Inside You Are Two Barths
Historical Imagination, The Cost of Silence, and a Defense of My Portrayal of Karl Barth
KARL
We will confess our allegiance nowhere but in God and His Scriptures - that much already has us defunded, exiled, and imprisoned. What more do you want your brothers to suffer at your frivolous request?
That is just one of the many lines where my portrayal of Karl Barth may have come off as a bit rough around the edges. Whatever your knowledge of Barth is, you may have listened to Karl & Elisabeth (my recent audio drama), and thought, at worst, “Yeesh, he makes Karl out to sound like a cranky anti-Semite!”
I was aware my portrayal may give off that impression, and while I don’t think that’s an accurate description of Karl Barth, it wasn’t entirely unintentional. Allow me to explain.
A Deafening Silence
As the title suggests, this particular ‘scene’ between Karl Barth and Elisabeth Schmitz is just one among many in a broader concept I’m calling Scenes from Kirchenkampf.
The German phrase Kirchenkampf refers to the church struggle in 1930s & 40s Germany between the Nazi aligned German Christians and the Nazi-resistant faction, the Confessing Church. — from the introduction
Summarizing the Confessing Church as the “Nazi-resistant faction” of the German Protestant Church was admittedly an oversimplification for the sake of brevity. The degree to which it resisted Nazism and its reasons for doing so are actually quite complicated and its that tension that draws me to the subject personally and creatively.
The true Kirchenkampf, in my opinion, was not between the Reich Church and the Confessing Church, but between the members of the latter. This inner conflict can be viewed as a battle for the heart of the CC’s resistance: was it simply a matter of church freedom, in which the CC pushed back against the encroachment of the state upon church decisions, or was the church itself a resistance movement against Nazism? To state it more clearly, did the church merely want to protect itself, or did it want to stick its neck out and protect others too? Unfortunately, in most cases, the CC proved to be more concerned with the former.
This tension lived inside the CC’s three most notable leaders: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, and our subject, Karl Barth. This can be disappointing because it’s tempting, and all too common, to present these men as flattened heroes who went up to bat with Nazism and faced the consequences. While they are personally heroes to me, I’ve had to acknowledge through learning more about them over the years that framing them in that way, particularly as pastors against Nazism, is a little disingenuous.
There’s a book on my shelf called Pastors Against Hitler.1 It’s not unlikely that someone could see that book on my shelf and ask, “Oh, so these guys stood up for the Jews?” The assumption-heavy-question would be reasonable because that it is how we think of the Holocaust and Nazism nearly a century later. We rightly look back and see a political party and ideology that was anti-Semitic and genocidal.
That was, indeed, the core of the rotten apple, but it also had other tenets like militaristic imperialism, economic self-sufficiency, and the suppression of communism, socialism, and liberal democracy. Suffice it to say, if you asked a random German in 1940 what the goal of National Socialism was, “the eradication of the Jews” would probably not be in the top 5 things they said, even if every one of their answers implicated it. Likewise, social solidarity and human rights simply were not top of mind for the Confessing Church.
Given that Martin Niemoller was at first a Hitler supporter, it probably goes without saying that he was initially anti-Semitic. While Dietrich Bonhoeffer defended the inclusion of baptized and ordained Jews in the church in the wake of the Aryan Paragraph, he had little to say about Jews outside those narrow Christian categories, which reveals his defense to be more about church autonomy. He theoretically advocated for the church to stand with the poor, powerless, and oppressed, but his characterization of Judaism as legalistic and guilty of killing Christ kept him from explicitly recognizing the Jews in this advocacy. How can you seek to save a people from their plight when you believe their plights, past and present, are the natural consequences of an ancient and personal offense?
Bonhoeffer was uniquely able to cut through much of the noise of his time, but in this theological contradiction, he proved not to be entirely immune to cultural influence. Thousands of years of anti-semitism, much of it perpetuated by Christians like Bonhoeffer’s theological hero, Martin Luther, had concentrated in 1930s Germany, and to personally untangle all of its webs was nearly impossible. In fact, there are several known cases where rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany reported to hold anti-Semitic beliefs.2
Karl Barth was no less a fish in the same polluted sea in his attempt to see clearly through the waters of inherited prejudice. Whether he was anti-Semitic or not is more hotly debated than even with Niemoller or Bonhoeffer. Those who argue he was do so primarily on the basis of his practical conduct and paint a picture similar to the one Elisabeth does in the audio drama:
ELISABETH
No, it’s true isn’t it? You weren’t really concerned with the consequences of your words. You actually wanted your contribution to be sizable and over with quickly enough so you could be sent on your merry way back to your cozy library in Basel to write endless dogmatics and carry on whatever manner of relationship you have with your wife and that, that woman, whoever she is to you, all before the heat really began to turn up in Berlin.
His critics have controversially framed Barth’s refusal to swear loyalty to Hitler and resulting deportation as motivated by a desire for higher pay in Switzerland, more time to work on his Church Dogmatics, and generally a sense of apathy regarding the Jews. Wolfgang Gerlach accused him of working “quietly in his study on his Dogmatics as if there were no Hitler.”3
There are persuasive counter-arguments to these accusations, which I do not have time for here, but the most compelling was his outspoken advocacy for Jews starting in 1938. Eberhard Busch describes this activism in the following two examples:4
After Kristallnacht of 1938, [Barth] gave a lecture to a Swiss relief group:
He stated on that occasion: Because, in the German "plague of anti-Semitism," in the destruction of Jewish synagogues and Torah scrolls, in the intentional "physical extermination" of the Jews, there is a deep struggle against the God of the Jews, and because the God of the Jews is also the God of Christians, the church is therefore also under a "fundamental attack." Therefore, the church must now state, "even if no one else does," that "fundamentally" military resistance to this Germany is necessary." In the subsequent years Barth continued with this emphasis to such an extent that the German Foreign Ministry, together with the Swiss government, tried everything to silence him
While giving a lecture in 1944,
[Barth] asked, his voice quavering, about God’s presence with his suffering servant, in this new Golgotha, in order to cling then to the promise of Jeremiah 31: As certain as the fixed order of the heavens will not pass away, "so will the offspring of Israel never cease to be a nation before me forever." He therefore claimed it was a "proof of God" that such a nation that murdered Jews as Pharaoh and his army had done must "necessarily" meet a horrific end. Such a harsh statement as this hurts the German feelings till today.
Despite Barth’s framing the attack on Jews as an indirect attack on Christians and his choice to speak out individually rather than amplify his voice through the Confessing Church channels, these examples do seem to point towards a genuine love and sympathy for the persecuted Jewish people.
Note, if you haven’t listened to Karl and Elisabeth yet, this would be a good point to stop reading and do so, as it prepares you with a decent amount of context without spoiling the major plot points
A Life In One Decision
All of this was taken into account when I wrote Karl & Elisabeth in 2021, but my portrayal of Barth really came down to one thing. Why didn’t he write the memo Elisabeth was pleading with him to write?
“A Certain Insufferable Teacher”
As a refresher for listeners of the audio drama and non-listeners alike, Elisabeth Schmitz was a congregant of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and she was a teacher of history and theology at various high schools in Berlin. She aided many Jewish people by allowing them to stay in her apartment or her weekend house, and often provided money or food ration stamps.5 In Karl & Elisabeth, I display this through Elisabeth’s friendship with Martha Kassel, whom she took in after Martha and her husband lost their jobs due to the forced expulsion of non-Aryans from the medical field.
In the summer of 1935, Elisabeth anonymously wrote a memorandum titled On the Situation of German Non-Aryans.6 It consisted mostly of carefully documented cases of offenses against the Jewish people, with the perpetrators’ names explicitly stated, and also included a personal plea to the church to wake up to the horrors they were complicit in and write a public statement against the persecution of Jews in the hopes that the church could still rouse the consciences of German citizens.
She personally made over 200 copies and widely distributed them to Confessing Church leaders, including Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Wilhelm Niesel, the latter of whom intended to distribute them at the CC’s working conference in Brandenburg in mid-June of 1936.7 Aside from the memorandum, she had exchanged words and letters with several CC leaders between 1933 and 1939, but with none more than Karl Barth.
KARL
As fond as I am of these visits, I am beginning to miss doing this through letters.ELISABETH
Letters go nowhere. I also sent letters to Gollwitzer. What did he say? Write Niesel. I sent letters to Niesel. Those went nowhere either, along with ones to you.KARL
(gesturing back toward his house)
So you’ve resorted to showing up at our doors.ELISABETH
I’ve resorted to showing up at your door, which I clearly wouldn’t have gotten through without the help of your wife.
Elisabeth first approached Karl in 1934, and though he expressed reservations about the CC publishing a public statement, she continued writing him persuasively for the next five years and even took Summer visits to him in Basel, Switzerland, for four years after he was exiled from Germany. In one of her letters, she said that the Church and Christians in Germany had failed hopelessly in “simple, plain, natural Christian love,” a quote I incorporated into the script:8
KARL
I don’t have your courage, Elisabeth.
Elisabeth stands, ready to leave. Then turns back to face Karl.ELISABETH
It’s not courage, Karl. It’s love. Plain and simple Christian love.
Most writers have heard the typical advice of “write what you know” restated as “write what you want to know,” and this question I posed earlier — why didn’t Karl write the statement? — is what I wanted to know. As Elisabeth rightly discerned, if anyone were to write such a statement, it would’ve been him. Assuming every other male pastor (the only kind) was less willing than he, answering why Karl didn’t write it would perhaps answer why the Confessing Church as a whole ultimately failed to meet the moment.
Every word in this script flowed from that question, and it was the sole one animating my portrayal of Karl Barth. Individual lines of his could potentially be singled out as evidence that I was intending to portray him as an anti-Semite, but it wasn’t what was going through my head when writing it. Nearly every line of his had to be an attempt to answer the question, “Why didn’t he write it?” and at times, that may have necessarily had some anti-Semitic implications.
But Why So Cranky?
As for the general cranky tone of Karl’s lines, there’s first the superficial level, in which I leaned into the archetype of the stuffy academic. By God, he’s just too busy writing a 31-volume systematic theology to be bothered with the practical matters of mere mortals! Then there’s the deeper level, which is that Elisabeth is the hero of the story, albeit a tragic one. This was a slow realization for me as I started writing the script from a place of personal respect for both individuals, and I knew I had to do them both justice by presenting their arguments as convincingly as possible. But it became clear to me which argument and action was indisputably the right one.
For the purpose of the drama, the antagonists couldn’t be the German Christians, the Nazis, or even Hitler — no, it had to be Karl Barth himself. He is the thing standing in Elisabeth’s way, and because she is the most willing in the Confessing Church to stand in solidarity with those in suffering, she must necessarily be the protagonist.
I thought I had established that decisively in the script, but I realized I hadn’t fully committed to it whenever , the voice of Elisabeth, pointed out that the script began with Karl typing in his library. It immediately signaled to the listener that Karl was the focus and that when Elisabeth pops into the room, she must be just a character in his story. If I wanted Elisabeth to be the center of the story, T reasoned, I ought to cut the flashback to the night of Kristallnacht into two parts, one which begins at the opening of the script. I worried how this might affect the flow of the script, but I knew T was right.
I am not much of a fan of hokey, over-sentimental biopics, but I realized I owed it to the historical Elisabeth Schmitz and the heart of the story to center her properly, even if it risked being slightly melodramatic and preachy.
So that is how Karl Barth became the antagonist. It doesn’t mean he’s evil, just that he’s standing in the way of what the protagonist so righteously wants. He had to be on the offensive, and that’s not usually a flattering place to be. The primary source of my knowledge about Karl Barth the person comes from Christiane Tietz’s 2021 biography about him, and while such a dense book of theological and ecclesiological explanations may not be preoccupied with describing his personality, she paints this brief vignette in the preface:
Barth was unwavering, yet he also experienced self-doubt and loneliness. He was a harsh judge of others, but could also surprise with his humor and twinkling eyes. And he was a friend to human beings.9
Though he occupies a precarious place in the audio drama, I think my portrayal of his general demeanor, while exaggerated at times, is reasonably faithful to the above description.
Why Throw In His Affair?
KARL
Charlotte’s not my wife.ELISABETH
Oh, I thought —KARL
That my secretary was my wife because she lives in my house?ELISABETH
Well, yes.
While it was somewhat of an open secret in theological circles for decades, it became more widely known in 2017 after the release of their private letters that Karl Barth and his secretary, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, had a romantic relationship. The story of the complicated love triangle within the Barth household is a long and heartbreaking one (especially for Nelly Barth), which, for better or worse, is now a part of Barth’s life that must be considered for anyone seriously seeking to understand him.10
“But did you really need to include information about this in the story?” you might ask, “Is it not needless character assassination?” That is a fair question, and the answer is no, I did not need to include it, but I ultimately decided to because it was one more way to demonstrate Barth’s capacity for duplicity. As his mother so contemptuously wrote to him in a letter, “What good is the most discerning theology when it suffers a shipwreck in your own home?”11 Barth loftily wrote of the seventh commandment, but somehow rationalized an exemption from it, telling Charlotte tenderly that their relationship, “could not simply be the work of the devil, it must somehow have some sense and a right to live, that we — no, I will speak only for myself — that I love you so much and see no possibility of stopping it.”12 Christine Tietz adds:
“He even had the sense that somehow in this situation God was acting, hoped that God would show them the way, and spoke of the ‘two who have been given to me.’”13
If Karl could rationalize this, then surely he could rationalize not taking action on behalf of the Jewish people, even when presented with the opportunity countless times.
A Sympathetic Ending
So I functionally cast him as an antagonist, imbued him with a sassy affect, implicated him in at least some degree of anti-Semitism, and included his most controversial secret. I would understand if I upset a Bartian or two, however, I didn’t want him to be without the listener’s sympathy. That was one of the reasons for ending the audio drama the way I did.
I had finished the script, but I sensed it was missing something. I originally envisioned this as a graphic novel and I wanted to add a visual component so it wasn’t merely just two figures walking with giant text boxes next to them the entire time and that’s when I had the idea of the mysterious loose paper soaring through the air, following the two as they moved through Basel. Not only did this add a visual element that reinforced the theme about all these stray words needing to become action, but it posed a fun question: What if Karl did start writing the memorandum?
What if, as he admits at the end, he didn’t have the courage, but he wanted to write the memorandum? It’s an imaginative leap, but not without any merit. Later in life, as Barth read the first Bonhoeffer biography, he reflected on the Barmen Declaration’s “missing seventh thesis” concerning the treatment of Jews, and he admitted:
“I have long since regarded it as guilt on my part that I did not make this [the ‘Jewish question’] a decisive issue…at least as publicly in the Church Struggle.”14
And, almost as if thinking of Elisabeth Schmitz, adds that a statement about it:
“Would hardly have been acceptable to the mindset of even the ‘confessors’ of that time. But this does not excuse the fact that since my interests were elsewhere, I did not at least formally put up a fight on the matter.”
The fact that he could recognize this in retrospect, taken with his propensity for reconciling paradoxical realities, makes this creative liberty possible. So when Elisabeth enters his library, I had him making an attempt at the statement, perhaps letting his hands move where his heart could not yet. This explains his “jolt” when Elisabeth enters his study, as she’s potentially caught him in the act of something he hadn’t even yet committed to himself.
The paper is quickly shoved into his briefcase and later whipped right out of it by the wind. It drifts above their tram and aloft over Basel University’s halls, as if a specter of Karl’s moral bifurcation looming just atop their conversation. But finally, it loses drift and slides onto the pavement only to be stepped on by a defeated Elisabeth as the listener hears Karl praying forgiveness for the things “left undone.” I felt this reveal that Karl had at least made the feeblest attempt, and that the beginning of words which could have meant someone’s salvation existed on a page for one fleeting moment, changed how I viewed Karl through the rest of the story when played again.
It makes him complicated and human, just as Elisabeth, who seems to be a wall of moral fortitude, is also revealed to be when the listener learns that she chose to write her memo anonymously so she wouldn’t lose her job. She, too, had a moment where self-preservation was intermingled with righteous action. We all contain multitudes, and we all contain the potential to change the world around us.
What Could Have Been and What Can Still Be
The audio drama was about Elisabeth, and this post has been about Karl, but allow me to move the spotlight once more back to Elisabeth, and by doing so, to you, too.
Perhaps I overestimate the effect that Karl's writing a public statement from the Confessing Church could have had. After all, as much as I love learning about the Confessing Church, I’m always fatigued by what seems to be so many words and so little action.
ELISABETH:
All these papers. Letters, memorandums, confessions. It’s all really the minimum amount of action required of us isn’t it?KARL
We are people of the Word.ELISABETH
The Word become flesh.
Just as you can’t separate orthodoxy from orthopraxy, so you cannot separate word from deed. So maybe more words wouldn’t have changed much, but they could’ve been a beginning, a spark that lit the flame. Let me show you why I think so.
In a lengthy memo from March 1935, the Gestapo gave its assessment of the church struggle between Confessing Christians and “German Christians,” noting that the former’s motto was “the church must be the church!” and that:
“Both sides must be granted that, at least as far as their genuine adherents are concerned, they do not stand opposed to the state. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, on the part of the Confessing movement, the number of inner opponents of National Socialism is large, simply because here the church is more important than the state.”15
The memo then speculates about the damage the CC could do to the Third Reich, listing particularly dangerous persons (of whom Barth is named), and then judges that the biggest threat they pose is that of “adverse publicity, particularly in the foreign press.” Noting a case of recent house arrests of two CC members here, they comment:
“All these consequences have certainly not been intended by the originators of the church debate (excluding the enemies of the state named above). But they offer evidence that the overall church dispute presents a severe national danger, which must, without fail, be countered as quickly as possible.”
This is jaw-dropping to me. Here is the Gestapo threatened by the CC and saying they present a severe national danger. Simply, they were afraid. That is the power the CC had, whether they knew it or not. Now, consider that Karl Barth writes a statement of solidarity with persecuted Jews, which condemns the state for their actions. Many in the CC would cower from the implications, jumping ship to join the “German Christians,” but the remaining congregation would be emboldened and committed to the path they felt required of them.
They would face fierce retribution. More house arrests. More church closures. There wouldn’t be just a handful of names who were sent to concentration camps or executed, there would be many. The outrage of the Christian West would be ignited, and the pressure to end the persecution of Confessing Christians would have been immense. I know, it’s an awful admission that some lives matter much more to certain cultures than others, but it’s true nonetheless (just as it is today).
These are the images that may have been running in Barth’s mind as he chose not to write the statement. The consequences would likely have been innumerable for the CC, but it just might have swayed large swaths of the German population to cease their support of Hitler. An untold number of Jewish lives could have been saved.
Now, finally, consider: what if the Confessing Church had ordained women as pastors, or they were more commonly in leadership roles? Imagine if Margarete Meusel, Elisabeth Schmitz, or other women like them had the power that many of the men did.
ELISABETH
You were right about me. I’m not a pastor. And now I’m not even a teacher. So I’ll continue to do what I can within my power, but it won’t be enough. But you — you started this resistance with your words. People listen to you.KARL
I don’t have as much power as you think I do.ELISABETH
You have more power than I could ever dream of.
Would things have been different? We can’t know for sure, but I know what Elisabeth Schmitz would’ve done, and I just told you the effect I think it could’ve had.
I know dealing in hypotheticals is exhausting and sometimes unproductive, but while I welcome readers of all persuasions, I hope this ignites my Christian readers’ conviction and imagination for what our current moment may require of the church. A man like Bonhoeffer, whom we rightly regard as a hero and martyr, was kept back from making a difference not just for the church, but for all his fellow men (especially of Abrahamic faith) because of a single theological snafu. Where are we bound from where the love of Christ may take us, because of seemingly important theological or ideological hangups? Where have we become more concerned with being right rather than loving well? Where do we prove to be self-preserving rather than self-giving on behalf of those unlike us?
I’ll leave you with these parting words from a Franciscan Blessing:
May God bless you
with enough foolishness
to believe that you can
make a difference in the world,
so that you can do
what others claim cannot be done,
to bring justice and kindness
to all our children and the poor.Amen16
If by chance you’re a Barth nerd, how do you feel I portrayed him? I’d be happy to hear your thoughts if you’re civil and sharing in good faith.
Further reading:
I didn’t make too many explicit connections and commentary regarding our current moment in America (maybe another post soon), but begins doing a lot of that in this fantastic post
For a time, the Gestapo viewed the Confessing Church as a threat. This post by
, which is the third in a series, gets into why tyrants have often feared Christians (when the two weren’t one and the same 😅)I mentioned it once or twice in this post, but if you want to learn more about Barth’s life and theology, I recommend Christine Tietz’s 2021 biography, Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict.
As far as just generally learning about the Confessing Church, I recommend For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler by Victoria Barnett. It’s not in print these days, but it’s possible to get through your library if it has an interlibrary loan system.
If you enjoyed this or Karl & Elisabeth, please like, comment, or share. This helps new readers find my work. Also, all my posts are free, but if you want to support me, you can buy me a coffee!
Dr. Michael S Haggard, Pastors Against Hitler: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany (2018)
I recently attended a talk given by Dr. Carol Rittner, and this was her main point. These rescuers, Rittner said, acted for various reasons—moral codes, religious convictions, or sometimes on impulse. She has written a book on the topic called Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (1986), which was adapted into a documentary that featured Elie Wiesel.
Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, Berlin, 1987, p. 408.
Aid for Victims of Persecution, an article within Elisabeth’s profile in the internet exhibition Resistance!? from the Evangelical Working Group for Contemporary Church History.
When I wrote the script for Karl & Elisabeth in 2021, an English translation of the memorandum was nowhere to be found in digital or physical media. However, I was able to obtain a translated copy, which was used for the documentary film, Elisabeth of Berlin (2008), but I promised those who gave it to me not to share it with anyone before clearing it with them. If you’re interested, I can get in contact with them about it. However, you can read about the memo here.
A Courageous Memorandum, from the Resistance!? exhibition
Letters to Karl Barth, from the Resistance!? exhibition
Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict, 2021, Oxford University Press, from preface
Barth scholar Christiane Tietz writes at great length about this love triangle in her 2021 biography of Barth (Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict)
Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict, 2021, Oxford University Press, pg. 230
Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict, 2021, Oxford University Press, pg. 222
Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict, 2021, Oxford University Press, pg. 222
Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict, 2021, Oxford University Press, pg. 236
Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, 1998, Oxford University Press, pg. 68
"You dumb whale". For anyone who reads this comment it's an inside family joke. It actually means you did well.