00:00:10.200And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:13.880So, Adrienne, today we are returning to our perennial project 1933 with part five going through July of 1933.
00:00:24.760Do you want to tell any listeners who might be new about our Project 1933 and encourage them to maybe listen to parts one through four first?
00:00:32.080People are making a lot of comparisons between the year 2025 and the year 1933.
00:00:36.860And we thought it might be a good exercise to go through 1933 as we go through 2025 and to think about points of contiguity, points of difference, and to really go through the experience of 1933.
00:00:52.220What it felt like, not sort of in hindsight, but for people going through it, given that we're currently going through 2025.
00:01:00.100The other thing we're obviously doing, given that this is a podcast about gender and conservatism, is to look at conservatives and to look at gender questions quite a bit.
00:01:09.400And that's what we're going to be doing today.
00:01:11.660So the July episode I had teased and promised would be about two things.0.98
00:01:17.440Collaborators and Catholics, who are not necessarily the same people.1.00
00:06:20.420One thing that I didn't realize until I looked at all these diaries in parallel is that people almost seemed to think there was going to be an invasion,
00:06:25.980that, like, basically the allies were going to be like,
00:06:28.360you're clearly going to go back on the peace treaty of Versailles,
00:08:35.140And professors are under threat for their speech or maybe their background.
00:08:39.980I think it's maybe useful to remind our listeners about Klemperer, who, in addition to being a professor, is unusually for professors by this point in 1933.
00:09:05.160A lot of people his generation are holding on, but I think I don't have the quote exactly right, but he's like, well, obviously this is piecemeal.
00:09:14.060They're going to get to me, but they haven't gotten to him yet.
00:09:16.860There's already been some purges, but people are waiting for things to get worse.
00:09:22.540And my guess is some people are complying in advance and some people are doing everything they can while they can, waiting for the hammer to fall.
00:09:31.720Exactly. Meanwhile, he also notices that people that he's friends with, and I think at this point, that's many, many Jewish people. He had a very mixed circle of friends. But obviously, in this situation, you turn to people who are going through what you're going through. And there are friends who are just withdrawing from him. There are friends he's breaking with because they're basically going Nazi or they're not standing up for people like him.
00:09:55.780And he notices in these people what he calls an immigrant mentality, especially among his Jewish friends, right?0.52
00:10:01.140The hope for a collapse of the regime or an invasion and so on has totally dimmed.0.93
00:10:05.880And people are starting to sort of be like, well, if we go, where would we go, right?
00:10:09.820So these are not your Thomas Manns or your Leon Feuchtwangers or your Erich Merier-Marc who were like, oh, we're outie.0.97
00:10:18.540Like the moment the Nazis came to power, these are people who are like, well, shit, what would we do and how would we do it?0.95
00:10:24.500And so people are starting to look to France, to Denmark, and again and again to Palestine, right?0.99
00:10:30.880I've had that conversation with people.
00:10:33.340If it gets really gnarly here, where would you flee to?
00:10:47.780So this is the other thing is the specifically anti-Semitic character of Nazi persecution, right?
00:10:56.800Because there's a lot of different classes of people who are being prevented from making a living or from being full participants in public life.
00:11:04.800Communists, SPD members, like all of these different big groups of people who are coming in under these punitive policies.
00:11:11.920But it's Jews in particular who are like, oh, we might have to actually flee.
00:11:16.320Being drummed out of your job is an indignity.1.00
00:11:19.800It is also, of course, it threatens your very existence, right?
00:11:22.960This is four years after the stock market crash.
00:11:25.940These people do not have huge savings to fall back on as a rule.
00:13:12.080Wow. Victor Klemperer said that, okay? Don't report us.
00:13:18.000Yeah. Do not deport me. I report, you deport.
00:13:22.260So the focus of our episode today is on the nature of collaboration with the Nazi regime, right?
00:13:29.820This is a political group that emerged, really kind of exploded out of the fringe far right and has now quickly taken over the national government and they're quickly making themselves synonymous with Germany itself.
00:13:46.540Right. Which means the opportunities to be a functioning member of German society without collaborating or cooperating or in some sense aiding the Nazi regime are probably like being foreclosed pretty quick.
00:14:01.880Like this is something you can imagine happening as, say, institutions fall in line, right?
00:14:06.600Like suddenly working in your job is a kind of collaboration or you're trying to keep your institution from being shut down.
00:14:12.960And say you maybe pay a $200 million fine to the authoritarian government to try and get them to allow you to continue being a research university.
00:14:24.460But there's a lot of different forms that collaboration takes.
00:14:28.280What do we mean by collaboration when we talk about Nazi collaborators?0.84
00:14:31.880It's such a good question. And I think this is the central problem with wanting to tell the
00:14:36.960story of these people, that as we are finding in 2025, there are many ways you can become
00:14:42.220complicit. There are many sort of decision points, and often they may not even become
00:14:47.480apparent as decision points until afterwards, right? What makes you a collaborator could be,
00:14:53.940joining the Nazi party. That would seem too really qualified. But then participating in0.76
00:14:59.400the Nazi state can absolutely be a form of collaboration. At the same time, we've seen0.85
00:15:05.240how that's not obvious, right? Remember in the June episode, we talked about the events in
00:15:11.560where the police, for instance, stepped in and stopped the SA from beating up on communists,
00:15:17.140right? So these people were working for the German state, which was starting to become more and more0.81
00:15:22.380identified with the Nazi party. But they're like, please stop, Nazi party. You're breaking the law,
00:15:27.140Right. So there is this weird kind of duality still. And probably some of them did not think that they were participating. Right. They were participating in the state, but it wasn't their fault that state was becoming identical with this party.
00:15:41.180But then there are plenty of others who basically, by just doing their job, you know, participated in that state.0.62
00:15:48.400And then there's the other one you mentioned, which in this forced synchronization, participated in the Nazification of the state.
00:15:55.120That's another form of collaboration.0.80
00:15:57.160And that, too, can be like, well, look, they're literally putting a gun to my head.
00:17:03.180And then the other thing that I really want to drive home for people is because there were so many inflection points where people could make these kind of decisions, it was also easy for them to tell themselves a more checkered story than was really true.
00:17:17.220Yeah, I mean, something that is really striking me about our era in 2025 is how elaborate and robust people's capacity for self-justification is.
00:17:30.160I wish I could. I wish I could be like self-righteously pointing at others. But this is also something I've encountered in my own like reflection on my own conduct. Right. Like it is very, very easy to keep acting as if you are not implicated or do not have responsibilities that you do.
00:17:47.640And this is something that, like, comes up a lot after the war, right?
00:17:53.980People are retroactively altering their own accounts of their participation in the Nazi regime and their own accounts of their conduct during the war to underplay the effectiveness of their aid for the Nazis and then overstate their resistance.
00:19:13.960He's really not something that I would accuse of any kind of moral turpitude in that regard, but no one has a perfect record, which is also to say that, like, you know, I hope that everyone currently muddling through and listening to us takes some courage in that, right?
00:19:27.280There are people failing the test of history much more grievously than you are, and they work at many universities.
00:19:34.740And it's also, you know, everybody who has had these lapses, that is not the finite end of their moral story, right?
00:19:43.640Exactly. Many of these people have lapses of exhaustion or naivete or like self-deception and then also find courage at other points in time.
00:19:55.380Yeah, exactly. This gets us back to the conservatism question, too, because, of course, it was particularly hard, not that I'm shedding a ton of tears for these people, but it was hard for people who agreed with the Nazis on some substantive issues and were happy that some of this stuff was happening, but were maybe not okay with how it was happening.
00:22:28.140I do want to walk you through how he spends 1933.
00:22:32.360In between all this stuff, his defenders will point out that, like, yeah, he stood up for all these Jewish people in various orchestras and for various conductors, et cetera, et cetera.
00:24:22.000but, you know, the mail was not that fast in 1933.
00:24:24.560I don't think they knew what was in this thing.
00:24:26.220So it really starts becoming like, oh, this is code for that man left Germany and you're starting to realize he's not coming back. Right. Yeah. So it becomes this like call out of this guy for essentially his anti-Nazi politics. Right. Through the medium of like he's wrong about Wagner and he's defaming this wonderful composer.
00:25:11.720it was a lecture to whom man gave about Richard Wagner.0.89
00:25:14.920Anything else important happening in the news that you might want to fucking weigh in on, Hans Fittsner?0.59
00:25:20.160Well, it reminds me a little bit about, like, the Trump administration expressing its own power through the flimsiness of its, like, pretextual grievances.0.90
00:25:28.960I don't think anybody really thinks, except maybe, like, the most naive Zionists in the world, that the Trump administration was concerned about anti-Semitism at Columbia University, right?0.96
00:25:38.000But that was the very flimsy hook upon which they hung this whole, like, shakedown enterprise.0.93
00:25:44.380And similarly at Harvard, it's a way in which the container for the grievance is almost arbitrary.
00:25:51.600What's really at stake is this sorting of different actors into enemy and friend camps.
00:27:34.760And basically Otto Klemperer leaves Germany and starts touring outside of Germany and outside of Europe and eventually will actually make it to Hollywood.
00:27:42.800So they're getting these people fired by claiming kind of these conspiracies against like genuine German art, right?
00:27:50.200And you can tell like every composer likes to have their stuff performed, but like the nasty sort of politics of personal destruction sort of intersecting with this kind of more broader complaint about our woke elites are suppressing genuine German art.
00:28:04.760right yeah and they're jumping onto these insane nazi cultural groups in order to kind of drum out0.61
00:28:12.480people like otto klepper likely wouldn't have lasted much longer if fitzna hadn't become active
00:28:18.280still he gets this guy fired essentially and at the same time fitzna is constantly sending like0.88
00:28:23.720various important nazis his writings and being like here i'll show you what's wrong with jewish
00:28:28.840modernism right and like a lot of that stuff ends up in exhibitions and they did a whole like0.93
00:28:34.220music festival where they were like oh this is all the degenerate music that you shouldn't be
00:28:39.680listening to which is kind of weird to then perform it but like whatever they were not the
00:28:44.520most forward-thinking people consistent group of people but he is like writing to nazis like i love
00:28:50.500your work here's some other stuff i think you should oppress yeah exactly so then in july of
00:28:55.5601933 he was supposed to conduct at the salzburg festival because he didn't want to help the other
00:29:03.180nations outside of Germany that were oppressing Germany right now by reporting accurately on what
00:29:07.980was happening within the country. The foreign oppression has switched from being about the
00:29:12.120reparations payments mandated by the Versailles Treaty to now just being like, how dare they0.96
00:29:16.860talk about what we are doing in their evil lying press? Okay. Yeah. Stop saying things that I've
00:29:21.820done. So he's like, I am such a German nationalist that I don't even want to perform in a music
00:29:27.840festival with other nations. Yeah. Ironically, I believe the person who steps in for him is0.66
00:29:32.520Otto Klemperer. He's like, I'll do it.
00:30:22.960And I think people might want to take notes on that.
00:30:24.840You know, smallness in that kind of situation can be a virtue, right?
00:30:28.740When the entire country is trying to forget what happened to be like,
00:30:31.300Well, I didn't forget. I got letters. If anyone wants to print them.
00:30:35.200I remember when you said all this Nazi shit. I remember when you provided material support to the regime. I remember. Yeah, exactly.0.98
00:30:42.640Useful pettiness. I, too, am taking some notes, assuming I see the other side of it, which I might not be as optimistic about as you are.
00:30:51.000Well, we'll see. I mean, you know, but pettiness will stand us in good stead either way.
00:30:54.540The second example I wanted to give for collaboration has to do with something that becomes more common in the summer of 1933 and does in fact show up in July in Klemper's diary, which is the Hitler salute, right?0.80
00:31:10.440This is so weird to me that quite quickly something as granular and mundane as the way that people said hello changed.
00:31:20.700It seems like quite pervasively, right?
00:31:22.960Like people started doing the Hitler salute like in place of waving.0.65
00:31:26.520Yeah, but it's really interesting the uptake of this thing.
00:31:29.120And obviously like all we have to go by are the recollections of people who were there and who don't have any reason to lie, such as Viktor Klemperer.
00:31:38.760because we don't tend to record how we greet each other
00:35:54.220Yeah, like again, pettiness, right? He also started his first lecture course in 1933 with a long disquisition on the first commandment. For our non-believers in the audience, Moira, what is the first commandment?
00:36:11.220I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any other gods before me. I'm butchering the very nice King James, but it's a prohibition on the worship of idols.
00:36:32.280I don't need to point a target on my back.
00:36:34.340And Karl Barth is like, where's that spray paint?
00:36:37.060I got to put a target on my back, you guys.
00:36:39.020And when his university required the Hitler salute, he refused, saying that the faculty of theology is exempted from the primacy of the state.
00:36:47.740It is a state-organized form of instruction, but one that serves a higher power.
00:36:56.520He'd be saying, you know, Gruß Gott, which means like be with God.
00:36:59.360But he was not going to invoke, you know, the chancellor, president, or anyone of Germany0.99
00:37:03.840because it's a fucking theology lecture.0.97
00:37:05.660And in August of 1934, he'd be asked to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and refused.0.99
00:37:11.140And then in 1935, he's offered a job in Basel in Switzerland.
00:37:14.480And he's like, okay, I'll take this, I think.
00:37:16.600So that gives you a sense of like these very symbolic measures created friction, created pressure, but also created sites for resistance.
00:37:26.720Because the regime is reaching into people's daily lives and trying to mandate these like minutiae of their social interactions, that also means that those small gestures can also become sites to express discontent or refusal.
00:37:42.240Yeah, this is something that I'm sure Hannah Arendt had in mind when she wrote about the origin of totalitarianism. This is really the state getting into your most nitty gritty interactions, inserting itself into these and making fraught what would seem to be possibly extremely personal and extremely small bore interactions where you basically have to constantly think, what will the collectives think about this? What will the state think about this? What will the party think about this? Right.
00:38:09.000And, you know, Hannah Arendt was still in Germany at the time.
00:38:11.260I'm sure this is something she was like, yeah, someone should write a book about the origins of this, you know.
00:38:25.680You're like, oh, shit, this guy too.1.00
00:38:27.520Ah, shit, everyone at the office, right?1.00
00:38:29.000When Klempela says, I saw people sort of doing it in the office to each other.1.00
00:38:32.900He's like, well, it always takes two, doesn't it?
00:38:34.720That means that office is already lost.
00:38:36.920Like, maybe I don't go in there anymore.
00:38:38.200When you drive through Trump country, even if it's a very rural place, and you see the big signs everywhere, it creates a sense of mass popular support for the regime, right? And when you're walking through your office building and people are making the Hitler salute, it's got to be incredibly isolating, but it also creates a sense of, okay, the popular zeitgeist is in favor of Hitler.
00:39:04.580Exactly. This comes to backfire eventually in the sense that a lot of people use the declining popularity of the salute to indicate the opposite mood swing.
00:39:16.280Klemperer in June 1941 will note, quote, the overall mood is terrible.
00:39:22.680You can tell they're losing the workers.
00:39:25.080They used to say, Heil Hitler. Now they say, guten Tag.
00:39:28.200Right. It becomes this thing where like he starts taking hope in the fact that, oh, this guy got this illusion.
00:39:40.160Because political expression is repressed and because there's a great deal of consequence or risk in just speaking frankly about your opposition to the regime, you also have to sort of be decoding and reading the tea leaves of these tiny gestures.
00:40:33.900I'm stuck in my ways, I'm not doing this, you know, I'm going to invoke God.
00:40:37.460Yeah, or like, it is its own kind of like cantankerous conservatism, you know.
00:40:43.000It is the kind of tiny gesture of like resistance or refusal that can also obscure a broader buy-in.
00:40:52.820But then I also imagine that there's a lot of people who retroactively like overstated their own resistance or opposition to the Nazi regime by being like,
00:41:01.020well, I said guten tag all the way to the 1930s, you know?
00:41:04.680So on the one hand, yes, the insistence on this greeting
00:44:37.140How did Wagner come into the rehabilitation of Heil?
00:44:41.120So there is a hailing scene in Lohengrin and Hitler loved it.0.68
00:44:46.280So that appears to be where the Nazi party sort of jumped on that train.
00:44:51.900It's like how every time Donald Trump says that he wants to reopen Alcatraz, it's because that like 1996 Sean Connery movie, The Rock, like just played on cable TV like the day before.
00:49:06.480What we might be seeing is just a stylistic distinction between, like, Nazi leadership and, like, Nazi rank and file, which doesn't strike me as, like, crazy or unique to them.
00:49:15.080At the same time, I think what it might be is that the regime and the party were just not identical in this way, right?
00:49:22.300The regime had an interest in being kind of ecumenical and welcoming all comers.
00:49:26.720And if there was a discourse that said that these late arrivals were not quite full member and maybe needed to prove themselves, that's also a bit convenient, isn't it?
00:49:35.180Like, behind closed doors, we're saying, like, is this guy really for real?
00:49:39.740It kind of gives people a real incentive to prove themselves and to overdo it maybe a little bit, to kick out more people out of their organization, to be even worse in what they say in public, right?
00:49:51.600And the second thing is that it probably speaks to different factions within the Nazi state.0.54
00:49:56.280Parts of it were very backward looking and all about having served and suffered for the cause or for Germany, right?0.58
00:50:01.600Like the SA with its weird World War I fixation and like cosplaying as World War I vets, even when they weren't.
00:50:07.800Right. And other parts of the Nazi state were forward looking, right?0.59
00:50:11.240They were looking to grow and to absorb the state.0.89
00:50:14.080Right. They were like, hey, if these people want to identify with us, that is fine.
00:50:17.600Right. For whatever reason, come on in.
00:50:19.840You're describing a social milieu in which there's like a really oppressive degree of mutual suspicion and distrust.
00:50:25.060like even among nazis and so there's a situation for like new members to the party or people who
00:50:32.480are trying to be nazi collaborators in which like even buying in and even capitulating like it's not
00:50:39.500enough it reminds me a little of how we describe masculinity as like a receding horizon right
00:50:44.600you've got this identity that's never sufficiently proven yes never sufficiently expressed it's never
00:50:50.660sufficiently authentic. Nazism, like masculinity itself, has this like insecure inadequacy just
00:50:57.220built into it that keeps its participants like chasing it and chasing it and chasing it.
00:51:02.740So I think what you get is both a picture of a society where everyone is in acute competition,
00:51:07.880old guard versus Johnny-come-latelys, true believers who need to distinguish themselves
00:51:12.280from opportunists, right? And as you're saying, you could only screw this up, right? Scholl in
00:51:18.360his article mentions Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, who speaks
00:51:22.040of, quote, knights of the business cycle or Konjunkturritter, so people who join a party
00:51:27.080and movement whenever its stock is rising and then abandon it when it's on the wane.
00:51:31.860But Schirach also uses the term, which is also attested in other sources, of the 110
00:51:37.040percenter, i.e. a Nazi who kind of overdoes it.
00:51:40.840So even being too much of a Nazi is suspicious.
00:51:43.700Yeah, they're like, the lady doff protests too much.
00:51:46.300Yeah, you're not fully committed because you're too Nazi. Right. It's like you're always going to do it wrong. You cannot be properly Nazi for the Nazis. Right. Which means everyone is just going to look over their shoulder, is going to think everyone else is doubting them and is going to try and fall in line all the harder, but not too hard.0.65
00:52:05.580This also strikes me as post-talk rationalizations for, like, existing hierarchies within the party or within, like, various SA groups or whatnot.
00:52:15.340Because, you know, you know when you don't like somebody and you wind up having to, like, try and, like, retroactively construct a reason why you don't like them that's righteous?
00:52:27.060The Nazi party is like a very messy friend group where you're like, Jesus, you guys got to get it together.0.54
00:52:31.440And you can imagine if you overlay that kind of messiness over a functioning civil service, like what that does to it, right? Like that's the kind of transformation that we're seeing throughout 1933.0.88
00:52:41.160So that's our detour into elements of collaboration. But then part two of this episode is about the Catholics and the Catholic relationship to the Nazi party.
00:52:51.680Yeah, and I mean, collaboration will come up here as well. And the question of how the Catholic Church sort of reached some kind of entente with the Nazi regime. But again, it's also about how sites of resistance and of alternate power centers have opened up within the Nazi state.
00:53:10.580When we talk about Catholicism in Germany, right, it's a religion that has been both extremely influential, but that had found its temporal power within Germany declining on a pretty long timescale.
00:53:25.200Before a decree called the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, one of those German words that's extremely short, during the Napoleonic Wars, there had been temporal rulers in Germany who were just Catholic bishops.
00:53:37.240That sort of ended after the Napoleonic Wars.
00:53:41.060And then, as you remember, in 1871, Germany is united by and under Prussia, which is a Protestant nation, right?
00:53:48.380This put German Catholics in a very strange position.
00:53:52.320On the one hand, a lot of them were convinced German nationalists and were maybe even happy that Germany was finally unifying or thought it was inevitable, right, that this was going to happen.0.92
00:54:03.780There were just more Protestants in that area.0.70
00:54:05.600If you didn't take Austria on board, like we just were in a minority.
00:54:09.460But at the same time, they were quite worried because suddenly a nation that had been Protestant since the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century was making official government policy.
00:54:21.320And then, of course, what pours oil into the fire is the Syllabus Errorum, which sort of launches the kind of campaign of Vatican anti-modernism.
00:54:30.680This is the First Vatican Council, which basically coincides with the foundation of the German Empire, right?
00:54:52.200So this is the idea of papal infallibility, right?
00:54:56.400Which is, as far as I understand it, not a traditional position of the Catholic Church.
00:54:59.700It is an anti-modern one. It is meant to prevent a absorption of the Catholic Church into the modern nation state.
00:55:07.700To be like, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to be separate from that.0.98
00:55:10.140We will create dual loyalties within our followers, and you're going to have to just be okay with that, right?
00:55:14.980Right. So if the pope is divinely ordained as infallible, that creates some tensions for, say, a German subject who is Catholic, who is being told by the Kaiser to do one thing and by the pope to do another.
00:55:31.660Exactly. And I think this is traced back to Peter, but I think they kind of reactivate this anti-modern sort of pushback.
00:55:40.800I think if you take the maximally cynical view or the Declaration of Papal Infallibility, you'll probably get pretty close to the truth, right?
00:55:47.760They didn't want to be questioned, and so they made up a rule with probably quite flimsy pretext in church history that questioning them was the same as questioning God.
00:56:01.240Yeah, and I mean, some of this is about ideology, some of this is about giving the church more breathing room within the nation state.
00:56:08.720It is also, right, coming out of the Vatican.
00:56:11.280Do you know what was happening with the Vatican in 1864 to 1870?
00:56:51.640They thought, well, the Pope being infallible
00:56:55.680was something that was smart when we had a Holy Roman Empire.
00:56:59.140Now we have a government that runs railroads and telegraph poles.
00:57:04.480I sort of feel like we're done with this.
00:57:06.660It feels like the nation state is the carrier of history.
00:57:09.880I'm not sure the dude in the purple robe is the carrier of history here.
00:57:15.440We're in an era where our nationalists are very regressive, often have integrated Christianity into their notion definitely of the American nation, right?
00:57:27.480And in which like nationalism and religion go hand in hand.
00:57:30.000But at the time, nationalism was a new force that was imagining a sort of historical destiny that was going to be fulfilled in the future.
00:57:38.020And the loyalties and imagination and vision of, like, authority that nationalism offered was in pretty direct competition to the older vision of, like, authority and loyalty to your church, to your religion.
00:57:53.580But the fracturing of the German Catholics goes even further.
00:57:57.380Even liberal Catholics in Germany were often worried about the dominance of Protestant Prussia, right?
00:58:02.420They charged what they call Borussiaanism.
00:58:04.540So the idea that, like, we're not saying that the Pope is right to claim infallibility, and we are German subjects first.
00:58:12.800But you also have to be German subjects first.
00:58:15.440You can't be Prussian Protestants and then be like, oh, you have to get with the program because it's the German program.
00:58:20.440It's like, well, no, that's also particularism, right?
00:58:22.600Like, you have this particular cultural tradition, and you can't force us into that either, right?
00:58:29.320And those are the Catholics that then are gathered in the center party, which we've already encountered in our June episode.
00:58:35.500They were concerned with preserving their particularity vis-a-vis the nascent German state, right?
00:58:42.940There have to be things, especially when it comes to things like education, where we have to just be allowed to do our own thing by this state.
00:58:51.200Right. The center party, in contrast to its name, we talked about how they are like on the political right before 1933.
00:58:58.300Well, we'll get to that. They drift more to the right. They really start in the center. They mean it.
00:59:03.980They're like, we're fine with a lot of this stuff. We think there should be national education.
00:59:08.540We just think that you shouldn't be teaching people that the pope is wrong.
00:59:12.380They are in a very tricky kind of political position.
00:59:15.500And in some way, the right wing Catholics had a much easier time just joining these kind of traditionalist parties.
00:59:20.500The center party is really staking out this very contradictory ground.
00:59:25.100But it gets worse because it wasn't just about the role of German nationalism and particularism.
00:59:32.320Catholicism becomes a stand-in for ethnicity.
00:59:34.940Not in the sense that like Bavarians are their own ethnicity.
01:00:38.640This feels like a standard for something else.
01:00:40.480Right. So not all Catholics are created equal, is what you're saying.0.89
01:00:43.600Exactly. Right. So for a Prussian Juncker like Bismarck, ultramontanism, so ceding authority to the other side of the Alps, meaning Rome, was always going to smack of a negation of national unity.1.00
01:00:57.280Now you're negating the national German idea, which technically a lot of these Polish nationalists, in fact, were.0.56
01:01:03.640We're like, yeah, we would like to leave, Bismarck.
01:01:06.260And he's like, well, that's what I'm talking about. Now I don't feel so good about this.
01:01:09.080Right. This was also like weirdly a fringe accusation against John F. Kennedy when he became the president. Can he really be the leader of the U.S. if he's got this secondary loyalty to the Pope? It's this like idea of divided loyalties as a threat to the nationalist project.
01:01:25.540That's right. And so what we get is the so-called Kulturkampf, the culture war, where Bismarck starts sort of asserting national dominance over and against the Catholic Church and really goes all in on this fight with the Catholic Church, right?
01:01:41.380He advocates for a separation of church and state, a fight against ultramontanism, and a separation of church and school, right?0.99
01:01:50.520Get the Catholics out of the school system.0.99
01:01:53.840The actual moves of this culture war were stuff like banning the Jesuits.1.00
01:03:06.240Someone's got to kiss someone's feet, but it's just not clear who it's going to be.
01:03:09.840And what ends this fight is just that Pius IX died and his successor, Leo XIII, was more moderate, both sides kind of disarmed, and time passed.
01:03:21.980One of these conflicts that doesn't really end in a clear victory, but more in a sort of gradual disinvestment from the stakes.
01:03:30.380Exactly. But set the Catholic Church in Germany on this course, where there were people really coming down on various different sides of these issues.
01:03:39.360And they weren't like one side versus the other, although that's how Bismarck thought about it, the ultramontanist versus like people who were German nationalists first.
01:03:48.200But German Catholics were in a way divided along really interesting lines, right?
01:03:53.800There were German Catholics who accepted the primacy of the German nation, who had rushed to declare their fealty to the Hohenzollerns.
01:04:01.320They called themselves state Catholics.0.61
01:04:03.840You know, this sounds a little creepy.
01:04:05.660Yeah, state Catholics, not really a phrase you want to hear.
01:05:05.880The reason they tried to minimize religion in their thinking was not that they were irreligious, but that they had seen what people were capable of if you told them that their irreconcilable religious differences were politically salient and that they should maybe murder each other over it.
01:05:22.160They do end up murdering each other over it and say like, okay, what if we find something that isn't that and agree on that, such as the fact that we can all think and reason together, right?
01:05:33.240This was an old position within Europe to sort of say, hey, it seems we don't agree on this Catholic-Protestant thing, so let's just shift attention to other things that maybe are better at creating a kind of shared basis for discourse and disagreement for us.
01:05:51.260Usually the state Catholics opposed the center party's claim to speak for German Catholics as such, and they instead drew on an estatist understanding derived from the Hegelian right or from historic positivist schools of law.
01:06:07.460So what does an estatist understanding mean? That's not a phrase I've heard before.
01:06:12.800Yeah, historic positivism might need some glossing for people.
01:06:16.420What this basically means is they said, look, it's ahistorical to oppose church and state, right?
01:06:22.580Over the course of centuries, their interactions have developed a logic of their own that you can't abstract from, right?
01:06:30.200They had one relationship in the Middle Ages.
01:06:36.820And they have a different one in the 19th century.
01:06:38.900Okay, so like the notion that these are institutions that have had a changing relationship that are nonetheless somewhat symbiotic and that we don't need to put them against each other.
01:06:50.060Yeah, look, we're just not in the Middle Ages anymore.
01:06:53.240And to act like it is a little bit like you're cosplaying, right?
01:06:56.580You may think that the church should have primacy.0.86
01:07:00.140But if we look at our present historic moment, it's pretty fucking clear it doesn't.
01:07:05.840We're not going to rewind history to like St. Thomas Aquinas.0.78
01:07:08.460we've moved on. Positive law in this case does not mean positivistic. It means law that people
01:07:15.060have made over time, right? As opposed to natural law. They're saying it's not about what ought to
01:07:20.820be the case from first principles. It's what ought to be the case from historic development,
01:07:28.020right? They're saying like, look, would I enjoy it better if I lived in the 15th century? Possibly.
01:07:33.480I do not, in fact, live in the 15th century. Here, I can't help but notice that, again,
01:07:37.900the German Empire is able to have trains that run on time.1.00
01:07:42.000The Catholic Church does not have a single fucking train.0.99
01:07:47.140What we call history is the rearticulation of the relationship between these two things.
01:07:52.800He famously thought, well, what we really see is the spirit of religion transforming into something else,
01:07:58.660into kind of a more political, state-bound, what he calls spirit, right?
01:08:03.740Objective spirit is what he'll call it.
01:08:05.460what we were saying about like the claims of authority and imagination and loyalty of the
01:08:11.700church in one historic era become the claims of the nation and another. This is basically a
01:08:15.800shorthand of this Hegelian process of the spirit of religion transforming into a spirit of the state.
01:08:22.660Exactly. So, you have these state Catholics who basically say, look, we have to understand the0.80
01:08:26.980emergence of the modern state as fundamentally re-articulating the relationship between church
01:08:33.060and state. And we have sort of church supremacists who are saying, well, we think that the articulation
01:08:38.160of the modern state is a mistake. And we think that ultimately, we have to return the church
01:08:44.000to some kind of stature that it once had. Like Adrian Vermeule, who uses the integralist
01:08:50.220sect. Yeah. But those were often the center party, right? This was often the liberals.
01:08:55.280Adrian Vermeule, except with liberal pluralist politics, it's very, very funny, right? So by
01:09:00.080the time we get to 1933, we have these Rechtskatholen or Rechtskatholiken, right-wing Catholics. But as
01:09:07.580the historian Olaf Blaschke points out, the term Rechtskatholisch was a left-wing descriptor of
01:09:13.720these people coined after the war, right? It wasn't like the dude, a handle that anyone self-applied
01:09:20.180in 1933, which creates all these definitional problems. Like, who are we really talking about?
01:09:25.020Who are these Catholics that found themselves in alliance or an agreement with the Nazis in 1933?
01:09:33.360Blaschke sort of distinguishes between Rechtskatholiken on the one hand
01:09:36.800and a bunch of other groups and voting blocs that mixed Catholicism and right-wing politics in the 20s and 30s.
01:09:43.580He lists fulkish Catholics, Catholic anti-Semites, philofascists, and brown Catholics, right?
01:09:50.160And you can sort of see in the way we've talked about the various subdivisions of these Catholics, where they all come from.0.98
01:09:58.760This isn't just like, oh, I'm not that kind of fascist, I'm this kind of fascist.
01:10:02.680These are all people who really differ in their Catholicism, right?
01:10:05.880Some are state-first Catholics. Some are church-first Catholics, right?
01:10:09.680Some are essentially fascists who also happen to be Catholic.0.59
01:10:12.720Some are Catholics who think that the fascist state will reestablish the primacy of the Vatican, right?0.59
01:10:20.600Like, there are really interesting mixes that are happening here.
01:10:24.740At the same time, Blaschke also stresses that the term, you know, Rechtskatholiken, so right-wing Catholics,
01:10:30.880tends to suggest that there was a block of people responsible for the shift.
01:10:34.760And he and a bunch of other historians of Catholicism point out that it's a far more diffuse set of actors and actions that created the sort of entente cordiale between the Nazis and the Catholic Church, or of Catholicism more broadly.
01:10:49.940It wasn't a discrete set of personalities and political groups that underwent this shift.
01:10:56.300It was that various Catholic subgroups became more comfortable with fascism and with the Nazis as time went on in the 1920s for a variety of reasons.
01:11:06.740The historian Manfred Gailus points out that there was this new, what he calls the hybridity of faith in the 1920s.
01:11:14.200For Protestants in Germany, identifying the church and the state was easy, right?
01:11:18.560their church was run by the state.0.98
01:11:21.360But Catholics were not immune to this kind of thinking,
01:11:24.400that they thought, you know, in some way,
01:11:26.600the Catholic Church and the German state are also identical, right?
01:15:22.340So he was the Cardinal Secretary of State in the Vatican and the Camar Lago, a position that will be familiar to Dan Brown fans among our listeners.
01:15:32.720This has come up enough on the podcast that I do think I have to read the Da Vinci Code now because you bring it up like every third episode.
01:15:38.920Well, no, no, it's not the Da Vinci Code.
01:17:36.520Many of those negotiated by the apostolic Nunzius at the time in Germany, one, wait for it, Eugenio Pacelli.
01:17:44.260Oh, okay. So he's bringing out this work he's done before to make a bigger, more general sort of treaty or contract between the Vatican and the Nazi German state.
01:18:13.040Since 1918, most monarchies in Europe had fallen.
01:18:16.860So basically the relationship between church and state needed to be reconfigured or at least reaffirmed.
01:18:22.540Note that these guys in the Vatican are thinking, weirdly, given what we know the stakes to be today, looking back,
01:18:29.540in shifts and matters bigger than day-to-day politics, right?
01:18:34.160They're wondering about the role of faith in government and society as a whole.0.79
01:18:38.860Surely the way to get a modernizing population to maintain their faith in God is for the institutions that represent God on earth to get in bed with the Nazis.0.61
01:18:49.720That has never given anybody a crisis of faith.0.70
01:18:52.640The Catholic Church is just playing a very different game.
01:18:55.100They think of themselves as playing the long game, right?0.57
01:18:57.600We might think of them today as extremely narrow-minded and short-sighted and concluding a treaty with a literal devil.
01:19:04.380at the same time, what they think they're doing is rolling back the effects of the fall of the
01:19:12.200great monarchies across Europe and the sudden precarity of the church's position in those
01:19:19.920societies as a result of that. So Brüning claims that Hitler and von Patten had first contacted
01:19:27.000the Holy See about a Germany-wide concordat. If you remember, during the negotiations over the
01:19:35.180enabling laws in April of 1933, Ludwig Haas, the head of the Center Party, quite a right-wing
01:19:42.540member of that party, part of that rightward authoritarian shift in that party, had made
01:19:48.000negotiating such a concordat, such a treaty with the Vatican, part of his negotiations with Hitler,0.70
01:19:54.420being like, I will support you if you then reach out to the Holy See
01:19:58.900and see if you can't get an agreement figured out.
01:20:02.940The negotiations took place on Easter in the Vatican,0.77
01:20:06.420hilariously enough, with Germans on both sides of the table.0.58
01:21:31.600Was just taken over and all of the leaders were replaced with Nazi-affiliated women and suddenly it was a Nazi women's group, right?0.77
01:21:39.220The Catholics are looking around and being like, well, we've got our charity advocacy churches, what have you, and we don't want you to fire all of our people and put in yours.
01:21:50.600We would like a degree of independence.
01:24:36.420So maybe we'll leave it there for our July.
01:24:39.540But looking back, I think you kind of get a sense of, like, the Catholic Church is looking to reset its relationship with the German state.
01:24:49.760And I think on the one hand, we have to be clear, this is the official Vatican.
01:24:54.400These are a bunch of Italian dudes who, frankly, already have made some real strides towards getting into bed with Mussolini.0.65
01:25:02.100And now they're like, oh, cool, we'll do this one, too.
01:25:27.960The center party moved to the right because German Catholics did.0.65
01:25:31.720The reason why the Nazis are like, hey, please prohibit German priests from condemning stuff from the pulpit is because German priests were, in fact, being like, yeah, I don't think this is kosher, you guys.0.67
01:25:43.200you cannot, whatever is Catholic for kosher, who knows. But like, they're just like, you should not
01:25:47.860be beating up people in the street, by the way. Like, that is bad. That is sinful. The Catholic
01:25:52.040clergy is in a far better position to push people to anti-Nazi positions. And as we saw with the
01:26:01.000Protestant theologian Karl Barth, has a much better reason for being like, I'm not party to
01:26:06.320this. Like, my conscience belongs to God, not to the German people. And I will tell you, you should
01:26:12.000not be beating up those people. Murder is wrong. I've got a couple of commandments here that
01:26:16.200suggest this and I don't give a shit what Hitler tells you to do. Don't do that. And it's very0.98
01:26:21.440important for the Nazis to silence them. So it's this very interesting thing where on the one hand0.62
01:26:25.200you have like rank and file Catholics and you have the kind of, you don't even have like the
01:26:30.520institutional church. You have different factions within the institutional church, part of which is
01:26:35.320quite anti-Nazi clearly, right? Hitler is not trying to get the concordat done in order to shut
01:26:41.060up rank-and-file Bavarian Catholics, he's worried about the parish priest, right? He's like, that
01:26:46.760guy needs to shut the hell up. I don't want him spreading ideas about you're going to hell for0.97
01:26:51.780going along with this asshole, by the way, right? That's what he doesn't want to hear. He's worried1.00
01:26:56.000about bishops. He's worried about deacons. He's worried about all that stuff. He's not worried
01:27:00.060about Pacelli. He's not worried about the Pope, but he's also not worried about your everyday
01:27:05.200Catholic because he knows they have come up with these kind of hybrid positions of nationalism
01:27:36.900to say like, what do Catholics do?0.95
01:27:38.740Because, like, yeah, there isn't one thing that the Catholics do.0.99
01:27:42.980They break down along extremely unpredictable lines, which is another place we sort of see, like, we're dealing with a complicated set of historical precedents that allow people to find their courage or to find their seemingly limitless capacity for collaboration.1.00
01:28:19.720Thank you for taking me on this wild, weird journey through 1933.
01:28:24.760It's always a pleasure to record these with you because I feel like I learned so much in such a short amount of time.
01:28:28.980Well, in this case, I learned a lot, too, because I do have to say, like, not being Catholic and not having spent much time thinking about sort of various churches in the Third Reich, like, I really learned a lot.
01:28:40.040And I have to thank all the wonderful historians whose work I was able to draw on here, who really have taught me, I think, collectively, how to distinguish between, like, Catholicism as a way of life, Catholicism as doctrine, Catholicism as something that's taught at universities.
01:28:53.140and how these kinds of things, to me, as an outsider, it doesn't always matter.
01:28:58.160But like, yeah, no, it mattered in 1933.
01:29:00.720And it mattered in ways that weren't always predictable.
01:29:03.560And I want to pat myself on the back for having made it through two and a half hours of recording0.60
01:29:08.680with an Irish Catholic person without ever having said, the Catholics.0.76