The Church in the early days of 1945 was no longer the same as the Church of 1932, and we shall pay heavily for any failure on our part to recognise the importance of this fact. On the one hand the Church has suffered the loss of almost everything that is normally associated with the Faith as it is practised in the family and in the parish; its scaffolding and its organisations have almost all been destroyed. Nor can the Church in Germany be entirely exonerated from the accusation of having failed over long periods of recent history to provide the nation with spiritual leadership and from its guilt on this account. But there is another side to the picture. New life has been poured into the Church by the blood of its martyrs, it has been purified by a flow of superhuman suffering, and it has undergone an interior rejuvenation. A generous missionary spirit is animating many of its members who have rediscovered the meaning and the richness of the Christian community; it can claim a trained, if small, elite, joyously prepared for sacrifices, who have it in them to serve as leaven for the masses.

At the same time as the Third Reich was brought low, the philosophy which had inspired that Reich, its ersatz religion, also came to an end. Millions of people were ready to entrust whatever hope and faith they had left to the Church because it had proved itself wiser, mightier and more enduring than their idol, the State. Yet there should be no illusions about the nature of this return to Christianity.

The end of the war left the whole educational system in Germany in chaos and its rebuilding has had to start from scratch. This is obvious as far as external conditions were concerned; buildings were ruined, teaching material destroyed, teachers dispersed and in part forbidden to follow their profession. The children themselves were involved in the maelstrom of evacuation and in the disorderly flight from the bombed west to the east, and from the Eussian invader in the east the return again to the west. All this is clearly appreciated by now. Equally one understands the loss of a sane religious background that followed the breakdown of Germany’s former educational system and the scepticism shown by both teachers and pupils against any alternative system (and even against the re-introduction of pre-war arrangements), whether it was inspired by German teachers themselves, by the Church, the German authorities or the inter-allied military government. These problems are appreciated, in paid at least, everywhere. Their solution is seen to lie only in a very gradual and by no means as yet wholly satisfactory rehabilitation. This is the natural result of the various factors involved in the present situation in Germany, but more recently two new and somewhat unexpected elements have emerged to influence post-war development in a disturbing manner.

The division of Germany into four zones has had an immense bearing on the political and social life of the country, but no less has it had its repercussions in the educational field. This is most marked of course in the division between east and west; but it is true also of the division of government within the west itself.

On 11th July, 1948, exactly fifteen years after the dark day on which Hitler founded the ‘German Evangelical Church’, Dr Martin Niemoller was present at the founding of the ‘Evangelical Church in Germany’ (EKD) on the Wartburg near Eisenach, which had once been Luther’s stronghold; there he coined the shattering phrase, ‘the solidarity of the helpless’ on the same occasion as the aged Bishop Wurm described this new structure as a ‘temporary shelter’. These words were sign enough, even for the uninitiated, that this emergency organization was a long way removed from that source of grace, the upper room at Jerusalem. Rendered indispensable by the sheer stress of chaotic political conditions, the new ‘Church’ was attempting to reassert its legal continuity with the past and to affirm the ‘unity of Evangelical Christianity’ in all the occupation zones, especially to bind together the East and the West. Was its motive, therefore, political?

Whilst these lines were being written Wilhelm Niemoller, the pastor of Bielefeld issued an open letter to Germany which ends with the cry: ‘The crisis is upon us!’; and the Reformed Church in north-west Germany has resolved not to attend the EKD conferences any more until they are again animated by an evangelical spirit. What does this signify?

The downfall of the Nazis and their ‘Reichs-church’ means that, for the first time in 400 years, German Protestantism has been given the opportunity to free itself from the state and to give itself a constitution ‘in accordance with the New Testament’ as an earlier conference expressed it.

Those of us with a taste for idle speculation may be tempted to wonder how Goethe would have turned out if he had been born in Munich or Vienna instead of in Protestant Frankfurt and gone to school with the Jesuits. Voltaire, we may recall, was a pupil of theirs; and a certain respect for his old masters never left him. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in the absence of any direct Catholic contacts in Goethe’s early years it was from Voltaire and the Encyclopedists that he acquired his first notions about the Church. For although the young poet reacted against the French classical tradition in verse which Voltaire represented, he was like the whole age in which he lived deeply influenced by French writings. How far the Voltairean attitude towards the Church in the eighteenth century was justified it is difficult for us to realise in an age happily free from gross ecclesiastical abuses. As we know, Voltaire did not limit himself to attacking abuses. That the period in which Goethe grew up was one in which the Church had largely lost the allegiance of the intellectual world must regrettably be admitted. As for the Protestantism in which the poet was educated, it was a dull and formal affair from which the genuine enthusiasm of the Reformation had long since evaporated, and it was rent by internal dissensions. It could not but be wholly unsatisfying to Goethe's genius; and since the ‘paganism’ of his temperament and the prejudices of his youth prevented him from ever considering Catholicism seriously, he evolved a religion of his own out of the various elements he collected in the course of his reading and experience. In this he was typically modern.