The realism of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' destroyed illusions about nationalism and the glories of war.
In 1936, the University of Berlin revoked the teaching certificate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young Christian theologian who would eventually be hanged by the Nazis for joining a secret resistance movement against Adolf Hitler.
The move came after Bonhoeffer was denounced as a "pacifist and enemy of the state" by Theodor Heckel, a leader in the German church, after Bonhoeffer took an unannounced trip with a small congregation of theologians to Sweden.
The charges against Bonhoeffer were true, of course. He was a pacifist and deeply opposed the Nazi state—its nationalism, its anti-Semitism, its militarism, and its coercion over society, including the church.
Heckel had long quietly battled Bonhoeffer. Unlike Heckel, who rose to prominence in the church through gross subservience to Nazi authority, Bonhoeffer had a knack for resisting Hitler’s efforts to put the church under the control of the German state. When Bonhoeffer objected, for example, to combining church youth groups with the Hitler Youth, Heckel responded that other leaders in the church didn’t seem to mind, adding that the Fuhrer himself viewed the gesture as “the Christmas present that pleased him most.”
Yet Bonhoeffer was only officially denounced by Heckel following his trip to Sweden, which prompted Germany’s Foreign Ministry to write its embassy in Stockholm, noting that the Reich and state church...
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