O Come All Ye Faithful Deutsch

[Silvana Fleischacker]

Inthe northern German city of Kiel, five Catholic churches have recently closed their doors. The majority of the 240,000 inhabitants of the state capital of Schleswig-Holstein are Protestants. It is largely due to financial hardships that Catholic churches are in decline. The entire city of Kiel is now one large parish with just a few churches. Some buildings have already disappeared to make way for housing. Although the Church of the Holy Cross in the district of Kiel-Elmschenhagen is still standing, it has been shuttered.

Kirkskothen said that the closure of their house of worship hit local families hard. Immigrants built the church in 1956 and founded the congregation. "Their children witnessed their parents' devotion, got baptized and took communion there. For them, it was simply home," he said, adding that he understands the bitterness and disappointment.

When the church closed in the nearby Baltic seaside resort of Schnberg, the community "almost completely fell apart," said Kirkskothen. More than a few Catholics in Schnberg left the church entirely. At the moment, the Archdiocese of Hamburg is also closing several churches in the Baltic Sea city of Lbeck and trying to foster more dialog with local members.

Some parts of Germany have lost a particularly large number of churches over the past two decades, such as in the archdiocese of Hamburg, which includes Kiel. The number of closures is exceptionally high in Kiel. In response to an inquiry from DW, the secretariat of the German Bishops' Conference explained that 650 Catholic churches have "ceased to be used for worship" nationally since 2005, speaking or a "veritable wave of secularization." From 2019 to 2023, an average of 28 churches were lost each year across Germany.

Church buildings are even being closed or downsized in the financially strapped dioceses of Aachen and Essen but also in traditionally Catholic areas, such as the diocese of Augsburg, where German bishops are currently holding their general assembly.

Years ago official church statistics listed "24,500 sacred church buildings." Today they only show 24,000. Of these, around 22,800 are listed as historical buildings. This makes demolition much more difficult.

The declining number of houses of worship is in keeping with the trend: every year, the major churches are losing hundreds of thousands of members. As of 2023, one in two Germans no longer belonged to either of the major Christian churches.

Church buildings are, therefore, being demolished. Sometimes, they are successfully taken over by other denominations, for example, by Orthodox Christian communities. But sometimes they are razed to make room for residential complexes or nursing homes; or are converted into galleries, climbing halls, pubs, or burial halls. It is not just clerical academies that are actively exploring how they can be reused, but also architects and urban planners for specialty events.

Moreover, there are church organizations that specialize in the storage of vestments and liturgical items. And in an underground parking garage in Mnchengladbach, a private association set up by a married couple, "Forschungsstelle Glasmalerei des 20. Jahrhunderts" (Research Center for 20th Century Stained Glass), has been collecting decommissioned church windows for around 30 years. There are now many hundreds. But how do the faithful feel about this?

Matthias Sellmann, a Catholic theologian at the University of Bochum, knows such stories well. And he certainly understands the emotions. "People are losing the place where they come into contact with God, where they light candles, walk past the statue of the Virgin Mary or simply sit in the pews, where they know that God also comes into contact with people," Sellmann told DW. If there are no more local churches, things could start to falter.

In most cases, he said, churches that are no more than 150 years old or were built after World War II are demolished or deconsecrated. And yet, for many people, the church building is part of their concrete family history, like for the faithful in Kiel-Elmschenhagen. "It means a lot for someone who knows that their great-grandpa worked on the scaffolding or that their grandma got married there; they still know the stories about the piggy bank that was emptied to build the church."

"You may have read a thousand times in the newspaper that the role of the church is dwindling or that the number of church members is falling rapidly. But when your own church is demolished, it becomes a reality, it hits home," said Sellmann. In many cases, the buildings were not merely religious sites but also had social, political, architectural, or artistic significance. "It always involves the loss of a social anchor."

In the diocese of Essen, this is something they know all too well. According to the diocese, less than a third of the 270 churches there, around 84, will "remain permanently as places of worship" after 2030.

The parish development office in the Diocese of Essen has drawn up guidelines for closing church premises. The diocese proposes offering "tokens of remembrance" to the faithful, for example, postcards, puzzles, mugs, choir concerts, or even a sleepover for children and young people in the old church.

Markus Potthoff, the diocesan representative for parish development in Essen, described grief, disbelief, and also massive protests against past church closures. He recommends plenty of communication and "also space for grieving." It was not uncommon in the past for parishioners to "go to the barricades" to oppose the closure of their church, Potthoff told DW. But nowadays that doesn't happen anymore. "After COVID, church congregations have simply become a lot smaller."

We welcome the prayers of the faithful during Sunday Assembly at Dominican Chapel at Marywood and appreciate the sharing of prayers in languages from around the world as we call out: Come Holy Spirit, renew the face of the Earth.

All are welcome to worship June 9, 10:00am Sunday Assembly at Dominican Chapel at Marywood. If you cannot join us in person, join us in spirit with the sharing of prayers in languages from around the world as we call out: Come Holy Spirit, renew the face of the Earth.

From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, but by the end of the year this figure had increased to more than 2 million. By 1937 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939. The German authorities then prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations.

Schools played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth. While censors removed some books from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism.

From their first days in school, German children were imbued with the cult of Adolf Hitler. His portrait was a standard fixture in classrooms. Textbooks frequently described the thrill of a child seeing the German leader for the first time.

The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were the primary tools that the Nazis used to shape the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth. Youth leaders used tightly controlled group activities and staged propaganda events such as mass rallies full of ritual and spectacle to create the illusion of one national community reaching across class and religious divisions that characterized Germany before 1933.

Founded in 1926, the original purpose of the Hitler Youth was to train boys to enter the SA (Storm Troopers), a Nazi Party paramilitary formation. After 1933, however, youth leaders sought to integrate boys into the Nazi national community and to prepare them for service as soldiers in the armed forces or, later, in the SS.

In 1936, membership in Nazi youth groups became mandatory for all boys and girls between the ages of ten and seventeen. After-school meetings and weekend camping trips sponsored by the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls trained children to become faithful to the Nazi Party and the future leaders of the National Socialist state. By September 1939, over 765,000 young people served in leadership roles in Nazi youth organizations which prepared them for such roles in the military and the German occupation bureaucracy.

The Hitler Youth combined sports and outdoor activities with ideology. Similarly, the League of German Girls emphasized collective athletics, such as rhythmic gymnastics, which German health authorities deemed less strenuous to the female body and better geared to preparing them for motherhood. Their public displays of these values encouraged young men and women to abandon their individuality in favor of the goals of the Aryan collective.

Upon reaching age eighteen, boys were required to enlist immediately in the armed forces or into the Reich Labor Service, for which their activities in the Hitler Youth had prepared them. Propaganda materials called for ever more fanatic devotion to Nazi ideology, even as the German military suffered from defeat after defeat.

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, EVZ, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.View the list of donor acknowledgement.

MLRy 99.2, 2004 565 termined concept. Schrader challenges what he sees as an over-comfortableperception of Kleist as a modern writer,situating him instead in a pre-modern intellectual world. University of Leeds Paul Rowe Deutsch-englische Literaturbeziehungen: der historische Roman Sir Walter Scotts und seine deutsche Vorldufer. By Frauke Reitemeier. (Beitrage zur englischen und amerikanischen Literatur, 18) Paderborn: Schoningh. 2001. 290 pp. ?46.40. ISBN 3-506-70829-5 (pbk). Frauke Reitemeier's Deutsch-englische Literaturbeziehungen uses the very basic, thor? ough approach characteristic of German dissertations. The introductory review of past research in the field addresses the basic question of German influences on Scott's historical novels in relation to previous works of genre criticism and literary history. The main chapters survey late eighteenth-century historical novels in English and German and compare them with Scott's works. Reitemeier sorts the books into sev? eral categories according to the roles ofthe narrator,protagonist, geographical setting, and historical context. Scott's novels are shown to share some of the characteristics of earlier English novels (similar setting, in particular) and the novels of Benedikte Naubert (the type of narrator, concentration on historical context, providing local and historical facts). Reitemeier includes a review ofthe general reception of German literature in Britain in the late eighteenth century along with this systematic 'mapping' of the novels' con? tent. Much ofthe chapter is not directly relevant to the text's main focus on historical novels, but instead provides useful background information. Between this section and Reitemeier's extensive bibliography, the book is a decent starting point for research into German-English literary contact in the late eighteenth century in any genre. The only puzzle is why this excursus appears in the middle ofthe sections comparing specific models forthe novel. It seems to lead quite organically towards the discussion of the evidence of specific German influences on Scott which concludes the book. This final chapter answers the questions posed at the beginning of the text con? cerning the oft-mentioned influence of Naubert. Scott is shown to have had relatively scant familiarity with English historical novels of his time, while documentary evi? dence shows that he had read at least two of Naubert's novels as an element of his wider interest in German letters. Reitemeier is careful to make no unsubstantiated claims concerning the connection between the two authors, but the investigation does show that it is at least possible that some aspects of Scott's works owe a debt to Naubert's influence. Deutsch-englische Literaturbeziehungen adds only a little to the reader's understanding and appreciation of specific novels, but it does an excellent job of placing the texts within a literary and historical context. The predictability of the analysis is a necessary side effectof its thoroughness. The systematic approach only increases the work's usefulness as a resource on the evolution of the historical novel. Cambridge Janet Bertsch Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy. A Comparative Study. By Josie Billington. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 2002. 227 pp. ?35. ISBN 0-838-75458-9. Josie Billington's title takes the form of a conceit. In the firstplace she is arguing that Gaskell's realism is 'faithful' to the everyday flow of life, and she quotes Ruskin on 566 Reviews 'finish' in a work ofart:' Finish means nothing but consummate and accumulated truth [. . .] the fillingof space and the multiplication of life and thought' (p. 102). She supports her argument by reference to J.P. Stern's work on realism, and concludes: 'In? deed itis as though Gaskell's realist mode is showing us what realism itselfquintessentially is' (p. 102). We learn that this is a mode resistant to category, and inherently amorphous. It is irreducible to categories either ofwomen's studies or ofsocial history, therefore Gaskell cannot be regarded either as a social or a regional writer. This may flyin the face of conventional interpretation of a novel like Mary Barton, but Billing? ton seeks to solve the social 'alienation' inherent in her view of realism by another (and pseudo-Marxist) conceit: 'In just the same way does the craftsman lose control over his product in the market process, and so...

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