clear, calm night over the Washington, D.C., area could kill between one million and three million people, 300 times as many fatalities as if the plane had delivered Sarin gas in amounts ten times larger.”

This corresponded to a later calculation by British biologist Malcolm Dando, a professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford in England, that devastating a square kilometer by a nuclear weapon would cost an aggressor $800. To wipe out the same area chemically would be 200 dollars cheaper. But for one single Dollar the same results could be achieved with a bio bomb, which would be even more effective than a nuke. A one-megaton hydrogen bomb would kill “only” a maximum of 1.9 million people; with 100 kilograms of anthrax up to three million could be annihilated.

These data are so alarming that when I interviewed Vladimir Petrovsky, then the Geneva-based United Nations director-general, in 1998 for Die Welt, he sounded scandalized by the indifference of the Western media to these perils. “I don’t understand the Western media,” he thundered, “they are asleep in the face of the greatest danger to humanity since the end of the Cold War.”

There have been some eyewitness reports by defectors claiming that Saddam Hussein’s bio bombs have indeed been stored in Syria alongside that nation’s own weapons of mass destruction. Is there any conclusive evidence for this? There won’t be until Syria falls. But given the massive perils to all humanity, it seemed to me extraordinarily irresponsible to trivialize this problem into an issue for petty partisan bickering.

Erhard Geissler, a molecular biologist formerly involved in the East German WMD research, wrote that even Hitler forbade the use of bio-weapons, presumably because of his bacteriophobic hypochondria. And he related that in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II outlawed their use against human beings, though not against military transport animals, such as horses and mules.

When in 1916 a military physician suggested using airships to drop plague spores on England, the War Ministry in Berlin replied: “…if we took this step we would no longer be worthy to survive as a nation.” Compared with the nobility of this statement by generals in the middle of a fratricidal war, the squabbling over whether Saddam’s frightening biological weapons programs had to be stopped militarily seems amazingly petty.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Born 150 Years Ago: Robert Bosch, Global Entrepreneur

2011-09-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Robert Bosch 1861-1942

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

One hundred and fifty years ago, on Sept. 23, 1861, the visionary industrialist Robert Bosch was born in a village near Ulm in Germany. He became a global entrepreneur whose name is ubiquitous in the auto industry to this very day. And 125 years ago, he founded Robert Bosch GmbH, the largest privately owned corporation in the world today. In 1907, Bosch opened its first U.S. subsidiary. By the time World War I broke out, Bosch presided over a worldwide empire. Its business collapsed after the war, soon recovered, and then was annihilated during Hitler’s Third Reich. Bosch and his collaborators financed the German resistance against the Nazis, rescued Jews and tried in vain to persuade the Western powers not to appease Hitler. Today, Robert Bosch GmbH is the world’s largest supplier of automotive parts.

It was “an act of grace,” wrote Theodor Heuss, West Germany’s first president, that his friend Robert Bosch died of natural causes in 1942. Thus, Bosch was spared the agony of watching nearly everything he had created being ravaged by the war he had struggled to forestall. When the guns fell silent in 1945, his global empire was gone, and 70 percent of his factories in Germany had been leveled by Allied air raids.
Even for Heuss, a political scientist and journalist, it would have been foolish to predict what I saw near Charleston, South Carolina, where Bosch has maintained a subsidiary since 1974. After passing several suburban churches, I arrived at what looked from afar like a country club but is in fact the corporation’s largest factory in North America.

It is an almost idyllic place, where 2,500 workers – called “associates” in Bosch corporate language – churn out automotive products the company has pioneered world-wide: gasoline and diesel injectors; anti-lock braking systems (ABS) among other things. I wondered: Are these workers – 60 percent male, 40 percent female; 65 percent Caucasian and 35 percent minority – familiar with their employer’s legacy?

Did they know that Robert Bosch was the first employer to introduce the eight-hour workday in Germany? Or that Bosch managers had languished in concentration camps for their role in a coup attempt against Hitler and that one was severely tortured? Or that Carl Goerdeler had actually been on the company’s payroll? Goerdeler, was the leading plotter who would have become chancellor of a post-Nazi Germany had he not been hanged for fighting “the criminal,” as Bosch called Hitler.

Most of the younger Bosch employees I spoke with in Charleston had only a vague knowledge of these facts. This part of the history of this huge privately owned corporation was not common currency in the United States, not discussed in the media and at universities. Equally little known was the significant detail that, up until America’s entry into the war, some Bosch subsidiaries in the United States had served as secret bases for the “other Germany” Goerdeler represented. And most employees didn’t realize that, in a unique situation, almost all of their corporation’s earnings go to a foundation supporting a hospital and scientific research, international scholarships and a host of programs to advance international understanding; this foundation holds 92 percent of the Bosch shares.

They were only vaguely aware that with their work they are helping a cause that was dear to Bosch’s heart after World War I – the reconciliation between Germany and France. The same goes for German-American relations, once so close but now often sadly strained, are a priority for the Robert Bosch Foundation, which holds 92 percent of shares in the company, whose global sales topped €47,3 billion ($68 billion) last year.

“Well, those who have been around for a long time had heard about this, as have our workers in Germany,” allowed Mark Widmann, a German executive who managed the production of diesel unit injectors in Charleston at the time of my visit. “But ever since Franz Fehrenbach became CEO of the Robert Bosch Group in Stuttgart in 2003, educating the staff in these matters has become company policy.”

According to Widmann, Fehrenbach corresponds directly with his workers around the world by e-mail to inform them about the corporation’s illustrious past and the special ethos resulting from it. It is a culture of civic responsibility, which Bosch himself had practiced throughout his life. In Charleston, it’s not just about protecting the environment and conserving energy but also doing volunteer work, such as cleaning up a dilapidated local school.

Providing a pleasant workplace for the employees is another mandate of Bosch culture. As we walked through the Charleston plant, communications officer David Brown said: “Have you noticed how pleasantly cool it is in here? And yet, this hall is full of furnaces with 1,000-degree temperatures.”

The Bosch ethos goes beyond good working conditions. It includes forward-looking programs such as German-style apprenticeships, which involve an American college education for American employees paid for by the company. In addition, the Bosch way promotes the cosmopolitan worldview that was the mark of “the Founder,” Robert Bosch.

Bosch, the son of a well-to-do farmer and innkeeper, was a precision mechanic. He traveled to the United States in 1884, eager to learn all about America’s democracy. While there, he worked for Thomas Edison, a man he later depicted as “the quintessential and best kind of American.” Bosch returned to Europe convinced of the truth of the adage, “wars don’t pay,” and proceeded to work for peace.

This cosmopolitan outlook has since filtered down to every level of the Bosch workforce all over the world. Blue-collar and white-collar workers alike are regularly sent abroad for stints at Bosch plants in different countries, according to Chandra Lewis, corporate communications director at Bosch’s U.S. headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

“Executives will only be promoted to the next higher level if they are willing to serve several years oversees,” explained Wolfgang Utner, director of engineering and manufacturing operations at the Charleston plant when I was there. Like Widmann, he had previously worked in Stuttgart, Bosch GmbH’s birthplace and company home.

For decades, the Bosch leadership had been strangely reticent about its distinctive culture and history, especially its daring anti-Nazi activities before and during the last world war. Why is it that the world knows all about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust – but next to nothing about Bosch’s wide-reaching variety of resistance?

“Perhaps this is due to a Swabian virtue – ‘Bescheidenheit’ (modesty),” said Widmann. Bosch was a Swabian; he hailed from the former German kingdom of Württemberg whose people are renowned for their reserve. But his is a story worth telling – the story of a successful craftsman who since the end of World War I labored with Count Richard Coudenove-Calergi (1894-1972), a former Austrian diplomat, to forge a united Europe, a dream that would not be realized until another global conflict had ravaged the Old World.

It is, too, the story of a liberal who was active in an association to fend off anti-Semitism well before Hitler came to power in 1933. It is about a quiet, behind-the-scenes operator who pumped millions into schemes to protect Jews, or smuggle them out of Germany, until the very eve of World War II, and who provided work for the disenfranchised Jews who could no longer make a living anywhere else in the country.

Bosch was an agnostic who funneled large sums of money to the Lutheran Church of Württemberg led by Bishop Theophil Wurm, a leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement. And it is an astonishing tale about the Byzantine ways in which this new denomination served as a cover for the transfer of Bosch funds to Jews.

Bosch was remarkable for his philanthropy, for example, in 1910, he gave one million gold marks – a huge sum in those days – to the Technical University of Stuttgart, and in World War II managed to found a large homeopathic hospital. However, Bosch’s story is one with many curious quirks that sometimes might seem hard to fathom for contemporary readers:

On the one hand, Bosch resisted Hitler. On the other hand, Bosch factories produced military hardware for the Wehrmacht, Germany’s military. Moreover, the company employed prisoners of war provided by the regime to take the place of workers serving at the front. And what are we to make of the fact that the Bosch management’s conspiratorial endeavors on behalf of the Jews and the German resistance would have been impossible had they not enjoyed the protection of Gottlob Berger, an enigmatic general in the Waffen SS?

According to Bosch’s biographer, Joachim Scholtyseck, this top-ranking Nazi probably even knew the true reasons why Bosch had employed Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, in 1937. Goerdeler had been a foe of the regime since 1933 and resigned from his post when local Nazis blew up a monument to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a Protestant composer of Jewish descent. Hitler had personally blocked his employment by other corporations, yet Bosch took him on – ostensibly as economic adviser, but in truth with the explicit task to warn world leaders of Hitler’s intentions.

“Hitler is no bulwark against Bolshevism,” was Goerdeler’s message to his Anglo-Saxon interlocutors. Rather, Goerdeler explained, Hitler too was a kind of a Bolshevik who “will first destroy Judaism, then Christianity and ultimately capitalism.” Goerdeler urged American, British, French and other leaders to stand up to the tyrant. Only then, he claimed, would the anti-Nazi faction of the Wehrmacht’s leadership rise against Hitler, arrest him and have him tried for treason. Sadly, Goerdeler was ignored.

Two years after Bosch’s death, the coup d’état of July 20, 1944 – one of the around 40 assassination attempts against Hitler – failed. Among those who were arrested were Goerdeler and some of Bosch’s top executives. Goerdeler ended at the gallows, the others in concentration camps.

Remarkably, Robert Bosch’s CEO and successor Hans Walz was not discovered, even though it was the passionate Christian who had engineered most of Bosch’s resistance operations – ranging from the protection of Jews to secret meetings secretly with Allied diplomats in Switzerland. It was Walz who and funded his church’s activities against the régime, and and who was Carl Goerdeler’s principal associate in corporate headquarters.

While the Gestapo did not nab him, the U.S. military did. Though aware of Walz’ wartime activities, the U.S. occupation forces interned him for two years for the “offense” of having headed a major German corporation. Theodor Heuss, the future West German President, denounced this as “alberner Schematismus,” a ridiculous display of a schematic mindset.

In the immediate postwar days, the mere mention of the German resistance was forbidden. On Nov. 8, 1948, Volkmar von Zühlsdorff, an anti-Nazi émigré who had returned to his homeland from exile in New York, wrote to his friend and fellow émigré Hermann Broch, an Austrian Jewish writer:

“You ask me why, in Germany, nothing is written or said about the heroes of the resistance? … Recently I spoke about this with … (Robert) Lochner who heads Radio Frankfurt [as Chief Control Officer on behalf of the U.S. military] … There exists an ordinance that July 20 [the day German Wehrmacht colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler] must not be mentioned, and this ordinance is still in force. Why? Because all Germans are Nazis, and if one mentions July 20, people might get the idea that there were a few who were not Nazis, and that is not permissible.”

Walz went quietly back to work, rebuilding Bosch’s empire. But some of the Jews he had rescued and who now lived in America had not forgotten. At their initiative, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel recognized that at the risk of his own life, Walz had saved Jews. It declared him a “righteous among the peoples.”

In 1969, a tree was planted in Walz’ honor at the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem. Today, the Robert Bosch Group is bigger than ever, with 300,000 employees and 320 plants and outlets in 140 countries producing automotive parts, power tools, security systems and, in a joint venture with Siemens, some of the world’s leading home appliances.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

The Berlin Wall and the laughing God

2011-08-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Berlin Wall story, which I covered for the Associated Press 50 years ago, is its spiritual dimension. I did not realize this then, on August 13, 1961, when the East Germans began building this monstrous structure to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to the West. I was a lukewarm Christian at best and had therefore little hope that this abomination would disappear in my lifetime. That God is the ultimate Lord of history is not something I fully understood when I was a 24-year old junior reporter.

The Wall that split not just the city of Berlin but also its Catholic diocese and territorial Protestant Church into two halves reduced the flow of fugitives to a trickle. But by then 2.6 million people had already fled from the Communist-run part of Germany. By and large they represented its elite – “elite” in the sense of skill and education. They were highly qualified craftsmen, scientists, engineers, professionals and farmers. Such was their impact of their flight on the economy that entire branches of East German industry had ceased to function.

On the other hand, these refugees generally belonged to the social strata that had been the mainstay of the Christian Church in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and their disappearance suited party leader Walter Ulbricht’s ideological ends. Ulbricht was intent on establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the proletariat had long been alienated from the Church, especially its highbrow Lutheran branch whose very cradle this part of the country was. By relegating the former upper and middle classes to an inferior status and driving them out, Ulbricht created the main cause for the decline of church membership from some 95 percent of the population in 1945 to one quarter at the time of the GDR’s collapse in 1989.

The persecution of Christians began well before the GDR was established in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. I remember it well from my childhood in Leipzig. A Marxist teacher had taken over our class. Every morning he admonished his 80 pupils: “There are three Christian swine among you who still go to church. Go beat some sense into them after school”. The three of us, one Catholic and two Lutherans, learned to outrun our roused classmates; eventually my mother had me smuggled across the border to the British zone of occupation, where I ended up in a boarding school.

In the East Germany, young Christians were denied access to higher education, unless they joined the Communist youth movement and subjected themselves to a ceremony called Jugendweihe, a Marxist substitute for confirmation. Some did this, for example Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter, who was allowed to study physics and later became chancellor of reunified Germany. Others made no such concessions. They fled or accepted discrimination at school and work in order to live a life of faith.

The three daughters of my uncle Horst Persing, a Lutheran minister, accepted this fate. In 1976, Rev. Oskar Brüsewitz made an even greater sacrifice. He immolated himself in front of the parish church of Zeitz in protest against “the suppression of our children in school.” His sacrifice was one of the first steps toward the popular protest movement that eventually brought down the Wall in 1989.

One day as I was covering the Berlin crisis in the autumn of 1961, East German police stopped me at the Heinrich Heine Strasse border crossing to question me about the source of a highly sensitive story of mine they had read on the AP wire. I did not give them her name. A few weeks later my grandmother sent me a poppy seed cake from Leipzig. Inside I found an aluminium tube with a message warning me against travelling again to the GDR. A well-meaning neighbour who was a “people’s prosecutor” had tipped her off that I would be arrested for espionage if I tried to do so.

I was now cut off from my East German relatives forever, or so I feared. “Eternity” turned out to be short, though. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. To my amazement the GDR granted me an unrestricted six-month visa. I drove to my uncle’s parsonage near Leipzig where I first found out about of an awakening among young East Germans. One of its many centres was the Church of St. Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, which later became the fount of the peaceful revolution that toppled Communism.

For weeks I travelled from church to church, monastery to monastery, parsonage to parsonage, trailed by secret police. Later I discovered that they considered me a religious crackpot, albeit a harmless one, which still perplexes me because the focus of my research should have troubled them: a large ecumenical movement luring thousands, including soldiers in uniform, to youth services and eventually providing an umbrella also for non-Christian opposition groups against the East German dictatorship.

I learned that this had begun in 1968 when Ulbricht had the Gothic University Church on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz (now Augustusplatz) blown up. It stood an a square that was designated to be a socialist parade ground, and Ulbricht did not want it to be “blighted” by a gracile sanctuary, where both Lutherans and Catholics worshipped.

Twenty days later, an international Bach contest took place in Leipzig. Suddenly in the presence of VIPs from all over the world and of East German party bigwigs an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death, 1240 and 1968, plus the inscription “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (We demand reconstruction).

The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and science students. They were captured and imprisoned. But they inspired sympathizers throughout GDR to form what became the nucleus of a “peace movement”, which gradually snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.

The Nikolaikirche is only a few steps away from where the University Church stood. It became known worldwide as the epicentre of this ecumenical enterprise, arguably one of the most impressive in post-Reformation history. Admonished by Protestant and Catholic clergymen not to resort to violence, tens of thousands marched on Monday evenings quietly around Leipzig’s city centre. Their most momentous demonstration occurred on 9 October 1989.

On that evening, pastors and priests had preached on Proverbs 25:15: “With patience a ruler will be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” Then a crowd of 70,000, chanting hymns, set off on a procession that softly felled a 40-year tyranny. Had they given the Communist authorities the slightest provocation, it might have resulted in a Peking-style massacre. The regime was certainly ready.

From the side streets their workers’ militia had their guns trained on the protesters. Local hospitals cancelled the leaves of their medical staffs. Ample amounts of coffins and body bags had been brought into town. A concentration camp had been set up in Markkleeberg, south of Leipzig. Later lists with the names of intended inmates were found. They included pastors, priests and Kurt Masur, the conductor of Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus orchestra.

But the demonstrators remained peaceful, as did the peace marchers who emulated them in many parts of the GDR. We know what happened next: The Wall opened in the following month. The GDR ceased to exist one year later. In the interim, Christians temporarily assumed positions of power in East Germany. Rainer Eppelmann, a Lutheran pastor and pacifist from Berlin who had done time in a Communist prison, became the GDR’s last minister of defence.

It is now 50 years since I saw the Wall go up and 22 since it came down. The Christian movement in eastern Germany seems to have collapsed. When Germany was reunited on 3 October 1990, most Protestant churches did not even ring their bells in gratitude, in contrast to Catholic churches, which did. Once again, eastern Germans are turning their backs on the Christian faith in droves. Next to the Czech Republic, the former GDR is the most secularized region in Europe, and Berlin is its most godless capital.

What happened here is a phenomenon well knwn from Scripture – the continuum of human ingrate forgetfulness of God’s mercy. Theologically speaking, this was a manifest expression of Original Sin in the sense of man’s innate inability to believe and trust in God; but at the same time it confirmed of Martin Luther’s brilliant insight about cloudbursts of the Holy Spirit that suddenly soak one area richly, and then inexplicably move on. This is what we have witnessed after the collapse of the Wall.

But it would be foolish to believe that this is the end of the story. History is always open to the future and the Holy Spirit, the creator of life and faith, always good for surprises. There is also an amusing side to this drama about this interface between faith and politics. To prove to the world that he was the greatest, Ulbricht had built the tallest structure in Berlin, a 1,200-foot television tower with a glass bubble containing a rotating restaurant at its top.

When the tower was finished in 1969, it turned out that the sun reflected on this bubble in the shape of a huge cross. Ulbricht was so furious that he refused to invite the tower’s architects to its inauguration. His regime spent huge sums of money to remove this symbol of the Christian faith – in vain: Regardless of whether you approach Berlin from the East, the West or the South, the first thing you can see from afar on a clear day will be the Cross.

The God Christians believe in is the God of Israel, and if they have read their Bible well they know that He is a God with a Jewish sense of irony about whom we read in Psalm 2:4: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine,

And the wall fell down flat

2011-08-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From The Tablet, London, August 12, 2011)

Exactly 50 years ago, work began on the construction of a lethal barrier dividing Berlin that was to last nearly three decades. Years of protests by East German Christians led to its destruction and that of the Communist regime which tried to contain the faith of its people.

On August 13, 1961, a Sunday, the Associated Press sent me to Berlin where East Germany had begun building a Wall that morning to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to the Western sectors. Fifty years later, I recognise that this turned out to be not just a reporting assignment for me but the beginning of a long story of faith.

I was 24 then, myself a refugee from Leipzig. From what I saw I did not expect Germany to be reunified in my lifetime. Yet it happened 28 years later, in large part thanks to a peaceful Christian resistance movement. This is actually the most important story about the Wall; it is a tale of hope.

I flew from Frankfurt to Tempelhof Airport and drove to Bernauer Strasse, a street dividing the French and Soviet sectors. On the eastern side, people were roping themselves down from windows, while Communist cops stormed their buildings from the backyard. Some refugees jumped into nets spread out for them by firemen, some fell to their death.

I watched East German workmen render the Protestant Church of Reconciliation inaccessible with barbed wire. Located on what became known as the death strip, it symbolised Christianity’s condition in divided Berlin, where both the Catholic diocese and the regional Protestant church were split into two halves.

I observed workers’ militiamen open fire on a fugitive family of nine prompting a French lieutenant to blast off warning shots from a machine gun mounted on his jeep. “Stop shooting or I’ll shoot you,” he yelled. The escapees made it across the border. I accompanied them to the Marienfelde refugee camp, the central stage of this drama in the heart of Germany. Of the 2.6 million fugitives thus far, 1.5 million had been housed here before being flown to West Germany. By the time East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered the Western sectors of Berlin sealed off, up to 2,500 left his country every day. Its economy was about to collapse. Entire branches of industry no longer functioned because their skilled workforce had run away.

Ironically, the flight of highly qualified craftsmen, of scientists, engineers, professionals and farmers, was not just a catastrophic loss to the Communists but also had a religious dimension. These refugees belonged primarily to the social strata that had been the Christian Church’s mainstay. Ulbricht’s regime was intent on establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, relegating the former upper and middle classes to an inferior status, and driving them out. This was the main cause for the decline of church membership from some 95 percent of the population in 1945 to one quarter at the time of East Germany’s collapse in 1989.

The persecution of Christians began well before the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was established in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. I remember it well from my childhood in Leipzig. A Marxist teacher had taken over our class. Every morning he admonished his 80 pupils: “There are three Christian swine among you who still go to church. Go beat some sense into them after school”. The three of us, one Catholic and two Lutherans, learned to outrun our roused classmates; eventually my mother had me smuggled across the border to the British zone of occupation, where I ended up in a boarding school.

In the GDR, young Christians were denied access to higher education, unless they joined the Communist youth movement and subjected themselves to a ceremony called Jugendweihe, a Marxist substitute for confirmation. Some did this, for example Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter, who was allowed to study physics and later became chancellor of reunified Germany. Others made no such concessions. They fled or accepted discrimination at school and work in order to live a life of faith.

The three daughters of my uncle Horst Persing, a Lutheran minister, accepted this fate. In 1976, Rev. Oskar Brüsewitz made an even greater sacrifice. He immolated himself in front of the parish church of Zeitz in protest against “the suppression of our children in school.” His sacrifice was one of the first steps toward the popular protest movement that eventually brought down the Wall in 1989.

One day as I was covering the Berlin crisis in the autumn of 1961, East German police stopped me at the Heinrich Heine Strasse border crossing to question me about the source of a highly sensitive story of mine they had read on the AP wire. I did not give them her name. A few weeks later my grandmother sent me a poppy seed cake from Leipzig. Inside I found an aluminium tube with a message warning me against travelling again to the GDR. A well-meaning neighbour who was a “people’s prosecutor” had tipped her off that I would be arrested for espionage if I tried to do so.

I was now cut off from my East German relatives forever, or so I feared. “Eternity” turned out to be short, though. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. To my amazement the GDR granted me an unrestricted six-month visa. I drove to my uncle’s parsonage near Leipzig where I first found out about of an awakening among young East Germans. One of its many centres was the Church of St. Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, which later became the fount of the peaceful revolution that toppled Communism.

For weeks I travelled from church to church, monastery to monastery, parsonage to parsonage, trailed by secret police. Later I discovered that they considered me a religious crackpot, albeit a harmless one, which still perplexes me because the focus of my research should have troubled them: a large ecumenical movement luring thousands, including soldiers in uniform, to youth services and eventually providing an umbrella also for non-Christian opposition groups against the East German dictatorship.

I learned that this had begun in 1968 when Ulbricht had the Gothic University Church on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz (now Augustusplatz) blown up. It stood an a square that was designated to be a socialist parade ground, and Ulbricht did not want it to be “blighted” by a gracile sanctuary, where both Lutherans and Catholics worshipped.

Twenty days later, an international Bach contest took place in Leipzig. Suddenly in the presence of VIPs from all over the world and of East German party bigwigs an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death, 1240 and 1968, plus the inscription “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (We demand reconstruction).

The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and science students. They were captured and imprisoned. But they inspired sympathizers throughout GDR to form what became the nucleus of a “peace movement”, which gradually snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.

The Nikolaikirche is only a few steps away from where the University Church stood. It became known worldwide as the epicentre of this ecumenical enterprise, arguably one of the most impressive in post-Reformation history. Admonished by Protestant and Catholic clergymen not to resort to violence, tens of thousands marched on Monday evenings quietly around Leipzig’s city centre. Their most momentous demonstration occurred on 9 October 1989.

On that evening, pastors and priests had preached on Proverbs 25:15: “With patience a ruler will be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” Then a crowd of 70,000, chanting hymns, set off on a procession that softly felled a 40-year tyranny. Had they given the Communist authorities the slightest provocation, it might have resulted in a Peking-style massacre. The regime was certainly ready.

From the side streets their workers’ militia had their guns trained on the protesters. Local hospitals cancelled the leaves of their medical staffs. Ample amounts of coffins and body bags had been brought into town. A concentration camp had been set up in Markkleeberg, south of Leipzig. Later lists with the names of intended inmates were found. They included pastors, priests and Kurt Masur, the conductor of Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus orchestra.

But the demonstrators remained peaceful, as did the peace marchers who emulated them in many parts of the GDR. We know what happened next: The Wall opened in the following month. The GDR ceased to exist one year later. In the interim, Christians temporarily assumed positions of power in East Germany. Rainer Eppelmann, a Lutheran pastor and pacifist from Berlin who had done time in a Communist prison, became the GDR’s last minister of defence.

It is now 50 years since I saw the Wall go up and 22 since it came down. The Christian movement in eastern Germany seems to have collapsed. When Germany was reunited on 3 October 1990, most Protestant churches did not even ring their bells in gratitude, in contrast to Catholic churches, which did. Once again, eastern Germans are turning their backs on the Christian faith in droves. Next to the Czech Republic, the former GDR is the most secularized region in Europe, and Berlin is the most godless city.

What happened? A manifest expression of Original Sin in the sense of man’s innate inability to believe and trust in God; but at the same time a confirmation of Martin Luther’s brilliant insight about cloudbursts of the Holy Spirit that suddenly soak one area richly, and then inexplicably move on. This is what we have witnessed here.

As for me, this amazing story still gives me huge hope. For it has reinforced my faith by confirming, on a secular level, the maxim that history is always open to the future and the theological truth God is the ultimate Lord of history that the Spirit always good for surprises.

Dr Uwe Siemon-Netto, a former foreign correspondent from Germany and a lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia University in Irvine, California, where is also a professor of journalism.

I was there when they built the Wall

2011-08-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Early Sunday morning the telephone rang in my Frankfurt apartment. „Off to the airport,“ my managing editor instructed me. Drowsily I asked, „To Leopoldville?“ For weeks I had been waiting for my marching orders to the former Belgian Congo to cover its civil war for the Associated Press. „No,“ said “Schmitti,” my boss. „You are going to Berlin. Ulbricht is building a wall.“

That was on August 13, 1961. My longest working day ever lay ahead of me: 36 hours. I took a PanAm DC-6 to Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin and then drove in a rented car to Bernauer Strasse, a street dividing the French and Soviet sectors. On the eastern side, people roped themselves down from windows, while Communist cops stormed their apartment buildings from the backyard. Some refugees jumped into safety nets spread out for them by Western firemen. Nine days later, Ida Siekmann missed a net and dropped on the sidewalk, becoming the first casualty of the Berlin Wall.

For the next three months Bernauer Strasse became my most important place of work. I was there when East German workmen unrolled bales of barbed wire and later replaced it with a wall; when they rendered the Protestant Church of Reconciliation inaccessible; when workers’ militiamen opened fire on a fugitive family of nine prompting a French lieutenant to blast off warning shots into the air from a machine gun mounted on his jeep.

“Stop shooting or I’ll aim my gun at you,” he warned; to my knowledge these were the only shots fired by an allied soldier in the 1961 Berlin crisis. The refugees made it safely across the border. I took them into an “Eckkneipe,” as Berlin street corner pubs are called. I bought the adults a round of stiff drinks, and raspberry sodas for the kids; then I accompanied all of them to the Marienfelde processing center for escapees.

The emergency camp in the Berlin district of Marienfelde was at that time the central stage of this drama in the heart of Germany. Of 2.6 million refugees thus far, 1.5 million had been housed here before being flown to West Germany. By the time the East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered West Berlin sealed off, up to 2,500 left his country every day.

These were university professors, professionals of every field, engineers, scientists, farmers, technicians, craftsmen, and hundreds of thousands of skilled laborers. The collapse of East Germany’s economy seemed imminent. Entire branches of its industry could no longer manufacture anything because most of the working elite had “voted with their feet,” as the saying went; they had run to freedom.

Things did not look good for the West either, though. With the support of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht demanded an instant end to this drain of manpower. He was determined to gain control of the access routes from West Germany to West Berlin, a city still under the sovereignty of the victorious four powers of World War II. Fortunately, this would never happen.

In June, the Associated Press had sent me to Vienna to reinforce its local staff during the summit meeting between Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We found out that Khrushchev regarded Kennedy as immature, calling him a “boy in short pants” whom he could intimidate, which he accomplished masterfully.

In those days the President had “no sympathy for the Germans,” retired diplomat R.W. Smyser wrote in his book, “Kennedy and the Berlin Wall.” His indecision and indifference were fueled by the counsel of the liberal “eggheads” in his immediate entourage. These were academics such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and speechwriter Ted Sorenson, whom Kennedy called his “intellectual blood bank.”

John McCloy, the former U.S. high commissioner in Germany, quipped about these men to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that in their entire professional lives they never had to make a decision “except which of their fellow professors should get tenure,” according to Smyser who added that Adenauer perceived Kennedy as a weak president and therefore clung to France’s Charles de Gaulle as an alternative.

So, in 1961, Kennedy did not interfere with the Communists as they walled in their own people. His stance would toughen significantly later under the influence of Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the “father of the Berlin Airlift,” whom Kennedy sent to Berlin as his personal representative. In 1963, Clay accompanied Kennedy on his trip to Berlin where JFK made his celebrated “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In this speech, which worried his “egghead advisors,” JFK went on to say: "I am proud (...) to come here in the company of my fellow American, General Clay, who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed." To this day, Clay is more beloved in Berlin than any other statesman of any nationality before and after him.

But Kennedy’s vacillation during the summer of 1961 laid the seeds of the insidious anti-American qualms that would so bewilder my friends in the U.S. in the years to come. Egon Bahr, the closest associate and spokesman of Willy Brandt, Berlin’s governing mayor, explained to me that his distrust of the U.S. began with this episode. Brandt numbed his sorrows in a manner causing Adenauer to nickname him Willy Weinbrandt (Billy Brandy); 1961 was an election year in West Germany, and Brandt ran against Adenauer as the Social Democrat candidate. Adenauer won.

Egon Bahr, who is still alive, never overcame his misgivings.

Kennedy’s irresolution was shared by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, Smyser writes, but contrasted markedly with the hard-line stance of French President Charles de Gaulle and the feistiness of West and East Berliners alike. While Kennedy dithered, de Gaulle positioned himself as “Adenauer’s protector, not only against Khrushchev but also against pressures coming from London,” according to Smyser.

As for the Berliners, irresolution was definitely not their prevalent mood that summer. Only 16 years after the collapse of the Nazi tyranny they were in no frame of mind to give in to yet another oppressor even if their stubbornness carried the prospect of enduring another armed conflict just when they had rebuilt their town from is devastation in the war.

We journalists, diplomats and spooks congregating nightly at Berlin’s premier intelligence exchange of the day, the piano bar “Inge und Ich” just off Kurfürstendamm, never ceased to marvel at these plucky people; they were a far cry from the irksome characters who gave their town a bad name seven years later. I am talking about those fetid draft dodgers who would soon nestle on the Western side of the Wall; those whining and sometimes violent wannabe revolutionaries demonstrating against the Shah of Persia and the War in Vietnam and chanting “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-minh;” those eternal students who would stay enrolled at Berlin’s Free University for 50 semesters because cafeteria meals and public transportation were cheap for their kind. Let it be stated here: Real Berliners they were not!

Back to the summer of 1961: We brash young journalists covering the erection of Ulbricht’s Wall even managed to mine some wacky fun from this distressing assignment. We established observation posts near the border crossings, especially Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse, which was reserved for non-Germans and Communist bigwigs. Mine was a bedroom above Café Kölln, a sleazy beer bar in the building where now the “Mauer-Museum” (Wall Museum) is located. This room had a wonderful bay window affording me a perfect view of the East German control center.

Early one evening I spotted a white Mercedes 220 with East Berlin license plates heading west. The man on the wheel turned out to be “Sudel-Ede” (Smirching Eddie), the most despised Communist television personality. His real name was Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. He had a propaganda program titled, “Der schwarze Kanal” (the black channel), where he regularly ran clips from western TV shows as “evidence” for his vile agitation against the alleged “neo-fascism,” “militarism” and “war-mongering” of our side.

“Smirching Eddie” was married to Marta Rafael, a striking Hungarian actress who must have been on tour that day for he clearly entered West-Berlin intent on poaching among our lonely hearts, of which there were plenty. So soon after the War, the city was still replete with unattached women in their late thirties whose male contemporaries had died in combat or Soviet POW camps.

And where did they find solace? In ball houses such as the “Resi” in the Hasenheide district, an establishment with dancing fountains, a full orchestra, 200 telephones and pneumatic tubes connecting all tables. That’s where “Smirching Eddie,” endowed with an East German exit permit and plenty of West German currency, directed his Mercedes while his fellow countrymen were locked up behind the Iron Curtain. I alerted my colleagues, and so a howling horde of international reporters chased after him.

Directed to a table, von Schnitzler began scanning beauties in the room but never managed to make contact with any of the scores of available females. For we had positioned ourselves strategically at neighboring tables and now bombarded him with telephone calls and pneumatically posted invitations to waltz and to tango. Puce in the face the frustrated Smirching Eddie stormed out of the ballroom and returned east. We followed him to Checkpoint Charlie and then piled into Café Kölln to celebrate our personal triumph in the Cold War.

It so happened that earlier that year I had befriended a comely East German government official at the Leipzig Trade Fair. She hated the Communist regime. Now as the Wall was being built she found witty ways to tip me off. One item of information she sent turned out to be a present for my 25^th birthday. In the middle of the night I received a secret message urging me to rush to the former palace of Prussia’s crown princes in the Eastern sector. There I discovered, probably as the first Western reporter, that more than 30 Soviet tanks had moved into the city. Two days later they confronted U.S. armor at Checkpoint Charlie, which turned out to be the most dramatic point of the 1961 Berlin crisis.

On the following evening I had a date with my friend but was stopped at the border and grilled: “Who was your informer?” I did not tell the investigators but soon discovered that as a result of this incident I was not to see my family in East Germany again for years to come. My grandmother lived in Leipzig. Her neighbor was a well-meaning prosecutor. She warned her that if ever I attempted to enter the country again I would be tried for espionage. Granny slipped this information into an aluminum tube and mailed it to me in a home-baked poppy seed cake.

I was banished from my native region “forever.” But this “eternity” lasted a little more a dozen years. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. Only a few weeks later I was issued a six-month visa allowing me multiple entries into my homeland. I raced to the parsonage of my favorite uncle, Horst Persing, a Lutheran parish pastor near Leipzig, who told me about a stunning development – the Christian awakening among young East Germans, which eventually produced the umbrella for the huge resistance movement that would bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989 resulting in Germany’s reunification a year later.

I was in San Francisco when the Wall tumbled. I flew home to rejoice with my fellow countrymen and remember fondly the plucky Berliners I loved so much in 1961. Returning to reunified Berlin now once every year or two is a bittersweet experience, though. Yes, this is arguably Europe’s most exciting city, a throbbing metropolis with stunning new buildings and an abundant cultural life.

But with memories like mine, I find it hard to stomach that a coalition of mainly left-of-center Social Democrats and Communists now governs this marvelous place. I know why the latter are still so numerous. The East German regime had moved all its top functionaries, its military and secret police officers from the entire country to its capital. Now they still reside in the heart of the city, and they vote for a party called “Die Linke” (The Left), which is the successor of the Socialist Unity Party whose leaders had built the Wall.

Most Berliners seem to have accommodated themselves to the shameless misalliance between the Social Democrats – once Willy Brandt’s very honorable party -- and their “dark red” minority partners. But I can’t. I can’t forget what they have done to their people and my country. I can’t forget that they shot refugees like rabbits. I can’t forget that they chopped Berlin into two. And I can’t forgive the Social Democrat-Communist city government its refusal to name a street after Ronald Reagan, who in April of 1987 stood at the Brandenburg Gate appealing to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this Wall!”

This is so disgraceful that I could not bring myself to accede to my British wife Gillian’s wish to move to Berlin. That said, I take consolation in the fact that history is always open to the future and always good for surprises. This is the comforting news I have learned in the 50 years since covering the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com . He has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications.

Soldiers: God’s masks in fatigues

2011-07-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

Lecture at Annual Conference of the Augsburg Lutheran Churches in El Paso, TX, July 25, 2011

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

We journalists have a tendency to talk with great authority about other people’s craft. This has become so bad that by now talk show hosts tell statesmen and other professionals how to do their jobs.

Think of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. He won’t ever allow his interview partners to finish a sentence. He always knows better. His favorite line is, “I have always said…” And he is not alone in this. He just does this more shamelessly than his lesser peers.

I am not much of a Paul Tillich fan. But this state of affairs confirms Tillich’s insight that hubris is a structural element of original sin. Thus hubris should be added to Article Two of the Augsburg Confession as a constituent part of Original Sin alongside man’s inability to believe and trust in God and concupiscence. On this point I agree with Tillich. Hubris is an innate human condition that foolishly presumes to trump God.

That said, I am brazen enough to talk about a vocation that is not mine: I mean soldiering. I have never served in the military. I have never fired a shot in anger. But I have spent a lot of time with soldiers in combat. I have been shot down in a helicopter in Vietnam. And I have held the hands of dying GIs screaming first for his mother and then for God, always in this order. I have been attached to a large platoon of Marines, which lost 40 men in 12 hours.

I am also the son of a German officer cadet who was blinded in action in World War I. I have heard his harrowing tales since my childhood and watched shrapnel protrude from his skin about once a month literally until the day he died more than 50 years ago.

During my CPE I worked as a chaplain intern with Vietnam veterans in the VA in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Some of you might have read my short book, The Acquittal of God, a Theology for Vietnam Veterans. It was based on the MA thesis I wrote at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

So come to think of if, I actually can speak with some authority about soldiering. When I claim that soldiers are God’s Masks in Fatigues, I know what I am talking about. And I also know what I am talking about when I call those self-righteous pacifists of the 1960s and 1970s who vilified returning warriors as baby killers of being the devil’s masks. I can call upon Luther as my witness.

Luther described Christians serving their neighbors out of love the masks behind which God hides as he is accomplishing his concealed purposes in the world.

By this logic, warriors are divine masks doing God’s work. “God honors the sword so highly that he says that he Himself has instituted it (Romans 13:1),” Luther wrote in his brilliant treatise, “Whether soldiers, too, can be saved.”

“For the hand that wields this sword and kills with it is not man’s hand but God’s; and it is not man, but God who… kills and fights.”

Luther compared the soldier’s craft with that of a surgeon who amputates so that the whole body may not perish.

This means that soldiers come under the rubric for which Luther coined the Latin term, “larvae Dei,” masks of God. He also said that people who are not larvae Dei are by definition larvae Diaboli, the Devil’s masks. There exists no neutral position between these two extremes.

Often the Devil’s Masks are perceived to be divine because they sound so nicely. My favorite Devil’s mask banner is the bumper sticker reading: “War is not the answer.” The Devil stops you from asking the obvious: “What’s the question?” Leave a dopey statement in a limbo and you instantly grow wings in the perception of a naïve public that has never read Luther’s statement that the devil is the great imitator: “Where God builds his Church, the devil brings his imitators along and builds a chapel, nay many chapels, right beside it.”

There exists a species of copiers of the divine called “Lutheran pacifists,” although this very expression seems an oxymoron. Let me focus on one person who has become a paradigm for this contradiction in terms.

Her name is Margot Kässmann. Until last year she was the Lutheran bishop of Hanover and chairwoman of the EKD, Germany’s state-related Protestant churches.

Then the police caught her careening around town blind drunk at midnight in her luxurious office car, a Volkswagen Phaeton, allegedly with former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder by her side; admittedly, she is quite an attractive woman.

I am not holding her DUI against her. We are all sinners. We screw up. She paid the price and resigned from her high office; kudos to her for that.

But what I do hold against her are her utterly un-Lutheran homilies on war. Shortly before she gave up the highest office in German Protestantism, she stepped into Germany’s most coveted Lutheran pulpit – the pulpit of the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady) in Dresden – and opined in a New Year’s Day sermon: “Nothing is good in Afghanistan.”

The only way out was to negotiate with the Taliban. This year she followed this up by making this idiotic pronouncement: “It would be better to pray with the Taliban than to bomb them.”

Let this sink in for a moment. After the United States and Britain, Germany maintains the strongest military contingent in Afghanistan. German soldiers are dying or getting maimed in the Hindukush as are their American comrades-in-arms.

Many soldiers fighting in Afghanistan hail from the former East Germany where they were brought up in an agnostic or atheist environment. In many cases, the first time they have ever heard the Gospel was in their camps or forward positions where both Catholic and Protestant chaplains are doing a valiant job of evangelizing. For German clergymen, Afghanistan has become fertile mission field. Nowhere else have they found a more receptive young audience.

And along comes the nation’s most revered church leader and tells the soldiers and their families that their work is no good, their sacrifice in vain. What’s even worse is that Mrs Kässmann has just been named her Church’s “ambassador” to the world with the task of promoting Lutheranism as we prepare for the Reformation’s Quincentenary in 2017. Talk about setting the cat among the pigeons.

Luther called pastors poaching in the political realm “false clerics and schismatic priests,” and warned that “cooking and brewing” together the spiritual and secular realities of life was the devil’s work. He was right.

There are three interlocking arguments against Mrs. Kässmann’s behavior, which reminds me so much of American clerics agitating from the pulpit against the Vietnam War and even forbidding returning soldiers to attend services in uniform or wearing crew cuts. I am not kidding you: I organized pastoral care groups of Vietnam veterans in the VA in St. Cloud; many told me that they had actually been banished from their home congregations, Lutheran congregations included.

My first argument is doctrinal. The “sword,” meaning all governmental power including military might, is from God. Like all other vocations, a soldier’s labor is a work of love designed to protect good order, maintain peace, defend the nation and punish evildoers. Where a soldier kills in the service of an unjust ruler, it is that ruler who bears the guilt. If the soldier arrives at the conviction that he is definitely fighting an unjust war, then he must offer passive resistance but suffer the consequences, which can mean execution.

The second argument is about human care. A pastor telling soldiers that their sacrifice is futile is committing callous malpractice. I can’t think of a more mindless and unloving pursuit of ministry than this. We know from the treatment of soldiers by antiwar activists in the Vietnam era that such comportment is self-serving, making pastors feel good about themselves.

I am not saying that the church should endorse any policies; this too would amount to cooking and brewing the kingdoms together. Chaplains have more than enough work to do when they bring word and sacrament to the suffering soldiers and tell them that God is suffering with them in a godless world, to paraphrase a famous statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

All they have to do is to assure them that a soldier’s vocation is also divinely ordained. All they have to do is to feed them the means of grace. There is no more compelling account of perfect pastoring than the story of a Lutheran chaplain in the besieged Marine base of Khe Sanh in Vietnam in 1968.

As the stacks of body bags were piling up all over the place, he ran, with a stole over his flack jacket, from gun emplacement to gun emplacement to commune the fighting men, saying: “The body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of Christ, shed for you.” The impact of this statement was overwhelming: in the sight of all those broken bodies he brought the marines the one broken body that gives life. I have been told that several of the surviving men later went to seminary.

Finally, let me posit a third argument against. Kässmann’s rhetoric, and this argument has to do with service. God calls us to serve others, not ourselves. If we serve others lovingly we render the highest possible service to God. The chaplain in Khe Sanh did precisely that, making no pronouncements on whether the war in Vietnam was just or unjust because to do so would not have been his Amt, as Luther would say; it was not his office.

Let’s look at this more closely. Mrs. Kässmann clearly affirms women’s rights; without feminist instincts she would probably not have striven to become a bishop and the first female head of the Protestant church in Germany.

Now she says: Let’s negotiate with the Taliban, clearly ignoring that when these folks were in power in Afghanistan ten years ago, women were not allowed to drive; forbidden to read and write; to show their faces in public, to exercise any kind of profession. We have seen on television secretly filmed documentaries of women being flogged and stoned to death in the Kabul sports stadium on Friday after church.

So what concessions does Mrs. Kässmann expect from the Taliban if they are ever allowed back to power? That they flog and stone women only on every other Friday? That they are allowed to learn half the Arabic alphabet, either from “Alif” to “Sad” or from “Dad to Ya”? And that they drive cars with small slits in their otherwise blacked-out windshields and only between 10 and 11 o’clock in the morning, not during the rest of the day?

Ah, and then she proposed praying with the Taliban rather than bombing them. Goods. Let her, a clergywoman, be the first to pray with these men – in the name of Christ, as is her obligation as a Lutheran minister. And then see what happens to her on Fridays after church.

Pardon my sardonic sense of irony, but what we have here is so self-serving it makes me gag. I am scandalized that nobody out there seems to takes people like this one to task, and people like Kässmann exist on this side of the Atlantic just as much as in Berlin. Where are the women’s groups when the future of Afghan or Iraqi or other Muslim women is in question? Are human rights only reserved for Westerners, not for Orientals? Or have women’s groups reduced their agenda to abortion rights?

When do we start countering such smarmy “peace-loving” pronouncements that disregard the safety of fellow members of the human race?

Let me tell you why this makes me so angry. I have seen what soldiers went through in Vietnam. I have been with them when the received Dear John Letters from their wives and girlfriends who had been sucked up by the self-serving peace movement back home. There was a veritable epidemic of such letters back in the late Sixties. In one case I am familiar with a GI found a video in a parcel from his fiancé. It showed her in bed with a bearded peacenik. The GI went apoplectic, grabbed his M-16 and proceeded to randomly shoot down Vietnamese civilians.

In Vietnam I have learned the stories of soldiers who dementedly walked into enemy fire and got killed after reading farewell letters from home. And when I returned to New York after covering this war over a period of five years, the fashionable thing to say on the cocktail party circuit was: “Ugh, Vietnam Veterans, my most unfavorable minority!”

Doing ministry among Vietnam veterans in Minnesota, I found many had retreated into the forest to live in isolation from the rest of society, which they though had rejected them. Most of the vets I dealt with had “flipped off” God, as they called it, not because they didn’t believe in Him but because they thought that God had already abandoned them in Vietnam and that they were now doomed. They were victims of lousy catechesis, bad pastoral care and a self-righteous society that didn’t want to be bothered by them.

Now that I am living in southern California, I am closely connected with the huge Vietnamese community there. And you know what I have found? That there are thousands and thousands of former South Vietnamese soldiers among them still traumatized by the aftereffects of head injuries they received when tortured in Communist re-education camps after the Vietcong victory in 1975 – thirty-six years ago.

There actually exists a stark study of this phenomenon. One of my doctors, a Vietnamese woman, gave it to me. This study was conducted by a group of scholars led by Harvard psychiatrist Richard Mollica. I published it in an Internet newspaper edited by a journalism class I taught at Concordia University Irvine last year.

Do you think I could interest any mainstream media outlet in these astonishing findings? No! Not even conservative papers wanted to know about this. You see, it makes people feel too uncomfortable? And do you want to know, why? Because even in our current climate, which is much friendlier toward the military than was the case back in the Sixties and Seventies it is not commodious to think of soldiers as Masks of God, especially as veterans often act strangely – not in line with generally accepted societal standards – and will probably do so for the rest of their lives, as I learned from observing my blind father who became a prominent lawyer but was never “quite right.”

Please pardon my bluntness, but in my ranting I am actually pursuing an agenda. And this agenda comes out of a conviction based on personal experience that made me interrupt my very successful career as a journalist in order to study theology – Lutheran theology – when I was fifty.

I found that neither the ditsy liberal nor the boneheaded right-wing theologoumena dominating religious discourse provide an answer to the quintessentially Lutheran question I raised yesterday: now that we know that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, what are going to do with the rest of our lives right here in the hidden God’s left-hand kingdom.

And the answer is this: We serve. We serve with guns and pens, in operating theatres and in schools. We serve by giving love and by lovingly receiving love. And it is this message that so often eludes those of us for whom soldiers have risked their lives, and those soldiers who have never been told that their sacrifice is a divinely ordained service; that when they shoot God shoots; that when they suffer they are suffering with God because this is their cross, and God never lays a cross on us that is heavier than we can bear.

This is why the League of Faithful Masks would welcome a network of local chapters in military units around the world. I believe that recognizing each other as divine masks not just in military barracks but also in their relationship with chapters in the civilian world would make a soldier’s life much more rewarding, for it would bring clarity to his vocation.

Mentoring each other to fulfill their function as priests in the left-hand kingdom is more than an exercise of soldierly camaraderie. It also differs from the brotherly love between combatants. It is different in that it is, - well -- priestly. Priests perform sacred rites, and according to Luther the most sacred rite in the secular realm is the service of love.

Two kingdoms Doctrine vs. the “Me” culture

2011-07-29T04:52:00.000-07:00

Lecture at Annual Convention of the Augsburg Lutheran Churches in El Paso, TX, July 25, 2011

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

I am sure that all you pastors had nothing better to do during the last two months than to follow the Casey Anthony trial in Orlando on Fox or CNN. If you have not done so you might have missed a paradigm for what we will be discussing this morning – the destructive force of the Me culture and how to resist it.

In simplistic terms, had Casey been found guilty of killing her two-year old daughter the paradigm would even have been perfect: Mother murders kid because the kid prevented her from having a good time. The Me trumps a child’s right to live. Case closed. Theologically speaking, my argument would have been the same as in the case of abortion. But that’s just the theological perspective, not the legal, secular view.

Casey Anthony was acquitted of all homicide-related charges, and from this point onward this case becomes even more fascinating for us Lutherans with our two kingdoms doctrine -- the doctrine that every Christian holds dual citizenship in God’s two realms: the spiritual realm of Christ, of grace and faith, and the secular kingdom where the hidden God reigns through His masks – meaning all of us.

Casey Anthony is not guilty coram hominibus, before man, period. She might be guilty coram Deo, before God, but only God alone can judge that. We have no say in this. We must accept the acquittal.

But a hateful rabble roused by massive media malpractice thinks otherwise. During my 55 years in journalism I have not seen anything as appalling as this in any democratic country.

Media stars called the jurors morons. So-called reporters opined before millions of viewers that Casey Anthony had no place else to go but into porn industry. They openly discussed that her life was at risk, pointedly suggesting that some kook out there might well hunt her down and kill her.

We were told that Casey was considering plastic surgery to change her appearance. Television anchors claiming to be Christians declared her doomed; the possibility of repentance was clearly not an option.

The scandal came to a head when entire fleets of media vehicles pulled up at the Orange County jail in Orlando a week before yesterday in anticipation of her release.

When she slipped into an SUV to be driven to a secret hiding place, scores of “reporters” chased her in helicopters through the night, clearly intent on letting the vengeful public know her whereabouts; thankfully, they did not succeed.

I am telling you all this at a Lutheran conference because what we were witnessing here was a vile symbiosis of the contemporary Me culture and a sinister, judgmental strain of American popular religion, which is not rooted in our tradition but, Max Weber would say, in Chapter III of the Westminster Confession of 1647.

The “Me” culture shows in these reporters’ flawed perception of their vocation. Their behavior proved that they felt no calling to serve their neighbors out of love.

Instead they instead pursued their craft in a self-aggrandizing manner. They sought their 15 minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol would say, by catering to the hateful lust in the hearts of their audiences, for nothing useful could be accomplished by putting this young woman’s life at risk. That’s the Me trumping the You in the singular and plural sense of the word.

The Westminster Confession, which according to Weber shaped American Calvinism and both independent and Baptist creeds, showed its impact on the crowds clamoring for “justice” for Casey Anthony’s dead daughter Caylee. This frightening Confession’s chapter on God’s Eternal Decree states that God predestines some unto everlasting life and foreordains others to everlasting death.

Clearly, Casey Anthony belongs to the latter category in the opinion of the plebs; she has no hope for redemption; hence she must be shunned, possibly destroyed.

This must make us shudder. But where were our Lutheran leaders in all this? Why did they not thunder: No, no, no, no, no; the option of grace, repentance and forgiveness is open for everybody, including Casey Anthony?! Why did Lutherans withhold the treasure of their theology from the rest of American Protestantism? Why did they not remind all those involved in this case – including reporters -- to live up to their vocations?

I fear that this is so because too many of us have become too evangelical in the wrong sense of the term.

I have had to say this because once again I sensed that Lutheranism was living up to its reputation of being America’s sleeping giant and snoozing on. I am told that Teddy Roosevelt coined this phrase and Billy Graham picked it up from him, but I might be wrong.

Never has the genius of the Lutheran theology of the two kinds of righteousness been more glaringly evident and more blatantly ignored by too many of its own practitioners.

And – to beat my own drum -- never have I found the need for the League of Faithful Masks, which I am heading, more palpably confirmed. I am not saying this because we seek glory, but because Lutherans too must be reminded of the self-evident Lutheran question: Now that we know that we are saved by grace through faith, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?

The Christian answer is: We roll up our sleeves and engage this sinful world – the world of Casey Anthony and the rest of us – and help manage it as an act of love. We follow our vocations in all our daily endeavors, in the present case as lawyers, voters, jurors, witnesses and, yes, defendants, and most definitely as journalists.

What does our fledgling organization do? And why have we set out to start chapters across the country? We are confronting the Me culture by championing the Christian worldview, which says that we are called to serve our neighbors. Our sights are set on the You rather than the Me, and we are spreading this message by mentoring the young, by lecturing, and publishing. You will find more about this in the brochures you were given. I do hope that some of you will intiate new LFM chapters in your congregations.

And why do we call ourselves “Faithful Masks?” We have borrowed this term from Luther’s definition of all creation, especially human beings.

According to Luther, humans are “Larvae Dei”. They are the masks behind which God hides while carrying out His hidden purposes in the world.

Luther described God’s action in this world as a masquerade. If we accept our part in this masquerade as a service of love, then we are priests in the secular world, according to Luther. This requires some elucidation for which I beg your indulgence.

First let me stress where Lutherans differ from certain other Protestants concerning the Christian’s role in the secular world.

Unlike some other Protestant denominations, Lutherans do not teach that Christ transforms culture. And here we take great exception to American religion of which we have seen an ugly side in Orlando. The idea that Christ transforms culture has had an enormous influence on both sides of the political and religious spectrum in the United States.

Take the Social Gospel Movement, an essentially American phenomenon. Its preachers started from the assumption that the secular realm can be converted by religious means. Social Gospel preachers believed that the Second Coming could not occur until mankind rid itself of social evils by human effort.

But conservative evangelicals also insist that this world can be fixed with the help of the Gospel, for example by shunning people we believe are predestined to doom. In Orlando we saw evidence of this. I have no doubt that all those irate demonstrators considered themselves to be righteous Christians.

At the extremes of the political-religious spectrum even President Obama’s ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright fits into the category that preaches Christ as a transformer of society. But so does Baptist minister Steven Anderson who proclaimed from the pulpit that he hates Obama, wants him dead and burn in hell.

Lutherans say that such outlandish views mix pulpit and politics in a dangerous way.

As a Lutheran I am therefore often lost in the religious jabber that comes with political campaigns of the United States and elsewhere in the public square.

It reminds me of certain artery-clogging types of American food -- something topped with something else, and that topped with yet different stuff, plus more gunk and more and more and more, and finally everything smothered in melted cheese running over the rim of the plate.

I am overcome with a similar kind of distaste when I hear quotes from the Bible, blended with personal idiosyncrasies, recreational sociology and Marxist-Leninist liberationist rhetoric, plus theatrics – or when I listen to Bible thumpers abusing God’s word for their own political ends.

To quote Luther, this is the mark of “false clerics and schismatic spirits.” To Luther, the act of knitting and brewing spiritual and secular concerns together, amounts to presuming to give God a helping hand in the construction of His kingdom Here and Now.

In Lutheran terminology, this is Schwärmerei. It is utopianism. It tries to drag the Hereafter into the present reality. Impatient with God’s hidden timetable for the trajectory of the universe, utopians attempt to build little Elysian islands in our imperfect world. They try to craft quasi paradises tailor-made for their own preferences.

Remember what the Communists promised to create? A Workers’ and Peasants’ paradise! Remember what the Nazis claimed to have established? A thousand-year Reich, a kind of preliminary millenarian heaven with limited access. What was the Orlando rabble clamoring for? A neighborhood without Casey Anthony, a sinner.

According to Luther, man has no such divine assignment. In Hitler’s Day certain misguided Lutheran theologians spoke otherwise. But they manifestly betrayed their own theology.

Lutherans do not believe that the secular realm can be straightened out by religious means. Lutherans argue that this world is finite. It cannot be fixed but, as I said, must be managed until it disappears. This can only be done by virtue of reason.

And now I must take you along on an excursion to the specific part of our theology that pertains to the interface between the spiritual and secular aspects of human existence, the Two Kingdoms doctrine, also known as the Law-and-Gospel dialectic. Please refer to my chart; it makes it easier to follow this dialectic.

The two kingdoms doctrine is often confused with the ideologically inspired rhetoric in the United States about the separation between Church and State. What I am here to discuss is no separation but the need for making proper distinctions between two realities none of which can really exist without the other.

First we must understand that that both kingdoms belong to the same God. As man can’t separate God from God, the very idea of erecting a Berlin Wall between these two realms is absurd.

According to Lutheran theology, God simply reigns the universe in two different ways. The God who has revealed himself in Christ is also the Lord of this world, which He will never allow to slip from his hands. The two realms are not in an antagonistic but exist in a paradoxical relationship.

Lutherans say that all Christians have two citizenships. Christians hold the passport of the Kingdom of Christ (please refer to the right side of the two-kingdoms chart). This realm is infinite. Here God has revealed himself in Christ. We refer to this reality as the right-hand kingdom.

The reason why only Christians can be citizens of this realm can be found in Christianity’s core conviction that by the grace of God, Christ has redeemed the believer with His sacrifice on the cross.

Whoever believes this has eternal life.

On the other hand, Christians do share with everybody else a citizenship in the secular left-hand kingdom – the realm of which Christ told Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).

This secular kingdom will ultimately disappear. Still, until this happens it will remain the realm of the hidden God. Here He reigns through his masks – through all of us. This is where we live out our biological lives.

In this world, we are God’s cooperators. We are His partners in the process of ongoing creation – by planting trees, by plowing fields, by raising children, by scientific research, by building spaceships, and perhaps by colonizing other planets and keeping order with the help of the police and the courts and – this will be my topic tomorrow – the military.

The two kingdoms are governed by different principles. In Christ’s kingdom this governing principle is the Gospel, the good news of the believer’s salvation by grace through faith. This knowledge, called Heilsgewissheit or assurance of salvation, frees us to engage in the sinful world.

This is the secular kingdom, where the governing principle is the law in two different manifestations – Mosaic and natural. Mosaic Law applies to Jews, Christians and Muslims, who were given the law.

But God has also written His law – natural law -- on everybody’s heart. Natural law is inscribed in our sense of right and wrong, it shows in our built-in sense of ethics. It is the universal morale code.

Though from God, the sense of natural law is a property of the secular left-hand kingdom. To be sure, it can be warped. It can be bent. It can be numbed to a point where it will be barely perceptible in the public mind.

This has become particularly evident since natural-law thinking was replaced by a new kind of positive-law thinking coming out of the French Revolution.

Luther made it plain that man-made “positive law” always had to be rooted in the “lex inscripta,” the law God has inscribed in man’s heart.

By contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the principal philosopher of the French Revolution, interpreted “Positive Law” as freedom from internal constraints that limit vice.

It seems to me that Roe versus Wade offered this freedom from internal constraints limiting vice. Similarly, the fact that in the Nazi era most Germans did not express outrage at the persecution of Jews suggests generalized departure from the universal moral code.

On the other hand, when law is religiously embellished but not accompanied by reference to the Gospel, then you also liberate it from internal constraints, for example the innate constraints of human decency.

This is what we have in Islam, and what we have seen in Orlando. Can a case can be made for the existence of a kinship between Islam and a perverted kind of Reformed Christianity? Absolutely! They are akin in that they both deny the Gospel. Orlando has made this blatantly obvious.

Before we move on, let me emphasize in passing that natural law, not Scripture, is the perfect platform from which to argue against abortion rights. Lutheran often foolishly follow the evangelical example of randomly choosing Bible verses to stem the contemporary genocide of one million babies a year.

These references are meaningless when you talk to people who do not even know the Bible. On the other hand, it is easy to ask anybody of any culture: “Is it right to kill innocent human beings? Is it right to suck out their brains to collapse their skulls in order to yank a child’s body out of the birth canal?” If you will check the Internet you will find a website of an organization called “Atheists and Agnostics for Life.” Clearly, the moral position of these nonbelievers must be rooted somewhere. I suggest it’s natural law.

But let us now look at the problem that has been troubling me ever since I began covering American politics as a journalist back in the 1960s: the improper use of both leftwing and right-wing religious rhetoric in affairs of state.

Lutherans should be much more outspoken about this issue. Against the religious junk food offered by other Christian traditions we should address the following questions from our perspective:

Where does government fit into the two-kingdoms scheme to which Calvinists, Methodists and others object out of doctrinal ignorance? By what means are we governed?

Here is the answer based on Scripture:

Christ’s kingdom is governed by the Gospel, by grace, love, and faith. But the Gospel can tell you nothing about how to fight the war in Afghanistan, how to end the world’s immigration quagmires, whether or not to impose speed limits or gun control or a universal health system.

These are all issues of the secular realm. And the secular realm is governed by natural reason.

Luther’s detractors often argue that he called reason the Devil’s whore. This was an especially popular charge in England during World War II. Dean William Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London used to make this point.

Luther did say this, but let us quote him in the proper context.

What Luther said was this, and I paraphrase: Reason is the empress of all things in this world. Reason is a gift from God enabling us to find our way around this world. Reason can even tell us that God “is.” But if reason presumes to tell us anything about God’s nature then reason becomes the Devil’s whore.

It is by natural reason, not the Gospel, that Kings and Presidents, Prime Ministers and mayors must run this world. ”The emperor need not be a Christian, as long as he possesses reason,” Luther said.

But of course rulers are themselves divine masks, like the rest of us in our secular vocations.

So did God govern through Hitler? Did He govern through Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot? Were these tyrants God’s masks? Are dishonest judges His masks? Are greedy businessmen? Is God hiding behind a coke-snorting brain surgeon?

Let me remind you of how Luther defined Satan. He called him God’s imitator, and this imitator too, like God Himself, conducts a masquerade in this world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor martyred by the Nazis, addressed this phenomenon most succinctly when he wrote in his prison cell:

“The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to disguise as light, charity, historical necessity or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethics, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.”

In this crazy situation, we have to do what’s reasonable while operating in the secular realm. But how does one act reasonably when a tyrant poses as the mask of the hidden God? Luther has often been accused of preaching quietism in such a situation, and indeed some Lutherans, though not all, have acted that way in Nazi Germany.

Yet Luther said, “If the coachman has lost his mind he must be removed from the driver’s seat.” But even in so doing we can make mistakes; we are fallible after all. Therefore if before we topple the tyrant and we must find the right replacement, for we cannot leave the carriage driverless, lest chaos ensue.

Even then there is no guarantee that things will work out well. Bonhoeffer participated in the plot to rid Germany of Hitler by means of tyrannicide. When asked about this he said he knew that he was engaged in a sinful plot. But he added, “Right now reason compels us to do this.” He added that he must turn to Christ’s right-hand kingdom for forgiveness.

Bonhoeffer’s plans failed, and he was hanged.

Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of my hometown of Leipzig and leader of the German civilian resistance against Hitler since 1937, tried to remove the coachman not by assassination; Goerdeler plotted to have Hitler arrested by the German military and tried for treason before a German court; and Goerdeler put together an elaborate list of candidates for a post-Nazi German government – from chief of state right down to county police chief.

He also failed and wound up on the gallows.

So where does this leave us now?

In his Nazi prison cell, Bonhoeffer wrote these memorable words:

“I believe that God will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For these purposes, he needs men to make the best use of everything.”

This paragraph contains the quintessential Lutheran paradox, that shows that for all of their differences, no Berlin Wall separates to two realms: We have a statement of faith in the first sentence and an affirmation of God’s ultimate sovereignty over the left-hand kingdom in the second.

I have taken this quote from the prologue to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. A little further on, Bonhoeffer pushes this faith-and-reason dialectic even more forcefully:

“I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds. I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions.”

Prayers belong to the right-hand kingdom; responsible actions are performed in the secular realm. Thus the two complement each other and therefore are not separate from one another, just distinct.

This is the tension field in which all Christians live, and in which Lutheran theology seems to provide a helpful compass.

Such a compass is particularly vital in a democracy because the sovereigns in a democratic nation are not a select few as in Luther’s day five centuries ago.

In a democracy, voters are the divinely appointed sovereigns. Therefore Romans 13:1 applies to voters as much as to all other rulers: “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

This has such profound implications for Christians that neither the social gospel approach nor Bible thumping seem right when considering the thorny issues of church and state, faith and reason, religion and society.

These implications can be summed up in three points.

1. According to Romans 13, Christians in the voting booth must be aware that they have a divine calling to help manage God’s secular realm.

2. In this vocation they will not proclaim the Gospel, as little as a responsible brain surgeon preaches the Gospel to the patient whose head he is operating on. They “share” the Gospel in church or in prayer groups or in private discussions. But in the voting booth or political assemblies, Christians serve God by serving their fellow man.

3. If they do so with love and circumspection rather than for selfish ends voters rank as members of the universal priesthood of all believers.

These three points pertain to the world of which Christ said that it was not His kingdom. They pertain to the world whose empress is reason, according to Luther. The Gospel will hopefully illume reason. Still, Christians like non-Christian voters – who have the law written upon their hearts – must base their decision on reason.

The Church has no business to tell the sovereigns of this world how to vote, but as the Church is imbedded as a corporate citizen of the left-hand kingdom it can and must counsel these sovereigns in a non-partisan way.

Take the race issue. The Church must make it clear to its members that under the Gospel there is not racial divide in Christ’s right-hand kingdom.

But the Church is in no position to opine on the means with which the results of racial segregation can be overcome. Would affirmative action the right way, for example? This is a question so be discussed reasonably in the secular realm.

But here is a neat point: If whites and blacks worship and commune together in a colorblind congregation on Sundays, to would surely be easier for them to discuss secular matters during the week. Here one must hope that Luther’s dictum should apply: The Christian faith illumes reason.

The Church must tell is congregants that they have an divine obligation to be relentlessly curious. The Church must urge them to muster the courage to ask candidates be brutally truthful about the dire state the world is in, and how they intend to deal with this, even at the risk of proposing unpopular measures.

The Church has a calling to warn voters against basing their decision on prejudice, ideology, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness, and a sloppy desire for an “easy way out,” rather than informed logic and neighborly love, lest they neglect their priestly duties.

This applied to politics as much as to court cases. The Orlando rabble based its actions on prejudice, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness and the sloppy desire for an “easy way out,” in this case a witch hunt against Casey Anthony.

The Church must also inform its members that playing ostrich is not a Christian option, but neither is kneejerk reaction to an unpopular verdict. A Christian failing to go to the polls for fear of voting wrongly resembles the useless servant who kept the pound entrusted to him laid away in a napkin (Luke 19:20). The same applies to Christians deaf to the calling to run for public office.

By the same token, a Christian behaving like Pavlov’s dog when a jury arrives by use of sound reason at a judgment is sabotaging God’s trust because that Christian implicitly denies the divine origin of the jurors’ vocation and thus rejects the created order of secular government, which includes secular justice.

Secular vocations are part of the created order. In my life I have witnessed the chilling consequences of attempts to undo created order. The behavior of the Orlando rabble shows the pitfalls of such behavior, which was an expression of self-righteousness has nothing in common with the Christian faith.

MEDIA MATTERS: The Casey Anthony story – a farewell to journalism

2011-07-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

No self-respecting newsman will shed a tear over the demise of The News of The World, London’s reprehensible Sunday paper whose reporters acted like a cross between KGB spooks and Mafia thugs for years. These weren’t journalists. Professional journalists don’t tap other people’s telephones; nor are professional journalists vile bigots stirring their readers’ hatred of foreigners, which was another News of the World specialty.

So I suppose that we must be thankful to publisher Rupert Murdoch for putting an end to this depraved parody of the great British press tradition whose noble home used to be Fleet Street where I worked nearly half a century ago. That said, the world has just witnessed in an Orlando courthouse a massive case of media malpractice with infinitely wider ramifications than anything ever perpetrated by the News of the World ruffians.

The way cable television, including Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Broadcasting Company, covered Casey Anthony’s acquittal in her murder trial was a travesty. It violated all professional standards to which trial reporters in the civilized world were rightly held for as long there has been a free press, whipping up public emotions to the level of lynch mob frenzy in a manner that reminded me more of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s evil propaganda minister, than of Edward R. Murrow, the celebrated American radio reporter.

To be sure, Casey Anthony was not a sympathetic defendant. That she partied for 30 days after her daughter Caylee’s death seemed incomprehensible, at least to those mercifully unfamiliar with the phenomenon of dancing around the rim of a volcano in the face of impending doom. What do contemporary media philistines know of the reaction of people who have witnessed unfathomable horror collectively or individually? It is quite conceivable that after her child’s accidental death Casey Anthony just “snapped” and went wild. I am not saying that this was so, but having seen times of great calamity I could make a case for such a scenario.

Watching the media coverage of this trial took my breath away. Even before the jury retired, cable TV hosts and panelists, mainly lawyers, former prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys who dominate America’s airwaves nowadays, reached their verdict before tens of millions of viewers: guilty. Disgustingly, this was undergirded by observations of “experts” such as a specialist on body language who told us that Casey Anthony’s mimicry clearly suggested deep hate.

And when the jurors acquitted her, two Fox anchors, including a comely ex-judge, went apoplectic, as did former prosecutor Nancy Grace on another network. In his signature exercise of populism, Bill O’Reilly did what contemporary media stars love to do: he made the audience retry the defendant. Result: 90 percent vote for a guilty verdict. Ninety percent: In real terms, that's a hung jury. Prompted by O'Reilly, comedian Dennis Miller jested that every defendant was entitled to a jury of twelve of his or her peers; hence “this defendant is a moron who found a jury if twelve morons.”

Casey’s future was generally described as dire, and though the panelists by and large professed to be Christians, the option of repentance did not come up; the possibility that some competent pastor or priest might find his way to Casey to bring her the quintessential Christian message of forgiveness for whatever she might have done was not even mentioned. On the other hand, the whole world was told that she would probably wind up in the porno industry.

This revolting display of judgmental self-righteousness was punctuated by perfunctory references to the assumed superiority of the American legal system over anybody else’s legal system I wonder how much this type of media hyperbole might have contributed to an increase in anti-Americanism abroad. I love this country, but, friends, this was definitely not your finest hour.

It became even more disgusting when U.S, television, which can be received around the world, showed the mob outside the Orlando courthouse demanding “justice for Caylee” and spewing hatred against the jurors who voted, presumably with great compunction, the way they had to vote in the case of reasonable doubt. In a democratic system, Court decisions must be respected; this is the first lesson I learned when I covered my first trial more than 50 years ago. In a free society, journalists are not called to be jurors or judges. The rabble out in the streets has no such vocation either, regardless of its prejudice. Jurors and judges are called to be jurors or judges; they alone.

There was a time when this was the iron rule of journalism. That was a time when journalists practiced journalism, not thugs as in London or lawyers and hyperventilating anchors as in Orlando. I don’t know why courts allow these poseurs to displace rightful judgment in the eyes of the public, quite possibly kicking off a witch-hunt against an unpopular young woman. I don’t know why Mr. Murdoch and other cable TV bosses conspire in letting these people undermine free journalism, and with that, free society. I fear that they will come to regret this farewell to journalism as evidently Rupert Murdoch has come to regret that he allowed the rogue behavior by the News of the World reporters for far too long.

Drawdown in Afghanistan – will populism again trump victory?

2011-06-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

President Barack Obama’s decision to set a timeline for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan against the advice of his generals begs the question: Will populist reflexes inevitably prevent democracies from winning wars of long duration?

One of democracy’s most determined antagonists came to this conclusion 60 years ago. North Vietnamese defense minister

: Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara exchanging recollections of the Vietnam War with his past foe, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, in 1997. / AP

declared that “the enemy,” meaning the West, “does not possess … the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war.” Fighting the French and later the Americans, he based his whole strategy on this insight – successfully, as we now know.

In all likelihood, Giap explained, public opinion in the democracy would demand an end to the “useless bloodshed,” or its legislature will insist on knowing how long it will have to vote astronomical credits without a clear-cut victory in sight. This is what eternally compelled democratic politicians to agree to almost any kind of humiliating compromise rather than to accept the idea of a semi-permanent anti-guerilla operation, he added.

In a cartoon in The Oregonian newspaper, Jack Ohman recently sketched a hand drawing dotted lines mapping “The Way out of Afghanistan.” The last image of this political comic strip showed the contours of Vietnam next to a briefer saying, “UM.”

Given General Giap’s statement about the political-psychological shortcomings of the democratic system when faced with an inconclusive military operation, Ohman’s analogy was frighteningly accurate. Once again, we keep hearing the term, “war fatigue,” though not in reference to the military but to civilian populations far, far away in the United States where 56 percent of the Americans demand a U.S. troop withdrawal as soon as possible.

Once again, maligning local allies as corrupt has become fashionable, so as if Western politicians were paragons of honesty. Once again, wordsmiths craft smarmy euphemisms for defeatist courses of action. In the Vietnam days the slogan was “peace with honor,” today it is “responsible peace” (Obama), although there was nothing honorable about handing over South Vietnam to totalitarian aggressors, from whom millions fled with many drowning in the South China Sea. And there would be nothing honorable in surrendering Afghanistan once again to fanatics manifestly belonging to the global Islamist movement that is determined to subjugate the world to its hideous faith.

Jack Ohman’s analogy was correct as far as it went. But I wonder if in a future cartoon he would remind the Oregonian’s readers of how the Vietnam story continued, for example with “reeducation camps” where hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were interned, starved and subjected to unspeakable pain; thousands of Vietnamese refugees in the United States are still suffering from the effects of torture inflicted on them during communist captivity decades ago, according to a recent study led by Harvard psychiatrist Richard F. Mollica. This is a story you can only read in a student publication; the mainline media did not consider it newsworthy.

Mr. Obama spoke of his desire for peace negotiations in which the Taliban should be included. Before Saigon fell in 1975, there were also “peace negotiations” with Hanoi and the Vietcong. In the end, the Communist invaders vanquished the democratic half of their country. It is not hip to say that South Vietnam was a democracy, albeit a flawed one. It had one of the most elegant constitutions and, fighting for its survival, conducted admirably free elections while back home in the U.S.A. hordes of Boomers marched through the streets waving Vietcong flags and shouting “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh.”

So now “peace talks” have again become the mantra. But peace talks with whom? With insurgents believing that they are under God’s command to impose their system on the whole world? What concessions can we expect from such interlocutors? That they proceed at first gingerly in whipping and stoning their women should they dare to drive, study, leave their husbands or, Allah forbid, resist arranged marriages at an age when others have just stopped toddling? Knowing the Taliban’s past, I marvel at the Western women’s movement atypical restraint when pondering the possibility; hypocrisy is of course another feature of populism.

One can be grateful that comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan ends when it comes to the treatment of returning warriors. Four decades ago they were badmouthed, called baby killers, abandoned by wives and girl friends, even asked not to attend their home churches in uniform; this was a time when America truly showed its ugly side.

Today this is not the case, thank God, but it seems that once again populists, driven by the growing impatience of their home front, might deprive their military from completing their mission victoriously. If so, populism will trump democracy. The consequences will be much more dire than in Vietnam. There the adversaries were Marxists, belonging to a movement that soon imploded worldwide. In Afghanistan the foe is a radical strain of a religion with a 1,400-year history and global missionary aspirations, though they are currently in the defensive, just like the Vietcong after the Têt Offensive of 1968. Still, they might yet succeed. How? Read General Giap.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com. He has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Homobonide twaddle, the cause of Robert Gates’ frustration

2011-06-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Who is to blame for Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ frustration with NATO? In one word: Homobonides.

You don’t know what Homobonides are? Not to worry. I have just made up this term, translating the sardonic German expression, Gutmenschen, into English with a little help from Latin.

So what are Gutmenschen? Not really “good people,” as you might falsely assume after splitting this composite word into its two component parts. There are and always have been truly good people in Germany, of course, for example Helmut James von Moltke, whose farewell letters from a Nazi prison to his wife, Freya, have just been released. Moltke explained why he was facing the gallows: “Not as a Protestant, not as a landowner, not as a nobleman I stood before the [People’s] court, but as a Christian, and none other.“ That was a good man writing, not a Gutmensch.

Or take that retired West German army captain I met in a Jaffna restaurant during the civil war in Sri Lanka. He had come at his own expense to clear landmines, a benevolent activity that had already cost him the use of one eye in Angola. You find plenty of this kind of good Germans, particularly overseas – good men and women, not Homobonides.

Homobonides are the European incarnation of political correctness, originally an American affliction. Homobonides make pronouncements that sound good until you start to think. They talk a lot about peace, for example, not in a theological, historical or pragmatic sense but solely because of the word’s heartwarming properties. It’s this constant kitschy reference to peace that has caused defense budgets in Europe to decline thus rendering NATO military irrelevant, according to Gates, who predicted in his valedictory speech in Brussels a dismal future for the alliance.

Homobonides don’t believe in the Latin adage, “sic vis pacem, para bellum” (if you want peace, prepare for war), if in their appalling lack of historical knowledge they have ever heard of it. If Homobonides ever thought responsibly about the future, they would by definition cease to exist; therefore they don’t dare to. Let’s enjoy our prosperity here and now and let our children fend for themselves; that’s their motto.

The poster girl of German Gutmenschentum is the Rev. Margot Kässmann, 53, Lutheran bishop of Hanover and chairwoman of the state-related Protestant Church in Germany until she resigned last year, having been caught careening around town at the wheel of her Volkswagen Phaeton office car with a blood alcohol level of 0.154.

This resignation, seen as an act of valor rather than the necessary consequence of misconduct, has since made her Germany’s idol by giving speeches and churning out books filled with moralistic clichés, which literary critic Denis Scheck wickedly rated as “Eiapopeia-Prosa,” or lullaby baby prose. Misogynists have noted that women above the age of 50 make up the majority of her acolytes; if true this would be a troubling observation, given the successes of past German populists especially among this segment of the population.

Before giving up her bishopric last year she stepped into the splendid pulpit of Dresden’s baroque “Frauenkirche” (Church of Our Lady) and proclaimed, “Nothing is good in Afghanistan,” which was not a sensitive thing to say given that German soldiers are fighting and dying valiantly in that country. It was also a thoroughly un-Lutheran statement. Lutherans are not pacifists, and they especially object to “cooking and brewing” secular and spiritual matters together, which according to Luther is the devil’s work. Luther called preachers doing this “false clerics and schismatic spirits.”

But Dr. Kässmann knows what she is doing. She is catering to Europe’s Homobonide Zeitgeist, which is pacifist, thus gradually elevating herself to a position of the opposition Social Democrats’ foremost intellectual, according to the newsmagazine, Focus.

And so at the recent “Kirchentag” in Dresden, a meeting of 120,000 Protestants, she piled on some more gobbledygook. Instead of bombing the Taliban, she told a cheering crowd, we should pray with them. Now that’s rich coming from a pastor whose own career displayed an infatuation with the idea of female empowerment.

Let’s not belabor the fact that in the eyes of churches representing 70 percent of world Christendom, including this writer’s branch of Lutheranism, a female bishop is an ontological absurdity, kind of like the pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 movie, Junior.

But imagine NATO followed Kässmann’s advice. Imagine the Taliban, spared allied bombing, returned to Power in Kabul. Imagine they picked up from where they had left off a decade ago. Imagine an “Afghan Margot Kässmann,” perhaps named Maha, elevated herself to the rank of a Muslim Mufti, left her husband and were caught driving drunk through Kabul with an unidentified man an her side, and then suggested praying with infidels. From what we know about the Taliban’s past behavior, what would happen to poor Maha on Friday after church?

I pondered this question with a specialist on Islamic law computing the number of lashes she might first receive at Kabul’s sports stadium: 80 for having learned how to read and write? 99 for driving a car? 150 for drunkenness? As for her presumption of being cleric-in-chief, praying with infidels, and allowing an unknown guy so close to her, there’s no question of what would happen after that: They would stick her into a hole in the ground and lob rocks at her head until she is dead.

The good news is that in Germany even the liberal media are souring of Homobonide hypocrisy, to wit Der Spiegel’s admonition to Margot Kässmann to remember the Decalogue. Here is how this normally left-of-center newsmagazine paraphrased the Eighth Commandment to fit ex-bishop Kässmann and fellow Homobonides: “Du sollst keinen scheinheiligen Stuss reden.”

In English: “Thou shalt not talk sanctimonious twaddle.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com . He has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Germany’s anti-nuclear Schwärmerei

2011-05-31T11:37:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Germany’s radical decision to quit nuclear power by 2022 has me worried, and not just for economic reasons. My concern is primarily philosophical for this development suggests the robust return of a troubling mindset that has served Germany and the world badly for centuries. It is called Schwärmerei and translates literally into “swarming.” Martin Luther invented this term for a murky combination of utopian mass enthusiasm and fanaticism.

Luther used the word, Schwärmerei, to describe 16^th-century theological-political movements that taught that man should give God a helping hand by establishing Elysian entities already here on earth in anticipation of His ultimate paradise. The quintessential “Schwärmer” was Luther’s antagonist Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525), chief ideologue of the 16^th-century peasants’ wars in Germany. Müntzer had a great influence on the bloodiest political movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Marxism and National Socialism.

Both Friedrich Engels, the father of Communist theory, and Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg deferred to Müntzer, even though they were atheists and he was not. But it was from Müntzer that they inherited the idea of having to create a miniature paradise with limited access here and now. The Communist self-declared goal was to create a “Worker’s and Peasants’ Paradise;” the Nazis tried to establish an idyllic reservation for one particular tribe, the Aryans. Both proved to be irrational and ultimately lethal schemes.

It would be unfair to suggest that the unattractive alliance between environmentalists and dull populists driving Germany’s exit from atomic power is in a league with genocidal fiends such as the Communists and Nazis. My point is merely that, like those movements, they are responding to irrational sentiments like fear, envy and insularity; the dreaded German word, Sonderweg, springs to mind.

That the earthquake and tsunami disaster in faraway Japan should send a majority of Germans, whose country rarely experiences seismic tremors of a magnitude of minor itches, into mass hysteria, and that their center-right government now responds to this frenzy in the manner of populist Pavlovians, is a disturbing development indeed. It seems no less alarming than Chancellor Merkel’s and Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s flip-flop policy of breaking solidarity with Germany’s partners in NATO and the European Union in the Libyan crisis, thus catering to the mushy pacifist mindset that has taken hold of the German people since World War II.

The spectacle of the world’s most successful economic power succumbing to its people’s angst seems unbecoming, all the more so as there is no European nation more dependent on electricity that Germany, and none with more open borders; Germany has 10 immediate neighbors, all with nuclear reactors whose radiation clouds, if there were ever to be a disaster, would not ask Berlin for permission before traversing German territory. Thus it is fallacious Schwärmerei to assume that a nation of 80 million surrounded by ten other nations could be turned into a nuclear-free land of bliss.

Not that concerns about atomic power lacked legitimacy; particularly the issue of what to do with the nuclear waste remains unresolved. But it surely makes no sense to act according to the motto of “stop the world I want to get off.” By all means let’s accelerate the search for alternative energies, but in the meantime build the safest reactors imaginable, which is precisely what German manufacturers have been doing thus far.

It seems sad that the German genius to which my country owed its postwar success has evidently deserted the political arena. But at least it is still present in the economy and in industry, where imaginative minds will doubtless find a response to the mess our latter-day Schwärmer and populists are currently causing. This is of course a statement of faith of sorts. Would it be that I could be as confident about my country’s future leaders!

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

WORLD MATTERS: A royalist dream – Harry, King of Saxony

2011-04-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Pardon this outburst from an unreconstructed German monarchist: Scanning the Internet for news about the impending royal wedding has rendered me envious, morose and frustrated. Never mind the uncomprehending sniggers by Bill O’Reilly about this display of allegedly antiquated glamour. O’Reilly might have many merits but he does not grasp the need for glamour in this era of vulgarity and triviality every one of his T.V. shows so aptly portrays night after night.

Being German, I am keenly aware of the dearth of glamour that has marked my country for almost a century. In church we have surly preachers in black robes opining from the pulpit about separating garbage instead of chanting the rich Lutheran liturgy and joyfully proclaiming the Gospel. In academia, colorful commencement proceedings have been abolished; graduates are told to pick up their diplomas in the Admin Building, room 312/A, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. In affairs of state, we are represented not by Kaisers or kings with spiked helmets but grey-clad presidents; some of these have been impressive, I admit, but glamorous they were not. Recently, one of our heads of state just walked off the job like a peeved bookkeeper; compare that with the iron self discipline of Queen Elizabeth II who has just turned 85 and never missed a single workday in the 58 years of her reign.

What galls me most is that royal ceremonies in neighboring countries, in Britain, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Monaco or Spain, are all implicitly German affairs because the blue blood in the veins of at least one of the players is our blue blood – quality German blood. The German yellow press reports every minutiae of these events while missing the central point: A little more of this kind of style in our own country would insert a modicum of elegance into our political and societal discourse, which is even more annoying than its American equivalent because we tend to systematize everything, including imported bad taste.

At this point, though, I must report some good news blessing our bland republican reality with a ray of potential glitter. In my home state of Saxony a baron by the name of Hildebrand von Thumbshirn is waging a campaign to place Prince Harry on the throne of Dresden. I confess that I know little about Herr von Thumbshirn, other than that his family hails from Schloss Ponitz, a fine Renaissance castle in the duchy of Altenburg.

According Thumbshill, there is only one problem with his proposal. He lacks the €250,000 ($360,000) required to start a “Saxon Windsor Party.” There is another problem, too: why Windsor? Why this name that is as spurious as “liberty cabbage,” the American neologism cooked up in World War I to camouflage the German origin of sauerkraut; as specious as the British misnomer, Alsatian, for German Shepherd dogs, and as daft as the term “freedom fries” latter-day American know-nothings invented for French Fries ten years ago when France and Germany opposed the second Iraq war?

So I wonder: Is it not a little petty of the royal family to cling to the fake name it adopted after their own relative, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s first grandson, had become their adversary in Europe’s fratricidal World War I? Why not acknowledge what they are – a blend of German clans, the Hanoverians plus the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whose name they bore until they traded it in for the name of a small town in the County of Surrey? Here you might interject: What about that Greek in the equation? Indeed there is one; Prince Philip of Greece married Elizabeth née Windsor and became the Duke of Edinburgh, but what, do you suppose, is the Greek royal family’s real name? Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

You see, if you look carefully, you can’t escape us. Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost of Germany’s 16 states. It has a discrete but still wealthy and influential ducal family by this very name; its branches reign in Denmark and Norway and once upon a time lorded over Greece; via its Greek line it is related by marriage to the royal families of Spain and Britain. In addition to Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg a second German dynasty with an Anglicized name contributed to the noble genealogy of the Queen’s consort. They call themselves Mountbatten but used to be known as Battenberg; Philip’s mother is one of those.

Germany’s top aristocracy has held thrones almost everywhere in Europe – in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belgium, Scandinavia and Luxembourg. They even left their mark across the Atlantic, in Brazil and Mexico, but also in Hollywood where Prince Frederic von Anhalt shares the glamour of his name with Zsa Zsa Gabor, although he acquired it by adoption; at birth he was called Hans Lichtenberg. Real Anhalt blood has survived in the Romanov family; Catherine the Great was a Princess of Anhalt before becoming a tsarina. And perhaps the noblest Anhalt was Joachim Ernst, the last reigning duke. He resisted the Nazis, was sent to Dachau concentration camp, then liberated by the Americans only to die 1947 at Communist hands in Buchenwald concentration camp.

He was a stellar example of German royals opposing Hitler, a phenomenon rarely acknowledged by Germans or their former adversaries, but this is a story for another day.

Before I proceed with my and Baron von Thumbshill’s monarchist reveries, I may be permitted a historical reminder. Preceding the invention of the automobile by Carl Benz 125 years ago, princes and princesses were Germany’s most precious export items. Our nation with its countless dukes, margraves and landgraves was an amazingly rich source of bluebloods. The British in particular couldn’t get enough of them. They loved King George III, even though the United Kingdom lost much of North America during his reign. They loved this Hanoverian eccentric, especially when he stepped into the sea at Weymouth stark naked, while a band hidden in a nearby bathing machine struck up “God Save the King;” bathing machines, an English invention, were large-wheeled carts that were rolled off the beaches into the water to afford bathers privacy; sometimes they had pianos and even sizable musical ensembles on board.

Or think how much leverage the British allowed George’s daughter-in-law, Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, even though she often neglected to wash, wore dirty clothes, consequently emitted unpleasant smells, and then eventually absconded to Italy with her manservant, Bartolomeo Pergami, leaving her husband, the debauched George IV, in the arms of Maria Fitzherbert whom he had secretly married before even meeting Caroline. The British loathed him and loved her.

Far be it from me to try to wrestle away from our British cousins the scions of our finest families. By all means, hold onto them, you are welcome! But it would be nice if they sent us back just one of them and stopped the false labeling. Please, they are not Windsors but Saxe-Coburg-Gothas! Now I know from personal experience that hyphenated names can be cumbersome, and names with two hyphens must be especially awkward, which is why the Bulgarians quite sensibly called their royal family Sakskoburggotski, though the Belgians, who were twice invaded by the Germans in the 20^th century, seem to have no problem to have a king sporting two German hyphens.

To get back to Baron Thumpshirn’s proposal, and to propose to the British a way out of their Windsor bagatelle, how about reverting to the elaborate family’s real name, which is Wettin. The Wettin dynasty has been around and much beloved by its subjects in assorted principalities of central Germany since the 10^th century, 100 years before William the Conqueror invaded England. A Wettin prince-elector, Frederick the Wise, was Luther’s protector. Another Wettin, Augustus the Strong, built baroque Dresden and with one of his numerous mistresses, Countess Maria Aurora von Königsmarck, sired Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750), who became one of France’s most celebrated field marshals; one of his grand children gained literary fame calling herself George Sand.

So let’s take up Thumbshirn’s suggestion and make Harry von Wettin King of Saxony. That he is a brave military officer with a great sense of humor won’t hurt. A wholesome display of manliness and humor from the throne will do us Saxons, actually all Germans, a lot of good.

Did Lincoln owe his victory to Germans?

2011-04-19T15:33:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

One century ago, on the 50^th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, historian Wilhelm Kaufmann concluded that without his 216,000 German-born soldiers, President Abraham Lincoln could not have won that conflict. More recently, Thomas Adam, professor of history at the University of Texas in Arlington, suggested that this might be an exaggeration, and German historian Wolfgang Helbich rated Kaufmann’s finding as an indication of “how filiopietism then and ethnic politics now can mangle straight facts;” the word, filiopietism, means immoderate reverence for forebears or tradition.

Kaufmann made his observation in his book, “Die Deutschen im amerikanischen Bürgerkriege” (the Germans in the American Civil War), the seminal work on this subject. He was not alone in his assessment. “Take the Dutch out of the Union army, and we could whip the Yankees easily,” said Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Confederate Forces, meaning “die Deutschen” (the Germans), not the Dutch, who hailed from the Netherlands.

In 1869, Benjamin Gould, a Union army physician, analyzed official reports about the Civil War. He found that 2,018,200 men served in the northern regiments. Of these, he concluded, German-born men were the most loyal Union supporters. German immigrants, Gould added, provided 50 percent more soldiers than they would have had to by law. According to Kaufmann, every tenth Union trooper was a German. “Germans fought almost exclusively on the side of the Union and outnumbered all other ethnic groups significantly;” only a few thousand served in the Confederate forces.

“Their unity placed [German immigrant soldiers] in a unique position,” Kaufmann wrote. While native Americans and members of all other immigrant groups split into two hostile military camps… Germans found [themselves] only on the side of the Union. Hardly anybody among them supported secession, and there were almost no German Slave owners.”

Their loyalty to the northern cause also paralleled the sentiment in their homeland. “In most German states public opinion was strongly pro-Union,” Adam wrote in his book, “Germany and the Americas.” He related how Frankfurt became a hub of pro-Union activities, in part due to the influence of U.S. consul general William Walton Murphy who “made sure that the press remained friendly,” wrote articles in the leading local newspapers and convinced Frankfurt banks to support large war bonds.

Not that their loyalty earned German Civil War soldiers much gratitude from their Anglo-American comrades-in-arms, who reviled them as “bloody Dutchmen” and blamed their alleged “cowardice” for the disasterous defeat of 76,000 Union forces by 43,000 Confederates during the battle of Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, a claim not supported by today’s military historians.

German commanders such as Col. Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker reported that their units were deprived of supplies and had to find their own provisions as a result of “know-nothing” prejudices against immigrants prevalent among American-born bigots, called responsible for logistics.

Tales of open anti-German bias by American anti-immigrant “nativists” two generations before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany mar the otherwise upbeat story about the powerful contribution by the largest ethnic group in the United States to the eradication of slavery.

German units were often mirror images of the Turnvereine, or gymnastics associations, that emerged during the German revolutions in the first half of the 19^th century. At first, German was the command language of many of these regiments. Their soldiers wore uniforms resembling those of the armies of the different German principalities. The German-language press in the United States praised them for being better led, fighting better, keeping their camps better and their bodies in better condition than their English-speaking counterparts in the Union army.

So well regarded were some of the German units that the Jewish community in Chicago raised a company of volunteers on the condition that they be integrated into a regiment commanded by Col. Hecker, a lawyer and former leader of the failed revolution in the German Duchy of Baden.

On the other hand, throughout the Civil War German troops were the target of ridicule by the English-language press and derogatory pamphlets circulating among the military, though Lincoln strongly comdemned such tendencies, and Gen. William T. Sherman praised the bravery of his German soldiers. He also called on of their commanders, Col. Edward Siber, the “best trained officer in this army.”

It seems that the Germans’ insistence on the maintenance of their distinctive lifestyle, on cultivating their language, their music and educational system, and on drinking lots of beer, have caused this antagonism, which 50 years later, in World War I, has produced heinous forms of persecution, including lynching, out of all places in Missouri.

Yet it was in Missouri where 10 primarily German-speaking regiments saw to it that this state under the leadership of its pro-Confederate Governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson did not change sides. Their most famous commander was Col., later Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, a Baden revolutionary who was instrumental in turning “Turnvereine” into combat-ready forces.

It was in Missouri, too, where two German-language newspapers, “Anzeiger des Westens” and “Westliche Post”, were instrumental in upholding pro-Union sentiment among the German population; of the 170,000 inhabitants of St. Louis, 60,000 were Germans.

Among the editors of “Westliche Post” were men who played pivotal roles in the conflict: Carl Schurz, a general, later Senator from Missouri and then U.S. Secretary of the Interior; Emil Praetorious who organized German troops in the Civil War, but also Joseph P.Pulitzer, a German-speaking Hungarian who joined the paper after the War as a court reporter.

Considering that Missouri was on the verge of joining the Confederacy, and that the Union might not have prevailed in such a catastrophe, historian Wilhelm Kaufmann could well be right: Abraham Lincoln might have lost the Civil War; so perhaps owed his victory indeed to Germans.

FAITH MATTERS: Hugo Chávez -- Bolivar's red reincarnation?

2011-04-08T17:21:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

In the late 1970s, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis came across Ayatollah Khomeini’s short book, “Islamic Government,” which later became known as the Islamic cleric’s “Mein Kampf.” It detailed what Khomeini planned to do with his country once he came to power. “I tried to bring this to the attention of people here. The New York Times wouldn’t touch it,” Lewis told the The Wall Street Journal. Underestimating long-term strategies of sinister leaders seems endemic in the Western media. The quasi-religious fervor with which Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez pursues his plan to resurrect Simon Bolívar’s empire, Grand Colombia, is largely overlooked.

When in 1999 Venezuelans elected left-winger Hugo Chávez as their new president, word spread among the wizards of the syncretistic Maria Lionza cult that the revered Bavarian warlock Klaus-Dieter Nassall had proclaimed him Simon Bolívar reincarnate who would do wondrous things for his nation.

Soon Chavez’s busts began adorning the altars of Maria Lionza temples in the barrios of Caracas and other major cities, alongside images of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the archangel Michael assorted Catholic saints, Viking warriors and other idols nobody else has ever heard of, such as some peculiar figures wearing top hats and post-Victorian attire.

The victory of this former lieutenant-colonel seemed to confirm a prophecy by Beatriz Veit-Tané, a self-proclaimed high priestess of Maria Lionza. She predicted in 1967 that in the year 2000 “a messenger of light will rise from the humble classes” to resurrect Gran Colombia, Bolivar’s short-lived creation. It consisted of present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Bolivia, but collapsed shortly before Bolivar’s death in 1830. To restore Gran Colombia was also one of the political goals of the FARC, Colombia’s lethal, kidnapping, cocaine-trafficking Communist guerilla movement whose leaders proclaimed Chávez as the quintessential “Bolivarian officer.” It seems fitting that before he came to power, Chávez always kept an empty chair for Bolívar at board meetings of his Socialist Party.

In the last dozen years Chávez has craftily cobbled together a left-wing alliance of Latin American countries that might well became the base of a future, much larger Gran Colombia. It includes Bolivia, Argentina and Nicaragua, lending some credence to the sinister statement by Antonio Osuña, the “brujo” (medium) of a Spiritist temple in El Carpintero outside Carácas, “Today he’ll own Venezuela, tomorrow the entire world,” reminding me eerily of a Nazi slogan I had heard in my childhood: “Heute gehört uns Deutschland, morgen die ganze Welt” (today we own Germany, tomorrow the whole world).

Osuña later became “quite angry with Chávez,” according to Angelina Pollack-Eltz, an Austrian ethnologist and Maria Lionza authority who had lived in Carácas for decades; this month she returned to her native Vienna for good. Life in Venezuela was now “zu ungemütlich,” too uncomfortable, she explained. In the last four years it had become too dangerous for her to enter the barrios for research; “Maria Lionza is now a wholly evil cult.”

Yet a powerful cult it is. According to Rainer Mahlke, another German scholar, one-third of Venezuela’s 22 million citizens is at least “passively involved” with this religion, which is based on the teachings of the 19th-century French schoolteacher Léon Dénizarth-Hippolyte Rivail (1804-1869). Writing under the nom de plume of Allan Kardec, Rivail taught that souls, while in transit from one body to the next, could be appealed to for guidance.

Since the late 19th century, Rivail has had a significant influence on mystical circles in Europe, Australia and the Americas, where members of the bourgeoisie conducted séances in darkened rooms making spirits opine on contemporary affairs. If this superstition calmed down a trifle during World War II and its aftermath, it returned with a vengeance after the 1960s when New Age rescued Kardec from oblivion. Societies bearing his name sprang up in every western country where his standard work, The Spirits’ Book, can be downloaded from the Internet in many languages.

In Venezuela, Kardec-style spiritualism filtered down to the poor and crime-infested slums where it mixed with folk Catholicism and tribal religions. Hundreds of thousands are now actively engaged in this cult in whose temples the departed allegedly take possession of mediums puffing liturgical cigars and drinking astounding amounts of liquor, usually cheap rum but on rare occasions also fine cognac or sweet champagne.

Cognac must be fed to a medium by anyone hoping to be possessed by Bolivar himself. The faithful call upon him for advice on political and legal matters, though Mahlke informs us that when you try to invoke the “libertador” you can never know who might show up. It could be John F. Kennedy, or Hitler, or Stalin rather than Bolívar.

As for the sweet champagne, well, that’s the favorite tipple of Maria Lionza who gave the cult its name. As Venezuelan lore has it, she was the fair-skinned, green-eyed daughter of a Jirajara Indian chief centuries ago. At her birth, a shaman advised the chief to kill this child at once, lest she unleash calamity upon her people.

Instead, the chief ordered his best braves to raise his daughter away from the tribe near a lagoon guarded by an anaconda. Alas, the reptile fell in love with the girl and gobbled her up when she resisted its advances. As a result, the snake grew and grew, squeezing the water out of the lagoon. The water flooded the Indian settlement and drowned the tribe, fulfilling the shaman’s warning.

Then the anaconda burst. Out popped Maria Lionza. It seems that she looked just like – centuries later -- Spanish-born empress Eugenie of France, the wife of Napoleon III. At least this is how Venezuelan artists have been portraying her ever since Kardec's teachings became the rage of Venezuela's elite just about the time when Napoleon III and Eugenie were sent into exile after losing the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

To her worshipers, Maria Lionza, Eugenie's look-alike, is of course still in power as queen of all nature, of game and fish, forests and rivers, ranches, coffee and tobacco plantations. With a crown glistening in her luscious brown hair, she is the Madre Reina, the queen mother heading a trinity called “Las Tres Potencias,” or three powers.

Her partners are Guaicaipuro, the ferocious Indian chief who fought the Spanish conquerors in the 16th century, and Pedro Camejo, Bolívar’s faithful general also called Negro Primero. Each represents the principal races in Venezuela. Guaicaipuro is brown, Camejo black, and Maria Lionza, though allegedly the daughter of an Indian chief, has nevertheless the alabaster skin of a Spanish noblewoman – for that’s what Empress Eugénie was born as.

This is not to say that these three outrank Christianity’s triune God. Angelina Pollack-Eltz saw Maria Lionza rather as a “utilitarian cult” that does not presume to be an alternative to Catholicism but rather a supplement. The God of Christianity is the master of the universe to be worshiped in church, no question about that.

But the other trinity – Maria Lionza, her two colleagues and their entire pantheon – used to help in sickness, affairs of love, and matters of terrestrial power. It is before these ghosts that the faithful brought sinister desires they dared not bother to trouble God with, such as their lust for affluence on earth and even their dark wish to wreak misfortune on an adversary. “Now I understand that they are only approached with evil wishes.”

Maria Lionza appears seldom at séances, giving advice to the faithful through a medium intoxicated with sweet champagne. On one of these rare occasions she evidently counseled a shop apprentice by the name of Eugenio Mendoza, Klaus-Dieter Nassall related. “The Madre Reina’s counsel bore fruit. It made Mendoza an industrialist and one of Venezuela’s richest men – the nation’s ‘king of concrete.’” Not surprisingly, he remained a fervent Maria Lionza follower until his death in 1979.

Here of course ends the analogy with Hugo Chávez, who in a confusing spiritual role-swapping exercise sometimes appealed to Simon Bolivar’s guidance, and sometimes proclaimed that he was Bolívar incarnate himself, according to Maria Lionza students interviewed in Caracas a few years ago. Now, says Angelina Pollack-Eltz, it seems that this left-wing opponent of free enterprise has lost his passion for a cult that made people rich. Though his busts can still be found on Maria Lionza altars, a chair held empty for Simon Bolívar no longer seems a feature of the Chávez regime whose ideological models are Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara and whose international friends include Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

WORLD MATTERS: Germany’s next vice chancellor – an Asian

2011-04-06T04:18:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Germany’s next vice chancellor will most likely be a young man who does not fit the stereotype of a German. Philipp Rösler, 38, looks Asian because he is a native Vietnamese, and he has a wonderful sense of humor utterly devoid of the political correctness that is currently stifling the country’s cultural climate. To the hilarity of a Bavarian audience he described the occasional tiffs between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her current deputy and foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, as “Zickenterror,” meaning a rapport of bickering bitches; Westerwelle is openly homosexual.

In May, the liberal Free Democrat Party (FDP), junior partner in Merkel’s coalition government, is expected to elect Rösler its new leader succeeding Westerwelle who has announced his intention to resign this position in the aftermath of the FDP’s crushing defeat in recent state elections. Rösler, an eye doctor, will also become vice chancellor while retaining his current position as health minister.

Westerwelle insists on remaining foreign minister, much to the dismay of prominent German commentators. Günther Nonnenmacher, publisher of the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, bluntly called Westerwelle’s foreign policy a failure and accused him of clinging to his position solely for reasons of prestige. Westerwelle is generally held responsible for Germany’s disgraceful abstention in the U.N. Security Council’s vote to enforce a no-flying zone over Libya militarily thus breaking rank with her NATO partners.

Rösler, an orphan from in Soc Trang in southern Vietnam, was adopted by a German couple when he was nine months old. He grew up in Hamburg, did his military service in the German Army’s medical corps, studied medicine and specialized in ophthalmology. According to idea, a Protestant news service, he became a “committed Christian” 11 years ago while working in a catholic hospital where he was “confronted with suffering and death.”

When Rösler was baptized, his girlfriend Wiebke, who is also a physician, was his Godmother. The two later married and now have twin daughters. Rösler is now a member of the “Central Committee of German Catholics,” the umbrella organization of Catholic lay organizations.
A devout Catholic as leader of Germany’s pro-business liberal party is a novelty. The FDP used to have strong anti-clerical and antireligious currents. But this era is over, according to its general secretary Christian Lindner who announced that German liberalism should from now on be “post-secular.”

Rösler is the first Asian-born member of the federal government in Berlin. His stellar career from eye doctor to minister of economics in the northern state of Lower Saxony and then minister of health in Merkel’s cabinet is in line with the astounding success the 35,000 South Vietnamese immigrants who came for the former West Germany after the fall of Saigon to Communist forces in 1975, and have extraordinarily well in their host country’s professions, businesses and academia.

By contrast, the 70,000 North Vietnamese imported as “guest laborers” by the former East Germany have not done well because the Communist regime kept them largely segregated from the German population. To this day many eek out their living as black market cigarette vendors.

Rösler’s likely election to the presidency of his party is expected to herald a new era in Germany’s political style. Rösler is spearheading a growing movement among young politicians promoting “a softer discourse,” “more authentic warmth,” and “modesty,” according to the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. This marks a welcome contrast to the shrillness and self-centeredness, which, along with a dearth of humor, is still typical of much of their nation’s public discourse.

With Rösler around, this is changing. Last year he amused an audience by remarking that Germans can now buy a Barbie doll with the features of Chancellor Merkel for only 20 Euros ($28). But then he added in reference to Merkel’s preferred garment, “The problem is that each of these dolls comes with 40 trouser suits, and that makes them really expensive.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

WORLD MATTERS: Media award for the media’s foe

2011-04-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

When a renowned university of a major nation honors a despot for restricting his people’s access to information the world should be alarmed, especially the United States. Earlier this week, the journalism school of Argentina’s National University in La Plata awarded Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez its coveted Rodolfo Walsh Prize thus “making the goat the gardener,” as Germany’s venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (FAZ) headlined its report about this astonishing event, which was barely mentioned in the mainstream U.S. media.

The paper reminded its readers that during his reign Chávez has closed down 38 radio stations, four of those during the last week. Moreover, he has a record of bringing criminal charges against reporters criticizing him, and of expelling foreign personalities from Venezuela if they make negative remarks about his policies in public.

Normally the Rodolfo Walsh Prize is given to personalities who have advanced freedom of the press in in their careers as journalists or in their academic pursuits. As this did not apply to Chávez or his ally, Bolivian President Evo Morales, a previous Walsh laureate, what might have qualified them for this award? Well, explained journalism Dean Florencia Saintout, their contribution to “popular communication.” She said, “We have created a new category of the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for Latin American leaders committed to giving a voice to people who are the least heard from.”

In his acceptance speech Chávez presented himself as a champion of the freedom of opinion, praising revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara, the destroyers of this very freedom in Cuba. He also berated “hypocrites and cynics” in the “bourgeois press” of creating a “media dictatorship that must be vanquished” because it was turning ”truth into lies.”

Alas, such is the disdain for history in Western newsrooms and editorial departments that none of these terms seems to have triggered apprehension. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks had a habit of agitating against the “bourgeois press” and evoking “the people;” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s ingeniously evil propaganda minister, called the Nazis’ newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter” (The People’s Observer), and truth became the slogan of Soviet propaganda, to wit the name of the Soviet Communist party’s central organ. It was called “Pravda,” truth.

There is a Greek word for turning things on their heads. It is “diaballein” and has given the devil his name. When in Argentina, now governed by Chavez’ ally Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, this enemy of freedom and of the truth and therefore ultimately the people is honored in the name of freedom and the truth, the American media must not sleep.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Faith Matters: Angst-driven landslide in Germany

2011-03-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

“Angst is a bad counselor,” a German axiom says. Angst has just caused a landslide in the most prosperous state of Europe’s richest nation. Angst fed by the nuclear disaster 5,900 miles away in Japan has ended the Christian Democrats’ 58-year rule in Baden-Württemberg, home of industrial giants such as Daimler-Benz, the Robert Bosch GmbH and Porsche.

On Sunday, Angst in this most conservative region of Germany swept the environmentalist Green Party to power, a movement agitating for a speedy shutdown of Germany’s nuclear reactors. Winfried Kretschmann, a high school teacher, will be this state’s first Green premier after his party won 24.2 percent of the votes in state elections. He will govern together with the Social Democrats (SPD), who received 23 percent, in Stuttgart, the state capital.

The Christian Democrats dropped from 44.2 percent four years ago to 39 percent, but will still be the largest group in the Landtag, or state assembly. But as their traditional allies, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), only managed to garner 5.1 percent, they could not continue their coalition.

This party, which once gave West Germany Theodor Heuss, its revered first president after World War II, is currently led on the national level by foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, the driving force behind Germany’s troubling decision to break rank with its NATO allies, notably France, the United States and Britain, as their air forces established a no-flying zone over Libya. Even liberal commentators in the German media labeled this policy “shameful,” “disgraceful” and “cowardly.” Thus the FDP’s decline seems richly deserved. In the state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate, this party garnered not a single assembly seat.

It is not this column’s task to speculate on the ramification of these regional ballots for the national government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nor will it attempt to answer the rhetorical question by retired Lt. Gen. Jörg Schönbohm, now a leading CDU politician in the eastern state of Brandenburg: “They will still need electricity in Baden-Württemberg; how will they get it when they close down nuclear reactors?” Indeed, for a state producing some of the world’s most celebrated automobiles and electronic equipment, the popularity of the Greens’ anti-nuclear agitation seems amazingly irrational, given that it manifests an almost hysterical reaction to a disaster that happened 5,900 miles away in Japan, where earth tremors and seismic waves are common, which is not the case in Germany, as Gen. Schönbohm pointed out on television.

The point to be pondered here is a theological one: Whence this crushing angst plaguing rich Germany, and particularly Baden-Württemberg, where Christianity is still stronger than in most other parts of the country? In this state in Germany’s southwest, 70 percent of the people still belong to the Roman Catholic or the Lutheran churches. Baden-Württemberg is home to universities with some of the world’s most renowned divinity schools — Tübingen, Heidelberg and Freiburg. Why then this tremendous angst, which seems so un-Christian? Dietrich Bonhoeffer defined fear as a “symptom of sin,” by which he meant original sin in the sense of man’s innate trust in God (Augsburg Confession article II)? Liberal theologian Paul Tillich, too, described angst as “an absence of trust.”

The Church is still a significant player in Baden-Württemberg (pop. 10.7 million), but the Church, especially its Protestant branch, is stirring nuclear and other fears in its pronouncements instead of championing faith, the very opposite of angst. The fear mongering of Protestant clerics flies in the face of their own Lutheran teachings. “God and the devil take opposite tactics in regard to fear,” Luther said. “The Lord first allows us to become afraid, that he might relieve our fears and comfort us. The devil, on the other hand, first makes us feel secure in our pride and sins, that we might later be overwhelmed with fear and despair.” The point can be made that by stirring up anti-nuclear emotions among Europe’s most comfortable people, as opposed to promoting reasonable discussions of this issue, pastors are actually doing the devil’s work.

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, one of Germany’s most eminent Lutheran theologians, rightly warned the Church that its irrational behavior is self-defeating because it is ultimately gambling away people’s trust. In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Graf quoted philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who termed Christianity a “thinking religion.” “I would like to keep it that way,” Graf said; instead, today’s pastors promote “a form of religiosity that combines a cuddly god with bad taste.”

With a rousing lack of political correctness, Graf blamed this deplorable situation on the increasing “feminization” of the Church. His seminars at Munich University are now dominated “by young women of … petit bourgeois origins,” he added. As a result of the gradual female takeover of parsonages psychological jargon, “constant moralizing” and an “infatilization of communication” have taken the place of the “culture of the word” for which the Lutheran Church was once renowned. “Moralizing is intellectually a rather low-brow operation,” Graf explained

He has just subsumed his observation in a book titled, “Kirchendämmerung – wie die Kirchen unser Vertrauen verspielen” (Twilight of the Churches – How Churches Gamble Away our Trust), an allusion to Richard Wagner’s opera “Götterdämmerung,” or twilight of the gods. (Munich, Verlag H.C. Beck, 2011, €10.95). It should be translated into English quickly because its findings describe not just a German but global phenomenon – Christianity’s decline from a thinking faith to kitsch with frightening consequences for the secular as well as the spiritual realms.

“Cogito ergo sum,” French philosopher Réné Descartes (1596-1650) wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” What Graf is observing in his church, and what contributed to the overpowering fear that seems to consume Europe’s wealthiest nation, is a contemporary mindset that has turned Decartes’ dictum on its head. Call it, “Sensio ergo sum,” I feel therefore I am – a truly frightening perversion.

World Matters: Ashamed by Germany's cowardice

2011-03-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

This column calls for an elucidation: I am German, and I am ashamed by the cowardly foreign policy of the government I had voted for. My country’s abstention in the United Nations Security Council’s vote to enforce a no-flight zone over Libya and her refusal to participate in NATO’s military operations are disgraceful. My only consolation is that I am not alone in this assessment. The adjectives “cowardly,” “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “disgusting” abound in commentaries and readers’ blogs of conservative and liberal German publications.

The driving force behind this decision was foreign minister and vice chancellor Guido Westerwelle, leader of the small right of center “Free Democrat Party,” the junior partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the coalition government governing in Berlin. According to the liberal weekly, Die Zeit, it was clear that Germany’s breach of solidarity with its NATO partners was primarily driven by domestic considerations. Bitter memories of World War II and its aftermath have turned many Germans into an arguably irrational species of pacifists. While opinion polls show that most Germans support the establishment of a no-flight zone over Libya, an equally large majority opposes and participation of their armed forces, the Bundeswehr, in military operations against Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s tyranny or, for that matter, anywhere else. The participation of 5,350 German soldiers and policemen in the conflict in Afghanistan is hugely unpopular in their homeland.

When the German government abstained in the Security Council vote last week, it faced three crucial state elections at home. One of those ballots took place on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt. I derive some schadenfreude from its result. Westerwelle’s Free Democrats received only 3.8 percent of the vote and will therefore have no seats in the state assembly in Magdeburg. The victorious Christian Democrats will have to continue their coalition with the Social Democrats, the main opposition party on the federal level. So at least in this state Westerwelle’s gutless policy has not paid off.

But apart from this, a larger ethical issue should be pondered: Is it morally right to allot regional elections a priority over the duty to protect “a freedom-loving people against a crazed dictator,” as Margot Kässmann, the former Lutheran bishop of Hanover and leader of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD), phrased it in a stunning reversal of her previous pacifist stance?

It is bad enough that Germany broke ranks with is closest allies, such as France, the United States and the United Kingdom and aligned herself with Russia and China instead, two nations with flawed systems of government; her friends will not forget this short-sighted act of political infidelity soon. Losing a regional election might be a temporary setback; giving up moral spine when faced with a murderous despot is reprehensible.

Germans should know from history the perils of their inclination to pursue a “Sonderweg,” or special path, in international affairs. With open borders to ten neighboring nations, they cannot afford to isolate themselves once again. The Danes, the Poles, the Czechs, the French and the Dutch participate in the military operations shielding the Libyan people, alongside the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, the Italians, some Arab nations, and others.

It is sad to observe this display of a mindset marking the self-centered German “Spiessbürger,” or petit bourgeois, with his tendency to retreat into his miniscule universe when, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in the early 19^th century, “hinten fern in der Türkei die Völker aufeinanderschlagen,” when far, far away in Turkey (or in this case Libya) peoples clobber each other.

In an international poll last month, Germany was rated as the world’s most respected nation. One might wonder just how much of this esteem remains after her relapse into her past flaws last week at the United Nations.

Faith Matters: Nutty hints at the Apocalypse

2011-03-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

The Bible cautions believers against speculating about the date and time of the Apocalypse, although current world events and calamities seem to invite such conjecture. There are the uprisings in the Middle East. In Japan, the tsunami and earthquake disasters are fueling raising nuclear fears. And then the nuttiness of clergymen fitting Luther’s definition of “false clerics and schismatic spirits” reminds us that Christ listed some signs of the looming end of times, for example the appearance of many bogus prophets. The Rev. Steve Lawler, part-time rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal church in Ferguson, Missouri, might just fit this rubric.

Fawler decided to “give up church for Lent,” and to adopt Muslim rituals and dietary rules for the 40 days until Easter. Thankfully, his bishop threatened to defrock him if he continued this practice, which manifestly confirms a Roman verity that preceded Christianity: Whom the gods want to destroy they first make mad. As Bishop George Wayne Smith told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “He can’t be both a Christian and a Muslim. If he chooses to practice as Muslim, then he would, by default, give up his Christian identity and priesthood in the church.”

If the times weren’t so dire it would be fun to spin Fawler’s rationale further: How about giving up love for marriage in Lent? How about giving up death for funerals, or birth for adolescence, or motherhood for fatherhood? One must cheer the bishop for trying to maintain theological sanity, which isn’t easy in today’s religious environment where major denominations are degenerating into post-Christian neo-Gnostic sects, to wit the joint celebration of the Eucharist by Episcopalians and Hindus three years ago in Los Angeles, or a same-sex wedding in a sanctuary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), also in southern California. The most titillating moment during this betrothal came when the woman pastor placed a consecrated host on the tongue of a seeing-eye dog; it is worth remembering in this context that according to Lutheran sacramental theology communicants receive Christ’s true body and blood “in with and under” the bread and the wine.

Taken by itself, the emergence of Gnostic sects is of course insufficient evidence for the imminence of Judgment Day. Gnosticism, a set of diverse syncretistic religious movements, has been around since antiquity and a huge threat to the early Church; yet the Church prevailed. St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was a Gnostic before his conversion to Christianity in 386 A.D.; be became one of the most important Fathers of the Church.

Spurious end-time prophecies also have a long track record. As Anglican theologian and philosophy professor Gerald R. McDermott points out, Christians in the days of Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century thought that Judgment Day was nigh when the Lombards, a northern Germanic tribe, invaded present-day Italy. In the 16^th century, Martin Luther was certain that the Apocalypse would occur in his lifetime or shortly thereafter. Later less formidable characters obtained their 15 minutes of glory, to paraphrase Andy Warhol, by prophesying precise dates for Christ’s return (parousia), never mind that Jesus said in Matthew 24:25 that nobody could know the time and day.

In 1856, the prophetess of the Seventh-Day Adventists, Ellen G. White, reported that an angel had announced to her the nearness of Christ’s return. The angel, she said, told her what would happen to most people: “Some (will become) food for worms, some subjects for the seven last plagues.” Also in the mid-19^th century, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, predicted that Jesus would be back within 56 years.

Then in the 1970s and 1980s, Hal Lindsay achieved notoriety by informing his millions of readers that 1988 would be the year of the parousia; well, it turned out it wasn’t. This list can be continued ad infinitum and include the fear-mongering forecasters of the impending Rapture.

The craze to hypothesize about the end of time or even advance this event by human means, which according to Martin Luther is the ultimate form of utopianism, spills over to other religions as well. In Japan in the 1980s, a semi-blind charlatan by the name of Shoko Asahara founded a “neo-Buddhist” sect called Aum Shinri-Kyo. It recruited primarily graduates of leading universities and gained worldwide infamy by producing huge amounts of Kalashnikov rifles and developing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. In 1995, they set off a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system killing 12, injuring 54 and affecting thousands of others, a misdeed for which Asahara was sentenced to the gallows; he is now awaiting his execution.

What was that all about? In an interview one of his top lieutenants told me that it was the purpose of this crime to trigger World War III between Japan and the United States, which would result in the destruction of the universe. Why would a bunch of young scientists wish to do that? “Well,” he said, “the Lord Shiva has commanded us to give him a helping hand;” Shiva is the destroyer in the Hindu trinity. When he’s done, Brahma, the Creator, would be able to begin a new cycle of creation.

So here we had a “Buddhist” sectarians killing in behalf of a Hindu god, and to top the syncretistic madness, they explained this in Christian terminology. With his hands on a Bible, Asahara’s white-robed henchman informed me that he and his co-religionists were Christ’s soldiers in the Battle of Armageddon. But who was Christ to them? “An incarnation of Shiva, the god of destruction,” he said.

All this would be hilarious if it weren’t so deadly and in total contradiction of what Scripture is saying. It is possible, suggests Gerald McDermott, that calamities such as the current disaster in Japan, are a warning or even temporal punishment from God. In fact, a prominent devotee of the Shinto religion suggested the same thing. “The character of the Japanese people is selfish. The Japanese people must take advantage of this tsunami to wash away their selfish greed. I really do think this is divine punishment,” Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, told a press conference.

As for the ultimate Day of Judgment, the Christ’s message is clear: repent and be watchful! “If you are not watchful, I will come like a thief, and you will never know at what hour I will come upon you” (Revelation 3:3).

Faith Matters (II): Muslim migration, a chance for the Church

2011-03-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto
Second of two parts

Occasionally when I am in Paris I chance upon taxis driven by women of dark complexion. They often speak a remarkably educated French and turn out to be university students or young professionals of North African descent. It has also happened to me that one of these cabbies admitted to being bi-religious: Muslim on Friday so as not to upset her family living in one of the grim housing estates at the rim of the French capital, and Christian on Sunday because she has secretly converted to either Roman Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism.

This is the potential flip side of the mass migration of Muslims into Western Europe, which so many pundits predict presages the imminent transformation of the Old World from a Christian into an Islamic culture. Adam Francisco, a young historian and Islamic affairs specialist teaching at Concordia University Irvine, Cal., warns against jumping to hasty conclusions.

“Politically some people might not like this influx of Turks and Arabs,” agrees Bonn-based sociologist of religion Thomas Schirrmacher, “but from a Christian point of view, this movement could also represent a great opportunity for the Church.” To mix gaming and religious metaphors, all bets are still open, theologically speaking.

Between five and six million Muslims live in France and some four million in Germany. “Ninety percent of all Muslims believe that Christianity in Europe has come to an end and will soon collapse,” says Schirrmacher’s wife, Christine, who directs the Islam Institute of the Evangelical Alliance in the German-speaking countries. When Muslims arrive in Germany, the Schirrmachers continue, their prejudices often seem confirmed. The churches don’t appear to take the Bible seriously as the living word of God. Few European Christians to read it at home. “We know that many Muslims would like to experience the use of Scripture and a good liturgy, which Islam does not offer, but find neither,” says Rev. Albrecht Immanuel Herzog, CEO of a conservative Lutheran publishing house in Neuendettelsau, Bavaria.

According to many students of the religious scene in Europe, Muslim women are especially open for a monotheistic alternative to the faith they were born into, a religion where so-called “honor murders” of members of their own sex occur at such a frightening level that a German-language website, www.ehrenmord.de, has been established to document the homicides committed by Muslim men against their female relatives for allegedly succumbing to Western culture. A stunning new German-Turkish movie titled “Die Fremde,” or “When We Leave,” focuses on this frightening phenomenon in Berlin so powerfully that the Christian Science Monitor considered it “too bad” that it did not make the Oscar nomination list for best foreign film.

A few years ago, Msgr. Aldo Giordano, now permanent observer of the Holy See at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, described the Muslim immigration into Western Europe as a “divine challenge;” he told me that Catholic and Protestant women’s groups discretely established contacts with Muslim women in Europe and Northern Africa. “These contacts are all the more important as in the Islamic world it’s the mothers who pass on their beliefs and values to their sons, who one day will head families,” said Giordano, then the secretary general of the European Catholic Bishops’ conference.

“Indeed, there are many groups of faithful Christians reaching out Muslim immigrants in Germany, visiting camps of asylum seekers, inviting refugees and immigrants to their congregations, and especially to Alpha courses, which are practical introductions to the Christian faith,” says Christine Schirrmacher.

Among the most stunning results of such forms of outreach I found in an independent Lutheran parish in a major eastern German city half of whose congregants are Iranian exiles; the church’s former pastor had led them to the Christian faith by using Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible as a textbook for teaching German as a second language.

It is difficult to quantify the overall success of such missionary efforts as no reliable statistics are available because much of these activities occur covertly but Christine Schirrmacher cautions against underestimating their significance. “True,” she says, “some ethnic Germans convert to Islam, young men often to ‘play being Muslim’ for a while, and young women when they marry immigrants. But at least as many Muslims become Christians.”

To this Rev. Herzog adds, “It would help if our churches did not make Christ look irrelevant by casting doubt on Scripture.” However, the Schirrmachers and Herzog confirm that many of the young generation of German pastors and theology professors are returning to a view of the Bible as the living word of God.

In France where huge Muslim ghettos that used to be Communist-run housing estates surround the major cities, between 400,000 and 500,000 are estimated to have converted to Christianity. According to Rev. Antoine Schluster of the French Protestant Federation, 10,000 Muslims join the Roman Catholic Church and 5,000 Protestant denominations.

These might not be huge numbers. Still, they are rarely reported, especially in the United States where the stereotypical definition of Europe as spiritually lost continent has become common currency. As Christine Schirrmacher reminds us, “Let’s remember who the Lord of history is: God, not man.”

Faith Matters (I): Are Christians to blame for Muslim hate?

2011-03-12T23:31:00.000-08:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

As Congress is considering the extent of Islamic extremism in America, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic wonder whether the liberal Protestant theology of the last two centuries must share some blame for the violence committed by Muslim radicals.

According to Thomas Schirrmacher, a German sociologist of religion, this debate is based on the following conjecture: Until the 18^th century, few Muslim theologians questioned the authenticity of Christian Scriptures, given that the Koran acknowledges the Old and New Testaments as “divine books descended from the heavens to guide mankind.” But since the Enlightenment period, Protestant scholars began casting doubt on the Bible’s reliability thus ceasing to accept it as the living word of God.

This in turn led prominent Islamic leaders to conclude that these texts were clearly not entirely true and therefore evidence of a false religion, and that false religion must be destroyed. In some theological circles, this is seen as a major cause of Muslim hostility against the Christian faith, an antagonism that has been increasing in virulence in the last decades.

Schirrmacher allows that this summary of the present quandary between these two monotheistic religions seems somewhat simplistic. Moreover, it risks leading to the false assumption that the entire Islamic community is seeking the destruction of Christianity, warned Rev. Albrecht Immanuel Herzog, a confessional Lutheran theologian in Neuendettelsau, Bavaria. “Nonetheless, it is undeniable that two centuries ago, liberal Christian theologians have handed Muslim apologists a powerful argument in their fight against missionaries in 19^th-century British India,” argues Christine Schirrmacher, director of the Islam Institute of the Evangelical Alliance in Bonn, and Thomas Schirrmacher’s wife.

The argument can be made that this laid the foundations of today’s assessment by Muslim radicals that Christianity must be squashed forcefully, and that it also contributed to the conviction of more moderate Islamic theorists that Christianity is so weak that it only requires a little patience to anticipate its implosion and replacement by Islam and the rule of Sharia law in Europe.

As one persuasive example of how Koran scholars have turned the critical study by Protestant theologians against Christianity, Christine Schirrmacher cites Maulana Rhmatullah Kairanawi navi (1818-91), an Indian Muslim sage. She points out that in his campaign against Christian missionary activities in British India, Kairanawi navi cited 18^th and 19^th century Protestant academics whose books had been translated into Arabic.

Among these were the German theologian and adventurer Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-92) who promoted an “anabionic” explanation for Jesus’ empty tomb; according to this theory Christ did not die on the Cross but faked his death and walked away from his grave.

Another 18^th-century German scholar Kairanawi navi quoted in his anti-Christian polemic was Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), a naturalistic Deist. Deism was a view widely held in England, North America and northern Europe. It saw God as a kind of clockmaker who wound up the chronometer (meaning creation in this context) but did not interfere with its progress. Raimarus denied that the Bible was God’s revealed word and that miracles ever happened. He opined that Christ’s disciples had stolen his body from the tomb to feign his resurrection.

Kairanawi navi stressed that both Bahrdt and Raimarus confirmed Islam’s rejection of the key Christian doctrine that Jesus had died, was buried and rose again for the salvation of all believers. Islam equally rejects Christianity’s teachings about Jesus’ divine nature, much like the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) whom Kairanawi navi quoted as well.

Significantly, Kairanawi navi is once again en vogue among contemporary Muslim scholars arguing the superiority of their faith. Last year at a conference of the “Institute of Objective Studies” at Patna, India, Prof. A.R. Monin reminded his listeners that Kairanawi navi had offered the writings of European Biblical scholars as evidence of the “interpolation and corruption” of Christian scriptures. This prompted Karl Pfander, a 19th-century German missionary, to agree with Kairanawi navi and then “beat a hasty retreat,” Monin said.

In reality, though, it is now liberal Christian theology’s turn to be in retreat. Gone are the days when the most pressing topic at Princeton Theological Seminary was what to preach on Easter Sunday after the doctrine of Christ’s Resurrection had been disproven, Rev. Fred Anderson of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church once told me. It is no longer considered intellectually fashionable to question basic tenets of the Christian faith.

To some extent, this is even the case in Germany, cradle and most significant holdout of liberal Protestant thought. “Twenty or 30 years ago, theology professors at the divinity schools of our state universities even denied the existence of God,” Thomas Schirrmacher relates, “but this is no longer the case.”

Rev. Herzog, CEO of a conservative Lutheran publishing house, agrees that a confessional movement among young Lutheran theology professors and ministers is slowly evolving, “but they don’t yet dominate church chancelleries and academe.” Muslim immigrants in Europe are not yet aware of this development. “Most of these immigrants still believe that Christianity’s collapse in Europe is imminent,” says Adam Francisco, an Islamic studies specialist teaching history at Concordia University in Irvine, Cal.

To paraphrase Thomas Mann, Germany, once in the intellectual avant-garde worldwide, always tends to be late these days. James W. Voelz, professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, agrees, citing as an example the annual meetings of the illustrious Society for the Study of the New Testament (or SNTS for Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas), where English and French-speaking scholars have long stopped belaboring the historical-critical method of interpreting Scripture; this method aims not to discover the meaning of a Biblical passage as the original author would have intended, and what the original listeners would have understood, but, rather, speculates on the circumstances behind the text that led to its composition.

“Most SNTS members are beginning to return to a traditional way of studying the Bible seeking to discover what the text is actually saying,” Voelz continues. “This has been facilitated by various literary approaches, which do not seek to attempt a reconstruction of the factors leading to the composition of the text but take the text as the actual object of investigation.

“The object is to discover first and foremost what it intends to tell its original hearers and readers, and then to see how that meaning might impact hearers and readers in the years to follow, including today. But German Biblical scholars still stubbornly cling to historical criticism, thus missing what the books of the Bible actually say.” Voelz continues.

Seminaries of liberal Protestant denominations in the United States follow the German lead with disastrous theological consequences, such as chipping away at the traditional understanding of law and Gospel, the nature of original sin and of salvation by grace through faith in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross and his resurrection.

This does great harm to the thriving Christian communities in the southern hemisphere, especially in Africa. “You are literally killing us,” Archbishop Peter Akinola, the former primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, charged U.S. Episcopal leaders during the controversy over the consecration of an openly homosexual priest as bishop of Concord, New Hampshire.

During a meeting in Vienna, Austria, Akinola told me that the homosexual agenda was a “diabolical attack upon the Church,” providing Muslim extremists in Africa with a pretext for murdering Christians.

Next: Faith Matters (II): Muslim immigration – a great opportunity for the Church.

Faith Matters (I): Are Christians to blame for Muslim hate?

2011-03-12T23:27:00.000-08:00

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Next: Faith Matters (II): Muslim immigration – a great opportunity for the Church.

FAITH MATTERS: Tariq Ramadan, point man of the Caliphate

2011-02-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Martin Luther considered the rise of Islam a sign of the impending apocalypse and God’s ferule for the backs of a wayward church. He was by no means the first great theologian to believe this. St. John of Damascus (676-749 A.D.) and the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202 A.D.) viewed Islam as an anti-Christian power of the end of time and Mohammed as a precursor of the Antichrist.

None of these sages presumed to speculate on a precise date of Christ’s Second Coming in the way some contemporary sects do today. “The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him,” Christ himself said (Matthew 24:43-44), and: “I will come like a thief” (Revelation 3:3). Therefore, warned Luther, predicting a date for this event was impossible and unnecessary.

Nonetheless, watching the blood-curdling events unfold in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, it is worth remembering the historical circumstances under which John, Joachim and Luther interpreted Islam in apocalyptical terms. All three witnessed a weak, confused, splintered and often unfaithful Church.

In John’s day, Islam wiped out flourishing Christian cultures in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean regions undermined by bickering, often heretical churches; some of these Christians even welcomed Muslims as liberators from their oppression by other Christians. Joachim was born in the aftermath of the Great Schism of 1054 A.D., which split Christendom into two hostile camps, the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox. In Luther’s day, the Turks had conquered much of southeastern Europe and were laying siege on Vienna.

The parallels between those historical sets of circumstances and today’s scenario must not be overlooked. True, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are also beset by schisms and the encroachment of modernity. But it is also true that among them are forces with more determination and, much clearer goals and seemingly more staying power that most Christians.

TV showman Glenn Beck has been foolishly ridiculed for insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood, which seems to play a key role in the Egyptian crisis, is busy scheming to establish a worldwide Caliphate ruling by Islamic law. But this is no wayward notion. Ever since it was founded by the Egyptian schoolteacher and imam Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Brotherhood has displayed incredible flexibility and strategic skills in pursing this goal, including courting the Nazis and collaborating with Marxist-Leninists.

Amazingly, of all major American media personalities, only Beck has mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood’s point man the West, a Teflon character by the name of Tariq Ramadan. He is a Swiss citizen, a much-admired scholar. He is also al-Banna’s grandson, and he speaks, in the words of French journalist Caroline Fourest, “from both corners of his mouth.” Currently a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, he claims to champion the re-interpretation of Islamic texts and emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of West Muslims, he sounds alarmingly duplicitous to discerning European ears.

When in 2003 Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister, now president, asked Ramadan about his brother Hani’s justification of the stoning of adulteresses, he replied, “I am in favor of a moratorium so that they stop applying punishments of this kind in the Muslim world. What’s important is for people’s thinking to evolve. What is necessary is a pedagogical approach.” Should we perhaps read this as a suggestion to teach first, and stone later?

Ramadan also termed terrorist acts “contextually” justified, told French television that “violence is legitimate” and, according to Swiss intelligence, been involved with Al Qaida leaders such as Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel Rahman as long ago as 1991. In 2009, the traditionally liberal Erasmus University of Rotterdam fired him for chairing the “Islam & Life” program of Press TV, a network wholly owned by the Iranian regime.

In that same year, the Obama administration issued Ramadan a 10-year scholar’s visa after he had been banned from entering the United States in 2004 when offered a professorship at Notre Dame University. The reasons why the Department of Homeland Security then prevented his entry then are rarely discussed. According to Islam critic Daniel Pipes they included: Ramadan’s praise for the brutal policies of the Sudanese political leader Hassan a-Turabi; Ramadan’s contacts with an Algerian terrorist and his “routine contacts” with an Algerian indicted for Al Qaida activities; his public references to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and to the bloodbaths of Madrid and Bali as mere “interventions.” Still, Foreign Policy magazine rated him 49^th among the world’s most important intellectuals today.

Tariq Ramadan, who wrote his doctoral dissertations on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, knows the feeble state of Western Christianity well. Living in Europe, he cannot help observing the consequences of the scarcity of clergymen in France where the church no longer provides pastoral care, and where in most cases old ladies now conduct Christian funerals because no priests are available. A scholar of his intelligence won’t find it hard to appreciate the depravity of Protestantism in Germany where the synods (parliaments) of most of the 22 state-related regional churches voted to allow homosexual pastors to live with their partners in parsonages. When Ramadan eventually reaches U.S. shores he will find a similar state of affairs in American mainline denominations.

“You don’t have a decent way of life that we can import,” British radical Islamist Anjem Choudary told Fox news anchor Sean Hannity in an otherwise disgraceful interview recently – disgraceful because Hannity lambasted him on the air, calling him “one sick miserable S.O.B.,” instead of allowing his viewers to draw exactly the same conclusion after watching a professionally crafted interview that could not be misconstrued as further evidence of the decline of Western standards.

It is easy to see how radical Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood might interpret the current state of Western Christianity as an open invitation to push it over and recreate a caliphate on its ruins. It is also easy to read all this as a sign of the impending apocalypse. However, this would not be Christian by any biblical measure. It’s a warning, yes, a reliable timetable to Judgment Day it is not.

Potsdam-Honolulu-Bordeaux: A Musical Arc

2010-09-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

The “Father of Hawaiian Music” was a Prussian military bandleader

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

What did Germans export before Mercedes-Benz cars were invented? Well, princesses, an old adage will have you believe. Actually, Germans enriched the world with another product too: musicians. One of these left a lasting impact on Hawaiian culture.

Some Anglo-Saxon linguists claim that there is something oddly Germanic about certain Hawaiian words. The consonant “w” is often pronounced like a “v”. According to George Kanahele, author of “Hawaiian Music and Musicians,” this seems to be the “fault” of one Heinrich August Wilhelm Berger (1844-1929) who taught folks in Honolulu to sing their songs that way. He was a Prussian, hand-picked by Kaiser Wilhelm I to whip the Royal Hawaiian Band into shape. Berger did this so well that his friend, Queen Lili’uokalani (1838-1917), later proclaimed him the “father of Hawaiian Music.”

A musical father he is for Hawaiians to this very day. When they chant “Hawaii Ponoi,” their state’s anthem, they sing a tune Heinrich (“Henry”) Berger has written for them, borrowing heavily from “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the hymn of imperial Germany, which sounded exactly like “God save the Queen” and the national songs of assorted other countries, including the principality of Liechtenstein.

How Berger, the former bandleader of the Second Guards regiment in Potsdam, came to be the premier musician in the history of Hawaii, is a wonderful tale, for it is the high point in the love affair between 18th- and 19th-century German speakers and the people of this faraway cluster of Pacific islands. This love affair had its origins in the South Sea romanticism, which gripped some of Central Europe’s most significant thinkers and poets of that time, including philosopher Immanuel Kant and poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and French-born Adelbert von Chamisso who visited Hawaii on the Russian brig “Rurik” in 1815-16, and then wrote the first grammar of the Hawaiian language – written in German and published 1838 in Leipzig.

As Niklaus R. Schweizer related in his book, “Hawaii and the German Speaking Peoples,” cultured Germans poured into Hawaii in the early 19th century, founding companies and serving the public upon whom they made such a favorable expression that King Kamehameha III wrote King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1846: “No foreigners in Our realm are more orderly and behave more correctly than Your Majesty’s subjects and other Germans.”

The romance between German speakers and Hawaiians took a distinctly melodious turn when in 1869 the Austrian frigate “Donau” (Danube) limped into Honolulu harbor with engine trouble. Being an Austrian military vessel, it had of course an excellent orchestra on board. So as the ship was waiting for engine parts to be sent from Europe these musicians delighted the public with brilliant performances around Honolulu and particularly on Emma Square. But when the “Donau” finally left in 1870, Hawaiians became disgruntled with the comparatively low quality of their own royal band. So the people petitioned King Kamehameha V to “revitalize” his own band, directed by a German by the name of William Merseburgh but consisting of merely 10 instruments, including a flute, a clarinet, a bassoon, a French horn and drums, according to “The History of the Royal Hawaiian Band,” an MA thesis by David Wayne Bandy.

And Kamehameha V obeyed his people. He asked Wilhelm I, Emperor of newly united Germany and King of Prussia, to send him a conductor, and so Wilhelm loaned him for four years Heinrich Berger, the bandleader of one of his favorite regiments, a tuba and double bass player by training but also a brave veteran of the Prussian wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870-71), a man who had played with orchestras led by Johann Strauss, the “king of the waltz.”

On June 3, 1872, Berger arrived in Honolulu on board the steamer “Mohongo” and one week later conducted his first public concerts. It took him just two months to receive this accolade from the “Pacific Commercial Advertiser”: “The Band, under the able direction of Mr. Berger, has resumed the practice initiated two years ago by the band of the Austrian frigate Donau… The neighborhood of Emma Square looked quite lively for an hour or so on Thursday afternoon where lots of people in carriages and on foot had assembled to hear the really fine sounds of the ‘Hawaiian Military Band.’ As was remarked by one of the Honolulu delegation in the Assembly when the appropriation for the support of the military was under discussion: ‘The band is by far the best part of the army.’”

After four years, Berger returned to Germany, had himself released from his duties in the Prussian military and then came back to Hawaii for good. He gave 32,000 concerts, composed 250 Hawaiian songs, some of which are still being sung around the world, and 1,000 other tunes. He wrote down indigenous hymns that had until then only been passed on orally. And on Sundays, taking turns with his friend, Queen Lili’uokalani, he played the organ in Kawaiaha’o Congregationalist Church. Lili’uokalani was a formidable composer in her own right. Her song, “Aloha ‘Oe” (Farewell to Thee), became world-famous. Berger had arranged it for her.

Henry Berger was by no means the only high-ranking German in Honolulu in his day. Queen Lili’uokalani’s finance minister, Hermann Adam Widemann, was German, as were her attorney-general Paul Neumann, and Maj. Henry Bertelmann, her adjutant. But she was so fond of Berger that she made him commander of the Royal Order of Kapi’olani and commanded her subjects to honor him on his birthday every year, an order their descendants are following to this day. Every year, the Royal Hawaiian Band still gives concerts in his memory.

Berger died in 1929, three decades after the former kingdom of Hawaii had been annexed by the United States. But the musical arc he has created between Europe and Hawaii is still there. In Coswig near Wittenberg where he once lived, a school of music has been named after him. And in Bordeaux, France, an American classical guitarist and composer by the name of Mark Billam-Walker, is trying to emulate him. He is the great-grandson of Henry Berger and his wife Leilehua, a New Zealander. Reached by telephone in Bordeaux, he said he was in awe of the way his ancestor composed. “He did not actually write complete scores for his compositions, but instead jotted down the notes for each musician individually. Then he handed every player his notes, raised his baton, and they all played. This is brilliant. I could not do that.”

Billam-Walker is now editing his second symphony. He says he hopes that the Royal Hawaiian Band, his great-grandfather’s old ensemble, will one day accept and play this work.

(From the September 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)

2010-08-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

An Audacious Hope Became Joyful Reality

2010-08-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

Commemorating the Demise
of the Iron Curtain

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

For students entering college this autumn, the Berlin Wall might seem like distant history. But to those in mid-career, who are still young from this writer’s perspective, the hope that this monstrosity would ever come down appeared audacious. Yet it happened. Twenty years ago, Germany was reunified. The Iron Curtain disappeared. To commemorate this exhilarating event, and to keep its memory alive among the next generation, the League of Faithful Masks and Concordia University Irvine are offering a unique Celebration of Freedom.

We will celebrate this anniversary with a variety of events on the campus of Concordia. There will be a German Film Week. There will be a month-long exhibition of artifacts, documents and works of art pertaining to Germany’s division, to life in East Germany and to reunification. And there will be, on October 6, a rich conference featuring classical music and jazz, a brand-new documentary and, most importantly, the historical witness of fascinating persons who have experienced reunification from a variety of perspectives.

You will find a wealth of details about our German Days, including programs and sidebar stories, on the “front page” of a special edition of The Mask. (www.germanday.org). The point of the present article is to explain why The League of Faithful Masks is doing this. The League’s stated mission is to champion the worldview of vocation, a worldview strongly shared by Concordia University. It holds that all humans are called to serve each other altruistically. It is hard to imagine any good-neighborly service more urgently needed than providing witness to history, for as the old adage has it: no history, no future.

Five anecdotes of recent weeks might illustrate the exigency of a return to the appreciation of history and its twin, geography, to assure the survival of our civilization in this age of information, an age whose principal mark seems to be that it renders our contemporaries increasingly uninformed. For the sake of trans-Atlantic evenhandedness, I am taking my examples from four different countries.

United States: As I was preparing the German Day program, a well-meaning American acquaintance with an M.A. degree cautioned me against referring to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), arguably the most brilliant mind in German cultural history. She insisted that a direct line linked Goethe to Hitler, and that the proximity between Weimar, Goethe’s place of work for decades, and the Nazi extermination of Buchenwald was “no coincidence.”

France: At a dinner conversation, the name Martin Luther came up. Said a local politician at my table: “Martin Luther? Wasn’t that the black guy from Switzerland?” She confused Martin Luther with Martin Luther King, the U.S. civil rights leader, and with reformer John Calvin who, though born in northern France, spent the most important years of his ministry in Geneva.

England: Again at a dinner, a British friend told me of a teacher he knew who had taken a class of English grammar school (high school) students to Dover. The teacher pointed to the English Channel and asked his pupils: “What lies beyond this body of water?” Some opined: “Perhaps the United States?” Others said, “No, no, it must be Africa.” It was news to all of them that by crossing the Channel they would soon reach France on whose shores perhaps their great-grandfathers had died.

Germany: The features editor of a well-known newspaper proposed to his editor-in-chief producing a special issue commemorating the 450th anniversary of the death of Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther’s most significant associate. The editor-in-chief, a man in his early thirties, rejected this idea outright. It turned out that he had no idea who Melanchthon was, the man educated Germans have venerated since the late 16th century as the “Praeceptor Germaniae” – Germany’s teacher.

USA again: In a recent journalism class, students interviewed a 15-year old girl of Vietnamese descent. “What publications do you read?” they wanted to know. She mentioned The Economist, a British weekly magazine of high quality. “Why The Economist?” they asked. “Well,” she replied, “I don’t want to be a moron like the other kids in my class who don’t even know who the current President of the United States is.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent a postdoctoral year at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930, he was horrified by the cluelessness of the students he had to listen to in seminars. “They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria,” he wrote. This clueless verbosity Bonhoeffer observed 80 years ago has now become an all-Western property, much to the detriment of the young people who are so often deprived of the basic historical guideposts for their journey through an in increasingly dangerous and inscrutable world.

The most tragic aspect of this is what has really been stolen from the younger generation: a historically grounded basis for hope. What happened in Germany in 1990 provided such a footing. Being hopeful seemed audacious for many of us. But then hope became a reality. This is why The League of Faithful Masks, Concordia University and their partners are inviting you to celebrate with us. The demise of the Iron Curtain, which looks like just a fact of distant history to some, has given all of us cause for courage.

A Warning from a Grave

2010-07-11T08:06:00.001-07:00

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

I have arrived at a period of my biological and professional life when rummaging through my archives and library seems in order. And so I am rereading books that were of formative value for my career as a journalist, especially as a war correspondent. The following passage I found on page 113 of The Two Vietnams by my late friend, the historian and social scientist Bernard B. Fall, probably the world’s foremost expert on the French and the American debacles in Indochina. Referring to Hanoi’s brilliant Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap who developed North Vietnam’s victorious strategies against France and subsequently the United States, Fall wrote:

“Giap’s own best contribution to the art of revolutionary war was probably his estimate of the political-psychological shortcomings of a democratic system when faced with an inconclusive military operation. In a remarkable presentation before the political commissars of the (Communist) 316^th Division, Giap stated:

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war….

“In all likelihood, Giap concludes, public opinion in the democracy will demand an end to the ‘useless bloodshed,’ or its legislature will insist on knowing how long it will have to vote astronomical credits without a clear-cut victory in sight. This is what eternally compels the military leaders of democratic armies to promise a quick end to the war --- to ‘bring the boys home by Christmas’ – or forces democratic politicians to agree to almost any kind of humiliating compromise rather than to accept the idea of a semi-permanent anti-guerilla operation.”*

The Two Vietnams was first published in 1963. It lay on the bedside table of most respectable American and European reporters, diplomats and senior officers I met while working in Saigon. I have never ceased to wonder why so few of my illustrious colleagues took Bernard B. Fall’s warnings to heart. When I first met Fall, this Austrian-born Frenchman was a professor of Howard University in Washington, DC. Having fought valiantly in the French Resistance, he proceeded to record the West’s follies and blunders in dealing with Vietnamese Communism with greater penetration than any scholar whose work on this subject I am familiar with.

Fall must have added the paragraphs cited above to the original 1963 edition of his seminal work on Vietnam shortly before his last journey to that country. On Feb. 21, 1967, while accompanying a platoon of U.S. marines in Thua Thien Province in the northernmost part of South Vietnam, 40-year old Bernard B. Fall stepped on a landmine and was killed along with Gunnery Sergeant Byron B. Highland.

Thus Fall did not live to see the day when his warning and Gen. Giap’s prediction became bitter reality in America’s self-inflicted defeat in 1975 – self-inflicted precisely because many media stars and political leaders ignored Gen. Giap’s insight that the democratic system is not psychologically equipped to fight a protracted war, irrespective of how evil the foe’s designs. In The Two Vietnams pilloried the fallacious notion that Ho Chi Minh was but a righteous nationalist. To Fall, Ho was a Bolshevik. “The fact that this was not understood by naïve outsiders was certainly not his fault; his career as a Communist has been on record since 1920,” wrote Fall.

Before me lies a Newsmax column by Edward I. Koch, the former mayor of New York. He cites a statement by Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, referring to the war in Afghanistan as “unwinnable.” This echoes CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s description of the Vietnam War after the 1968 Têt Offensive, a statement prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to day, “We have lost Cronkite, we have lost the Midwest.”

In his column, Mayor Koch goes on to suggest that the United States and its allies declare defeat in Afghanistan and get out. Here again, I discern echoes of the Vietnam era. Without any consideration of the disastrous geopolitical and strategic consequences a Taliban return to power in Kabul will have, Koch concludes: “We have sacrificed enough dead, wounded, and treasure in a failed cause. Enough is enough.”

Reading this and Bernard B. Fall’s warning from his grave on the very same hot summer afternoon in my home in southwestern France made my blood curdle. Surely, the Taliban and Al Qaida must have studied Gen. Giap’s analysis, which could have only led them to one conclusion: The way Western democracy has evolved since the mid-20^th century, it is driven by suicidal urges. None other than the former Mayor of New York and the RNA chairman have just confirmed this just now.

* Fall, Bernard B. The Two Vietnams. London: Pall Mall Press, 1963, 1964, 1967.

Divided by Clichés

2010-07-07T01:59:00.000-07:00

A transatlantic tragedy: ignorance in an age of instant information

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

As the Western world wallows in multiple crises, prejudice dominates the airwaves. Exasperated by a talk show star’s malediction on American television that it was time for the plague to afflict Europe (population: almost 500 million), our correspondent found solace in a simple Paris bar.

Phew! What a relief it was to plunk down at a small table outside a very modest Paris pub called Le Train de Vie, meaning train of life. Fourteen grueling hours in the air lay behind us. More than that, we crossed a transatlantic information gap rapidly dividing our continents.

We came from southern California where we now live pleasurably and surrounded by friends. But as lovers of the United States, we feel increasingly uneasy, more so than ever before in the more than four decades in the country. What troubles us is having to listen every day to televised invectives against our home continent, to hear slurs spoken by stars who know nothing about Europe yet opine against it venomously nonetheless.

This is what we mulled over as we comforted ourselves with fresh red wine from the Côtes du Rhône region served in half-liter carafes. Our minds wandered back to the latest apex of Europhobic hyperbole we had heard on Fox. “The problem with Europe is that there are too many Europeans,” one smart aleck quipped crudely, adding that a new plague would solve this problem. This prompted hilarity among his co-panelists but reminded us of the mindless things British bigots like to say about the French.

This was supposed to be funny. Granted I am German, and for Germans, humor is no laughing matter, according to another Anglo-Saxon inanity. But then my wife, Gillian, is an Englishwoman, and she did not get the joke either. “Imagine the international hullaballoo if a French talk show host told his audience at prime time, ‘The trouble with America is that there are too many Americans; may they be decimated by an epidemic,’” she said. We needed another carafe of wine.

At this point an inebriated Frenchman in his 60s stopped at our table. Staring distractedly above our heads, the stranger said, “I am wondering if I should have a nightcap before returning to my hotel room.” We invited him to sit down but no, he preferred to return to the bar. Bidding us farewell, he reached into a shopping bag and handed me a fistful of cherries, explaining, “They wouldn’t do me any good tonight after all the drinks I have had.” Then he staggered off.

Ah, echoes of the France of our youth! So she is not dead, thank God! Our thoughts then focused on the daily dose of venom emitted against the French by American commentators lumping all Europeans together as a moribund bunch of unreconstructed socialists. Before I continue, let me come clean: I am not a left-winger, neither is my wife.

In some respects, we are as conservative as TV hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. We affirm the sanctity of life and the institution of marriage; we prefer government to be small and defense to be strong. As Europeans, we might be forgiven for being less engrossed with the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms but surely that’s forgivable.

The ceaseless prattle on American airwaves about “European Socialism” is getting on our nerves, though. Do American radio and television commentators not know that all major EU nations have currently conservative-controlled governments? Perhaps their daily abuse is just tit-for-tat, paying Europe back for eight years of anti-American agitation in the Bush years? Probably. If so, this would be childish given the contemporary condition of the world.

We requested another carafe of Red.

It seemed strange to us that televised American bile is focused first and foremost on the French and the Germans. Until now, the British have been spared such outbursts. Still, British pundits are also given to utter “tedious snobby sneers against the United States,” to quote Alex Singleton, a leader writer of The Daily Telegraph. Then Singleton labeled President Barack Obama “an idiot… hell bent on insulting [America’s] allies.”

I have never been an Obama enthusiast but I didn’t write that; an Englishman did.

On the following evening, Gillian and I returned to Le Train de Vie. At the table next to ours a solitary man ate his dinner. He turned out to be a middle-aged French journalist equally concerned with the state of the international media. Together we lamented the fact that biased postulations are increasingly taking the place of properly researched articles, and that rank prejudice is in the process of superseding fair and balanced reporting.

We were both old enough to have learned a different kind of journalism than is often practiced now, he at a provincial newspaper in eastern France, I with the Associated Press in Frankfurt. We became journalists in an era filled with lingering memories of a fratricidal war. We thought that we had learned the principal lesson of that war: Never let stereotypical thinking govern your pen and your lips.

We were taught as young men that our opinions were irrelevant. What mattered was the need of our readers to be comprehensively informed. This required legwork on our part, and it was precisely the excitement of this legwork that had made us choose our craft in the first place. We learned foreign languages. We were trained to go to enormous lengths to trounce clichés.

In those days, all major American media outlets had posted foreign correspondents in France and Germany. These men and women were driven by the same professional ethos as we, and spoke our languages well. They knew our literature, our art, our strengths and foibles. They were wonderfully curious reporters. I am still corresponding with some of these colleagues who are now in the 80s and retired, and I know that they are just as troubled as we with the way many of today’s media foster ignorance.

It told the Frenchman about a recent acrimonious discussion with the executive editor of the new breed in the United States. He could not understand my distress over the statement by a majority of journalism students that they had chosen this career to “make this a better world.” This, I explained to the editor, was what had motivated propagandists of totalitarian systems. In free societies, journalists had the calling to research and write, just as bakers had a vocation to bake. Wanting to “make this a better world” by telling their readers what to think reflects ideological hubris.

The French reporter nodded gravely and ordered another carafe of Red.

We then lamented the evident increase of ignorance as a product of our age of instant communication. I told him about a woman with a Master of Arts degree trying to persuade me recently that a direct philosophical line led from the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Hitler, and that therefore the proximity between Weimar in Thuringia, Goethe’s place of work, and Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, was no coincidence. She had clearly never read anything by Goethe but watched a program linking the 18th-century Enlightenment to 20th-century totalitarianism.

There exists a serious school of thought making this connection, but it is much more complex, running via the anthropocentrism of the French Revolution; the German theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann argued that way. However, Goethe was neither an Enlightenment philosopher nor a revolutionary; he was a poet of classicism, a literary period that coincided with the French Revolution. He also told his friend Johann Peter Eckermann toward the end of his life that Christianity was the ultimate religion. Sadly, such details count little at an age of instant information dispersing ignorance in the form of packaged formulae.

My drinking partner and I found some comfort in the discovery that at least some of our readers were wiser than we. In the recent Franco-German tiff over bailing out bankrupt Greece, the Berlin correspondent of the Paris daily Libération charged German Chancellor Angela Merkel with scheming to forge a “Holy Germanic Euro Empire.” Going through the readers’ blogs of the Parisian press, though, we discovered the emergence of a different consensus: If France had followed the German example of frugality and industry since the rise of the new and reconciled Europe following World War II, we might all be better off. That’s what French readers are writing.

We left Le Train de Vie telling ourselves that the wall of clichés dividing nations and continents must not necessarily be permanent. If it has stopped separating France and Germany there is still hope, we thought, that the age of the instant media might also bear transatlantic fruit. The force that renders readers and listeners uninformed is the same that can make them wise. No, we do not need a plague to exterminate us. What we need is a wiser use of the gift of instant information.

from The Atlantic Times, July/August 2010 edition

Witness to History at Concordia Irvine

2010-06-19T13:03:00.001-07:00

Witness to History

Twenty years ago this October, a momentous development in Europe stirred the world. Germany and the entire Continent were peacefully reunified after four decades of bitter division. The League of Faithful Masks (LFM) and Concordia University Irvine (CUI) will commemorate this anniversary with three inter-related presentations on CUI’s campus, bearing witness to history, culture and current affairs:

1. German Day at Concordia – A Celebration of Freedom on October 6. The public will experience a fascinating array of historical witnesses. They will discuss political, economic, military, artistic, religious, journalistic and personal aspects of Germany’s reunification. A brand-new documentary film will be shown; there will be superb music and a forum discussion between the presenters and the audience. Our partners in this venture include the German Consulate-General in Los Angeles, and the Wende Museum of Culver City, which specializes in the art and artifacts of the Cold War.

2. Images of Oppression and Liberation: a German Film Week on October 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, offered by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. Five feature films relating to the Christian resistance against the Nazi regime, to life in East Germany and reunification will be shown.

3. Traces of Division -- Signs of Unity, a rich exhibition of East German and Reunification memorabilia from October 2-31 presented by the Wende Museum on the CUI campus.

For further information, please check lFM’s website www.faithfulmasks.org or the blogsite www.uwesiemon.blogspot.com in regular intervals.

Of Foreboding and Forgiveness

2010-06-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

This column reaches you from France. It is written with a sense of foreboding. Just before leaving California, I called a friend in New York. He is a native Berliner of Jewish descent. In the early Nazi years he fled to Paris while still a teenager, and then fought in the French Resistance. “Make the best of your stay in Europe,” he counseled me. “By the time of your return we might be living in a totally different world.”

This sounded plausible. You would have to be blind and deaf not to realize that a new era is upon us, and that this era is unlikely to be agreeable. We discern the bitter fruit of human hubris all around us – in the Gulf of Mexico, in economics, finance, in the shaky condition of governments on both sides of the Atlantic; in the deplorable failure of most media outlets to inform their audiences responsibly about world affairs; and in the state of the Church many of whose branches have either slid into rank heresy kowtowing to sexual deviance, or are offering feel-good fluff as a tonic to soothe the apprehension millions share with my New York friend.

This morning I telephoned a former German government minister about the future of dollar, the euro and other currencies. He is a statesman with a reputation of financial wisdom. He said, “I frankly cannot predict where we are heading. I have just bought Norwegian bonds because the Norwegian money appears to be relatively healthy, but who knows? Tomorrow I could be proven wrong.”

It cannot be the purpose of this column to list the plethora of indicators leading a neighbor of mine in France to compare the current time in history with the situation that prevailed in Europe just before World War I. “An insignificant event in an insignificant placed triggered that calamity,” she said, referring to the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914.

As the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod approaches its convention in Houston in July, it must consider the present perils in national and world affairs. Confessional Lutherans know of course that theirs is not to offer amateurish advice in worldly matters. Bicker though they might among each other, the various parties within the LCMS have generally resisted the temptation to emulate other denominations in poaching in alien territory, meaning the secular realm.

In fact, the opposite extreme is true and equally deplorable – an ostrich-like inclination not to concern itself at all with the likelihood of impending catastrophe. You don’t hear much from Lutherans about the Church’s role if and when disaster strikes. Four years ago, I taught a doctoral-level seminar at Concordia Seminary St. Louis on precisely this issue and received some brilliant papers from my students but could not find anybody prepared to publish them; they did not appeal to prevalent Lutheran tastes in America.

But then how is the Church to react in the event of terrorist attacks with nuclear or biological devices; how will it function when the supplies of food and energy are disrupted, and when communications have broken down? How will it respond to severe persecution perhaps even in America and Western Europe? How will it minister to its faithful when they are cut off from their sanctuaries, and when pastors have lost contact to their scattered flocks?

Are these unthinkable scenarios? It would be foolish to assume that they were – even in the United States. Take the word of a septuagenarian for this, a man who has spent his childhood in a country that used to be the most civilized in the world and was reduced to an antechamber of hell almost overnight.

The time might soon come when there will be no mega churches with thousands of happy-clappy congregants; whoever among Lutherans believes that in periods of woe bestselling guidelines to a purpose-driven life can be put into action will be egregiously disappointed. What sustained me in air raid shelters and during months of starvation were not expressions of religious enthusiasm but the words and tunes of the Scripture-based liturgy I had memorized since Sunday school, and the unshakeable message that, whatever happened, I was a forgiven sinner and would therefore live eternally by virtue of Christ’s vicarious suffering, death and resurrection.

This basic Christian truth is most clearly formulated in the Lutheran Confessions. However, they are a treasure sometimes too well kept by the LCMS; it makes no sense to hold these treasures jealously in reserve when millions of troubled Christians realize that they are staring at the abyss. I know of Lutherans outside the Missouri Synod praying that the LCMS will emerge from Houston “as a robust church ready to allow the treasures of its own tradition to bear fruit.” The man who said this was Thomas Schlichting, a canon lawyer and high-ranking official in the state-related “Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony.”

Rev. Albrecht-Immanuel Herzog, a pastor in the regional Lutheran Church in Bavaria, told me about sizable groups of Lutherans in Germany who are not in communion with the LCMS but are yearning for confessional clarity. “Missouri could provide this clarity if only it surfaced and opened its treasure chest,” he said adding that particularly younger pastors and theologians felt that way.

It is comforting to know that none of the major factions in the LCMS is inclined to follow the mainline Protestant trend toward apostasy. Yet even among Missourians the liberating Lutheran message is diluted by corporate numbers games, and drowned out by sets of drums that have replaced altars in many of our sanctuaries. And this message is: “You are forgiven. Now go and roll up your sleeves and engage this dangerous world.” This is what the Lutheran Church must proclaim more urgently than ever in times of foreboding, and this is why I have endorsed Rev. Matthew Harrison’s candidacy for the office of LCMS President. In my estimation he is the most likely man to open the Lutheran treasure chest for all to see. The moment to do this for the benefit of the whole Church of Christ is now.

Masks Asking Vicarious Questions

2010-06-06T17:27:00.000-07:00

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO*

From The Mask (www.faithfulmasks.org)

My meeting with the executive editor of a regional newspaper did not go well at all. He very kindly gave me much of his time but then took strong exception to something I had written in the syllabus of my journalism course at Concordia University Irvine. I had pilloried the reason given by most contemporary journalism students for wanting to make a career in the media. They wish to “make this a better world.”

Our disagreement on this point was generational and hence evidently insuperable. I am 73, and he was about two decades younger. If I were American, I would be considered a pre-baby boomer. He on the other hand was a post-boomer. Having been exposed to the calamitous consequences of ideological thinking, the axiom that the road to hell is paved with good intentions still resonates with me strongly. His view of good intentions, however, was evidently less jaded -- to the extent that he ended our collegial relationship there and then. I never heard from him again.

Well, what Rudyard Kipling observed about East and West seems to apply even more forcefully to the rapport between “pre” and “post”-boom media people: ‘Ne’er the twain shall meet.” When I was a cub reporter half a century ago, my seniors told me that my opinions on any given matter were immaterial. My job as a reporter was to research and write as fairly and factually as humanly possible. In other words, as a journalist, I was to ask questions vicariously in the original sense of this word, which is rooted in the Latin vocable, vicarius, meaning: “in the place of…” A reporter is inquisitive in the place of his readers. Therefore, a reporter must not arrogate upon himself the role of “making this a better world,” as little as a baker would bake bread to “make this a better world.” He bakes to nourish. Period.

Like bakers or plumbers or physicians or lawyers, journalists have the calling to serve their neighbors, and journalists do this by being relentlessly and – here we have that word again – vicariously curious. Tragically, this vicarious sense of wonderment that has lured me to journalism in the first place, and has remained with me ever since, has gone out of fashion in much of today’s journalism. Most reporters, though thank God not all, have had this sense of wonderment lobotomized from their souls by liberal arts professors, I expect. It is of course easier to “hit the beat” as a 22-year-old trying to tell his readers and listeners what to think, than to keep wondering on their behalf. I pity self-important media people of that ilk. They have no concept of what a tremendous vocation journalism can really be.

Then again, perhaps by remaining relentlessly inquisitive, journalists could actually help protect this world from getting worse. In an email, I politely offered this notion to the editor as a compromise of sorts. He did not reply.

*Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, an international journalist, is the executive director of The League of Faithful Masks.

East Germany by the Pacific

2010-06-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall perished, a museum in California evokes the land that lay behind it
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO
(From the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)

Twenty years ago, Germany was reunified, and soon the remnants of the Berlin Wall disappeared. So did many of Communist East Germany’s weird features, it’s uniforms, banners, slogans and snooping gadgets. But there is one curious place where they have been amply preserved: the Wende Museum building close to the film studios of southern California.

As I entered “Suite E” of the bleak office building on 5741 Buckingham Parkway in Culver City I was perplexed. There on a platform I spotted three rows of wooden jump seats reminding me of rural movie houses in decades past. It turned out that these chairs once accommodated the rears of East Germany’s leaders as they pondered political matters. They were part of the furniture of the now-defunct country’s “Staatsratsgebäude,” or building of the Council of State, according to Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, the Wende Museum’s program director.

“Wende” is the German word for turning point. The turning point this museum’s name evokes was the collapse of the East German Communist regime in November 1989, and then the creation of a unified Federal Republic of Germany on October 3, 1990.

Wandering through this museum triggered diverse sensations in me; I remembered my childhood escape from Soviet-occupied Leipzig, my coverage of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 as an Associated Press reporter, my banishment from entering East Germany for many years, and then my return immediately after this hideous structure was breached.

I imagined smells that weren’t there. As I stared at some of the museum’s 120,000 Cold War artifacts, the inimitable odors of the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR) seemed to return to my nostrils, odors that once hit me even before I handed my passport to GDR border guards whose uniforms, badges and medals are now on exhibit in Culver City. It was a peculiar cocktail of emissions from cars with two-stroke engines, of industrial disinfectants, of chickens broiled in stale oil, and lignite-fired stoves.

Of course all of this was only in my mind, for even a young genius like Justinian Jampol, 32, the Wende Museum’s founder, would not have been able to ship the stench in containers across the North Sea, the Atlantic, Caribbean, the Panama Canal and up the Coast to Los Angeles. But the sight of a poster bearing the image of a helmeted East German soldier and the inscription, “Der Befehl ist Gesetz” (The Command is the Law) was sufficient to give me a dose of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I know what that slogan meant. I remember standing on the Western side of Bernauer Strasse, a Berlin street sealed off by men following a “command” elevated to “law.” I watched people jump out of windows just a few feet away, desperately trying to evade men executing this “law.” Some jumped to their deaths. I watched East German workers’ militiamen shoot over the heads of a family of nine escapees until a French military jeep with a mounted machine gun raced right up to the border and fired over the militiamen’s heads until they quit executing the “law.”

Jampol, a Californian completing his doctorate in history at Oxford University, told me that a former border guard at “Checkpoint Charlie,” the key crossing point for non-Germans, donated the construction and maintenance plans for the Berlin Wall. I remember the early days of this checkpoint well; for a while I had my reporter’s observation post in a bedroom above a sleazy beer bar in the last building on the West Berlin side before the official border post.

This wasn’t a pretty period in recent German history, but a memorable one it was nonetheless, and so it was a brilliant idea by Jumpol to preserve so many of its relics ranging from a 2.6-ton piece of the Wall to a “Minol” gasoline pump of the kind in front of which East German motorists sometimes lined up for hours to fill up their tiny “Trabant” cars whose bodies were made of plastic containing resin strengthened by wool or cotton.

The Wende Museum’s exhibit is breathtaking, ranging from rows and rows of busts of Communist luminaries to the straw hat and last private papers of Erich Honecker, East Germany’s penultimate Communist Party chief, and his secretary’s office furniture; from Stasi (secret police) listening devices and other snooping paraphernalia to an impressive collection of oil paintings in the style of “Socialist Realism;” from artfully embroidered flags and banners of party front organizations to films concerning personal hygiene, and a collection of “Das Magazin,” a state-owned popular soft-porn publication.

After the “Wende,” East Germans found out that Honecker himself preferred more salacious materials, as evidenced by his personal film collection. He also had grand architectural visions, namely the “Palace of the Republic” he had built in downtown East Berlin where the Kaiser’s castle once stood. East German wags called this glittering structure, which was razed two years ago, “Erichs Lampenladen” (Erich’s lamp store). It housed the country’s rubberstamp parliament, a cultural center and elaborate restaurants. Guess where their silverware and china marked with the letters “PR” (for Palast der Republik) in gold, and where their menus have ended up? Indeed: in Culver City.

As a German with memories of the Nazi regime and its Communist successor I got goose bumps, though, when Jumpol told me about one of his eeriest items, the black robe of a judge in the National Socialist “people’s court” system in World War II, not the regular judiciary. This robe had a swastika embroidered to it. What makes this item so intriguing is that its owner later became a “Volksrichter” (people’s judge) under Communism, as Jampol said.

How come a youngster from America’s surfers’ paradise developed such a consuming passion for artifacts, art and kitsch from the Cold War era particularly in the eastern part of Germany? Well, it’s hard to say. But when he was nine years old he already acquired an East Berlin policeman’s uniform of the 1950s. A young man with a love for history uncommon among most of his contemporaries, he briefly studied in West Berlin’s Free University and found it astonishing that almost nobody in Germany seemed to take much interest in collecting memorabilia of the vanished GDR culture. So he started collecting, at first randomly.

“Soon people were bringing me their stuff,” he recalled. Then he found “scavengers,” as he called people scouting eastern Germany on his behalf. One of these “scavengers” was a man with perhaps a murky background making a living on flea markets. Jumpol was now a graduate student at Oxford University where things East German filled his dorm room. One night, he received a particularly urgent call from his scout, who had found an extraordinary “treasure” in the basement of a house near Dresden.

This was in 2006 at the time of the huge Dresden flood when water from the Elbe River kept pouring into people’s basements threatening the “scavenger’s” find – ledgers containing the complete collection of the daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” the East German Communist Party’s central organ. “My scavenger could not rescue them from the water by himself,” Jampol told me. “So, as many times before, I took the first bus from Oxford to Heathrow, flew to Berlin and raced down to Saxony to rescue the ledgers before they were soaked.”

They are now, he said, among his favorite items in his museum, which is funded primarily by the London-based Arcadia Fund whose key mission is the protection of endangered culture and nature. Peter Baldwin, Jampol’s former history professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and the earliest supporter of his collector’s passion, serves on the Donor Board of this international charity.

And which of his artifacts renders Jampol particularly contemplative? “Well,” he said, “a former East German prison guard gave me the tools of his former trade, his handcuffs and electrical shock equipment, for example.” And how, I wanted to know, does this man earn his living in reunified Germany? Said Jampol: “He is still a prison guard.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto's Blog

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The Berlin Wall and the laughing God

And the wall fell down flat

I was there when they built the Wall

Soldiers: God’s masks in fatigues

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Drawdown in Afghanistan – will populism again trump victory?

Homobonide twaddle, the cause of Robert Gates’ frustration

Germany’s anti-nuclear Schwärmerei

WORLD MATTERS: A royalist dream – Harry, King of Saxony

Did Lincoln owe his victory to Germans?

FAITH MATTERS: Hugo Chávez -- Bolivar's red reincarnation?

WORLD MATTERS: Germany’s next vice chancellor – an Asian

WORLD MATTERS: Media award for the media’s foe

Faith Matters: Angst-driven landslide in Germany

World Matters: Ashamed by Germany's cowardice

Faith Matters: Nutty hints at the Apocalypse

Faith Matters (II): Muslim migration, a chance for the Church

Faith Matters (I): Are Christians to blame for Muslim hate?

Faith Matters (I): Are Christians to blame for Muslim hate?

FAITH MATTERS: Tariq Ramadan, point man of the Caliphate

Potsdam-Honolulu-Bordeaux: A Musical Arc

An Audacious Hope Became Joyful Reality

A Warning from a Grave

Divided by Clichés

Witness to History at Concordia Irvine

Of Foreboding and Forgiveness

Masks Asking Vicarious Questions

East Germany by the Pacific

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall perished, a museum in California evokes the land that lay behind it By UWE SIEMON-NETTO(From the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall perished, a museum in California evokes the land that lay behind it
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO
(From the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)