Political religions

How did the churches - and their communities - respond to Nazism as a political religion? This paper examines this topic by taking one of the dominant schools of thought––that Nazism was a ‘political religion’––and dealing directly with an issue that is often encountered when teaching the history of the Nazi Party: what could be known about the Nazis when they came to power? It answers this question by using a case-study of the 'Temple Society' (Tempelgesellschaft), examining how members of this theologically liberal Christian community understood Nazism on the cusp of 1933.

"The mausolea of communist leaders, a major component of Stalinist symbolic politics, are still shrouded in mystery. Some are destroyed, like Dimitrov’s in Sofia, Gottwald’s in Prague and Neto’s in Luanda. The Lenin mausoleum in Moscow is basically defunct. Yet the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in Hanoi, Mao’s in Beijing and the Kumsusan mausoleum complex of the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang keep fulfilling their task of a powerful symbol of a different political, social and economic order, with the embalmed cadavers of the founding fathers embodying the supposed eternal duration of that order and thereby perpetuating its legitimacy.
While the destroyed and defunct mausolea continue to be a subject of rumours and fables widely circulating among citizens of the respective countries, and globally among journalists and some scholars, very little is currently known about what actually transpired in a communist mausoleum.
This talk will offer first an overview of the cultural background and ideological reasons for the origin of communist mausolea in general. Second, it will demonstrate the details of the Soviet embalming method and the symbolic meaning of displaying the leader’s body, based on archival documents relating to the mausoleum of Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov (on display 1949–1990) and Czechoslovak president Klement Gottwald (on display 1953–1962). The recently declassified archives of these mausolea currently represent the only freely accessible documentation of its kind. The formerly top secret material to be presented in this talk was never seen before by anybody else than the embalmers.
The talk will conclude with a discussion of the relationship of the embalmers to the practice of preserving dead bodies in the past. It will be shown that the Soviet, and to a lesser extent also the Bulgarian, specialists were fully aware that their preservation work in a monumental tomb constituted a continuation of a tradition inherited from antiquity, and they did not hesitate to publicly acknowledge that, at the same time highlighting the fundamental differences between the context and method of ancient and modern body preservation. They were (and still are) proud of their work while the attitude of particularly the Soviet population to the mausoleum project certainly was not negative. The attitude of the Czech specialists, however, was marked by indifference or even shame while the mausoleum project met with condemnation among the majority of Czechoslovaks."

In the context of WWI, Romolo Murri's invitation to participate in the war was inspired by a form of Catholicism that was deeply anti-clerical and a-dogmatic, marked by a rhetoric that focused on a "religion of the fatherland". Murri's thought is a paradigmatic example of sacralization of the politics overlapped with a politicization of Christianity in a nationalistic way. In the spectrum of modernistic nationalism, Murri's approach attempts to combine Italian culture, Latin civilization, religious reform, and modernity. The journalistic collaboration of this former priest with «L’Idea democratica» - the magazine of the Masonic lodge Grande Oriente d'Italia - highlights the emergence and the development of this ideological trend, which Murri wanted to keep separate from the national Catholicism of certain ecclesiastic groups as well as from a neo-pagan state-centered nationalism widespread throughout Europe. Precisely in his new ideology, and in particular in the proposed rejection of the rights of the individual, it is possible to detect an anticipation of the basic characters of Fascist authoritarianism.

At the beginning of the Great War, the former modernist priest Romolo Murri supported the reasons of democratic interventionism. Criticizing liberal Italy, his ideology suggests a politicisation of masses based on a civil religion of the nation. But what was actually the political and social translation of this claim? The essay deals with Murri’s engagement in propaganda for a new State, analysing his activities as a militant intellectual: in particular his journalistic collaboration to the roman newspaper «Il Fronte interno» and his relationships with the groups of the left asking radical measures against home enemies. Murri’s practice of propaganda points out an ambivalence between loyalty to war governments and delegitimation of representative institutions. As a result, the condemnation of liberal democracy because of her incapability to mobilize citizens leads him to an approach that deprives democracy of some essential features.

"The main thesis of this paper is that Nazi religiosity has its origins in the pagan phenomenon called the völkisch movement. This movement consisted of uncountable religious-cum-political groups called Bünde whose leaders and followers were closely interconnected with one another and with the developing Nazi Party. From there völkisch thought penetrated the German Protestant Church and found followers among some Catholics. Given this development, an obvious question follows, namely, can National Socialism be blamed on Christianity and is Christian anti-Judaism the ultimate source of the Holocaust?

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