Search results for ""Author Benjamin Ziemann""

Since 1945 the Catholic Church has resorted to a number of sociological methods in rapid succession. These should help to fill areas of church removal with new missionary zeal, to observe the attitudes of the faithful through demoscopy and to adapt the church's organizational structure to the changed conditions of pastoral care. Group dynamic and therapeutic concepts opened up new possibilities for the religious self-thematization of the individual. With the help of the social sciences, the consequences of functional differentiation as "secularization" could be observed without a greater rationality of church action being easily achieved. The reception and practical application of these methods in the church is a vivid example of the increasing "scientification of the social". The social sciences should help preach the gospel message in new ways. But at the same time they threatened to drain the faith. The historical analysis of this process enables fascinating insights into the religious and church history of the 20th century. At the same time, it is a criticism of the success stories of the Federal Republic that have turned out too smooth, and rather interprets them as a period of "dangerous modernity".

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This is the first fully researched biography of Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). It charts his life from his service in the Imperial German Navy, his work for the Inner Mission and as a Protestant pastor in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem from 1931. Niemöller's work as a leading figure of the Confessing Church and his contribution to the conflicts over church policy during the Third Reich are analysed and contextualised. Chapters on the post-war period chart Niemöller's contribution to ecumenism, anti-nuclear pacifism, and his role in rebuilding the West German Protestant Churches. From 1938 to 1945, Martin Niemöller was detained as 'Hitler's Personal Prisoner' in Nazi concentration camps. Liberated in April 1945, Niemöller was widely hailed as an icon of Christian resistance against the Nazi dictatorship. For many years, the Niemöller legend masked the problematic aspects of his life: his persistent antisemitism, on display even in the post-war period; his nationalism and support of the German war effort even whilst in concentration camp detention; and his disdain for parliamentary democracy. In his biography of the most important twentieth-century German Protestant, Benjamin Ziemann uncovers the 'historical' Niemöller behind the legend of the resistance hero. Carefully situating Niemöller's personal trajectory in his wider social milieu -- from the Imperial Navy to the West German peace movement -- Ziemann probes into core themes of twentieth century German history: militarism, National Socialism, German guilt, and moral reconstruction post-1945.

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The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic is a multi-author survey of German history from 1918 to 1933. Covering a broad range of topics in social, political, economic, and cultural history, it presents an overview of current scholarship, and will help students and teachers to make sense of the contradictions and complexities of Germany's experiments with democracy and modern society in this period. The contributions emphasize the historical openness of Germany's first republic, which was more than just the coming of the Third Reich. The thirty-three chapters, all written by leading experts, contain information and interpretation based on cutting-edge scholarship, and together provides an unsurpassed panorama of the Weimar Republic.

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