In April 2020—a stressful month!—I wrote two posts on the unexpected contemporaneity of Barth's Römerbrief and his use of the the word Krisis and its translation into English —and how that translation may have shifted its meaning in Sir Edwyn Hoskyns time and since. This is the last post I will write about The Epistle to the Romans, and I will return to reading Church Dogmatics, still in the first volume.
This modest essay will attempt to point to cultural events and sources that give Barth's book considerable nuance and were relevant to his time (and to his fundamental points). I have not read any study of Barth's Römerbrief that really attempts to put its first and second editions in the social, cultural context of Europe in the early post-war years. I am not really qualified to comment on Barth's German prose and how it compares or contrasts with expressivist or experimental styles in German literature of the post-World War period.
To recap: Barth wrote his celebrated theological commentary during his pastorate in Safenwil, Switzerland during World War I, and published it in 1919. It was an immediate sensation in German-speaking Protestantism, especially the substantially expanded and revised second edition, published in 1922. The second edition (lightly re-edited four more times until 1933) put Barth on the theological map of post-war Europe as one of the most capable "dialectical" theologians. In Great Britain, Edwyn C. Hoskins published an English translation of Römerbrief in 1933, as so-called Neo-orthodoxy was revolutionizing North American Protestant theology, offering a way out of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies and waning persuasiveness of much of "liberal" theology.
Phonto linked from the Swiss Reformed Church of Aargau
Barth's book has been discussed at length elsewhere, so-called dialectical theology "between the times" analyzed in depth in a very large bibliography. (I will not attempt to summarize or enumerate any of that here; an excellent bibliographical guide to 1995 can be found in Bruce McCormack's book.) In addition, the years 1914-1933 saw epochal and often disastrous changes in German-speaking Europe that have been exhaustively described and analyzed. Barth's own career and intellectual journey are well-described in Eberhard Busch's Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, Suzanne Selinger's Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth: A Study in Biography and the History of Theology (1998); biographical information is summarized here
My topic in this modest post focuses upon Barth's modernist sources in Römerbrief. By "modernist" I mean cultural resources and allusions beyond his theological sources in ancient Christian writers, Reformation theologians, and "liberal" theologians such as Schleiermacher, D. F. Strauss, Albrecht Ritschl, and his teachers Adolf von Harnack (d.1930) and Wilhelm Herrmann (d. 1922). In addition, Barth's sources in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have been well-studied; his sources in Friedrich Neitzsche somewhat less so (but neither neglected; see this 1995 article and this 2016 article in Czech ).
These "modernist" sources are really often more allusions or references to "what was everywhere in the air" (preface to the 5th edition, Hoskyns translation p. 21) The world of 1920s Switzerland and Weimar Germany, however, is no longer common knowledge, especially in period 1918-1922. A brief recap:
A series of unmanagable events and changes precipitated and resulted in unprecedented mortality in Europe. The Great War was fought in particularly difficult circumstances (both western and eastern fronts, and in the Atlantic) with disastrous decisions by military leadership and notoriously high casualities. Four European empires either ended or were profoundly re-shaped by the war: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish; the French and British empires were severely tested and arguably began long processes of subsequent dissolution (by the 1960s). Constant rain and mud in the trenches accelerated the spread of disease and recent research suggests may also have accelerated the deadly H1N1 influenza virus that claimed millions of lives 1917-1921. The severe shortages of food and fuel in almost every country (except the USA) after 1918 also contributed both to increased immediate mortality and adverse generational health impacts that lasted for decades.
The period 1918—1922 was especially difficult in German-speaking countries; former large states split or were split into unstable polities; the leadership class was severely discredited; economic disasters churned every kind of instability into ruinously high inflation abetted by inexorable and completely unrealistic demands for reparations. Because of wartime censorship, ordinary Germans and Austrians had little real understanding of their armies' defeats, setting up a lost-cause mythology of "the stab in the back" (Dolchstoss Legende) which later was weaponized by Fascists. Years of workers' sacrifices erupted in demands for workers rights and pay raises (in a time of inflation) that led to severe labor strife and the real possibility of further revolution following the Bolshevist, Russian example. Other parties actively sought the restoration of monarchies or imposition of extreme measures.
Recently some of the atmosphere of Weimar Berlin has been vividly evoked in the television series Babylon Berlin (released 2017-2021), based on the novels by Volker Kutscher. Granted, "Red Berlin" was far from Safenwil and Basel not only geographically but culturally (and the novels are set in the later 1920s and early 1930s). Nevertheless, the depiction of politics, poverty, and social change, and post-war trauma elicits a sense of creative instability and an atmosphere of Krisis not irrelevant to many of the original readers of Römerbrief.
The 1922 world of Barth's Römerbrief is not entirely unfamiliar to us: political instability, economic uncertainty, social trauma, racism, pandemic. The Weimar world feels almost-familiar (but with profound differences from 2020s America or Germany as well). Ross Douthat (not a columnist I esteem highly, but nevertheless) wrote, "If the tragedy of Weimar is that it went through a doorway that opened into hell, the drama of Weimar is that so many doors were open, so many different political futures seemed entirely possible." Alienation, possibility, tragedy, trauma —all these social realities shade into the background of Barth's 1922 text, and into the foreground of Barth's reader a century later.
Several specific allusions or cases invoke this sense of almost-familiarity. The war is never far from page. The image of the crater (Hohlraum) occurs four times in the first 40 pages. (The English page numbers below refer to Hoskyn's translation; the German page numbers to the 2nd edition.)
Commenting on 1.3-4, The intersection of the "known plane" of God's creation with the unknown plane ("the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of final Redemption") becomes observable and observed in Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
"the point where the unknown world cuts the known world. . . . The point on the line of intersection is not more extended onto the known plane than is the unknown plane of which it proclaims the existence. The effulgence, or rather, the crater made the percussion point of an explrding shell, the void by which the point on the line of intersection makes itself known in the concrete world of history, is not . . . that other world which touches our world in Him. Insofar as our world is touched in Jesus by the other world, it ceases to be able of direct observation as history, time, or thing."
(p. 29; cp. Die Ausstrahlungen oder vielmehr die erstaunlichen Einschlagstrichter und Hohlräume, p. 24)
When commenting on Romans 1.11-12, Barth writes, "The important of an apostle is negative rather than positive. In him a void becomes visible." (p. 33) (Ein Apostel ist nicht ein positiver, sondern ein negativer Mensch, ein Mensch, an dem ein solcher Hohlraum sichtbar wird. p. 29) --the void is in fact an Hohlraum, here a lacuna, but redolent of the crater (Einschlagstrich) above.
In commenting on 1. 16-17, Barth writes that the activity (teaching, ethics, worship) of the Christian community (Christusgemeinde) is strictly related to the Proclamation of the Gospel —but only insofar as "it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself." (p. 36, sofern das alles nur Einschlagstrichter ist, nur Hohlraum sein will, in dem die Botschaft sich selbst darstellt, p. 32) Anything so-called Christian but unrelated to the Gospel is a human by-product, "content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave," (sofern es allenfalls statt Hohlraum Inhalt, statt konkav konvex, p. 32) --Hoskyns' English softens the strong German metaphor, occurring so soon after the explosion of a shell.
This violent imagery of exploding shells and resulting craters works in tandem with the imagery of meaningless death and suffering mortality that pervades Römerbrief. When commenting upon Romans 6.3-4, ("we were buried with Him in baptism into death") Barth writes, "Death is not grace, if human possibilities are multiplied by it through the coming into being of a whole series of negative (?) things, such as asceticism, "back to nature," silent worship, mystical death, Buddhist Nirvana, Bolshevism, Dadism, and so forth: so long, that is, as the attack does not culminate in the final negation of the man of this world and all his possibilities." (p. 194).
Barth is entirely conscious of the range of movements and choices in exhausted, post-war Europe: he names variously Spartacists, Imperialists (restorationists?), Capitalists, Bolshevism, the "Russian Man" and the Proletariat, "open-air enthusiasts" (p. 508, die Abstinenten, Vegetarianer und Freiluftidealisten der Gegenwart, p. 512). Is this last an encoded reference either to Muck-Lamberty's Neue Schar (see below), or to the Freikorper-Kultur (FKK, or nudist) movement then ascendent in northern Germany?
One allusion in particular is a "cat's paw" for the militant strains of nationalism that will later metastasize into Germany's degraded future as the Third Reich. When commenting on 3.3-4, Barth wrote, "God is true: he is the Answer, the Helper, the Judge, the Redeemer: not man, when from the East or fro the West, whether or Nordic stock or Biblical outlook . . . not the pacifist, not the man of action; not even the superman" (p. 80, Gott ist wahr; Gott ist die Antwort, die Hilfe, der Richter, der Erlöser, nicht der Mensch, weder der östliche noch der westliche, noch der deutsche Mensch und auch nicht der biblische Mensch . . . weder der Wartende noch der Wirkende und auch nicht der Übermensch, p. 74.)
The same applies "Nordic enthusiasm and devotion to Western Culture" (p. 462 freely translated from, Es wirkt nicht eben als Bestärkung in etwaigen „Idealen”, ob es nun persönliche oder kollektive, völkische oder internationale, humane oder konfessionelle, deutsche oder westliche, jugendliche oder reife, konkrete oder abstrakte Ideale seien, p. 467) Barth is keenly aware of the tendency of the church towards idolatry: "Easter is not a representation in concrete form of the triumph of our lives or of our aspirations—of socialism, for example, or of the "resurrection" of Germany. ( p. 378, when commenting upon 10.6-7, Ostern [ist] keine Darstellung des Sieges unsres Lebens, unsrer Aspirationen (z. B. des Sozialismus oder der Auferstehung Deutschlands! p. 382.)
Barth's skepticism regarding the evolving language of nationalist Germany (recovering then from defeat) extends to his semi-ironic references to German leaders. Barth cites ironically Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (in the preface to the 5th edition, p. 23, es sei leicht ein Fähnlein auf die Stange zu setzen, aber schwer, es mit Ehren wieder herunter zu holen, p. 22), "whereas it is easy to hoist your flag, it is difficult to strike it honorably" —this from the father of the German fleet, and advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare, dismissed in 1916 and co-founder of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Honor, indeed.
Tirpitz also appears much later in the text, in Barth's introduction to "The Great Disturbance," (Romans chapters 12-15), when commenting upon 12:1, on the subject of exhortation. If "exhortation be the exposition of the validity of grace, [then] it involves a perception of the pre-supposition of grace in all concrete phenomena. . . . [and] can therefore be undertaken only where the pharisee and the Publican have thrust together onto one step." Barth disallows any separation of sheep and goats, and exhortation is only possible where any "moral indignation against . . . a Tirpiz, or a Bethmann-Hollweg, or even a Lenin has entirely ceased to exist." (pp. 428-429; und also gar kein moralisches Ressentiment gegen einen Tirpitz z. B. oder gegen einen Bethmann-Hollweg oder auch gegen einen Lenin vorliegt; pp. 434-435). These are names that evoked enmity in 1922: not only Tirpitz, but against the much-despised Theobald von Bethman Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany in office 1909-1917, who had just died in 1921. Vladimir Lenin is much better known and in 1921-1922 had recently conscripted labor, and was expelling dissidents from Russia on the heels of the Russian famine of 1921-1922 that caused over 5 million deaths. Many of the dissidents and other Russians were gathering in German cities, especially Berlin. Barth's list is a role of dishonor indeed.
When a few pages on commenting upon Romans 12:2, Barth wrote that "there are actions from which the light of sacrifice shines . . . that the peculiarity of God . . . might be disclosed, and that He may be known as—Lord." This particular "enlightenment" disturbs humans, "whether they be formed according to idealism of a Ludendorf [sic] and a Lenin or of a Foerster and a Ragaz." (p. 435, Und dieses Leuchten stört den Menschen, den Idealmenschen nach dem Schema Ludendorff-Lenin und den Idealmenschen nach dem Schema Foerster-Ragaz, p. 441) What is the Ludendorff-Lenin "scheme" but the human as a completely ideological, politicizing being, whether in thrall to the nationalist right or the Communist left? Ludendorff was the German General who helped Lenin return to Russia, who was blamed for German defeat as well as personal cowardice (slipping out of Germany in disguise in 1919), and who subsequently led German nationalists in right-wing politics in the 1920s. His writings formed the basis for the ruinous "stab in the back" (Dolchstoff) ideology. Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster is less remembered, an academic who was a strong opponent of German militarism, in exile in 1922 after receiving death threats from irredentist German nationalists. Leonhard Ragaz is better remembered by historians and theologians as a founder of religious socialism in Switzerland, and an influence on Barth through the Socialist Party during Barth's years in Safenwil. These were all names that Barth expected his 1922 readers to recognize as controversial or infamous.
Finally, Barth's modernist world of 1921-1922 included reference to a then-well-known sexual scandal which has long since faded into obscurity.
Friedrich Muck-Lamberty (born 1891) grew up in the German fringe vegetarian and Wandervogel movements, which protested against German industrialization and sought to commune with nature. He spent the war with the German Marines on Heligoland, an island in the North Sea off Bremen. In the aftermath of the war he sought a rebirth of Germany through spiritual development of individuals. Blending spiritualist philosophy, German ethnic ideas, and what would now be called environmentalism, he called himself a "pioneer of a new age" and his followers hailed him "the Messiah of Thuringia." He placed women (the Eternal Feminine) in a salvific social role in which Christ-consciousness would be reborn amongst the Volk. (It should be noted that Thuringia was one of the places where the National Socialist Party [NSDAP] received its greatest support before 1933, and where the modern Alternativ für Deutschland has become powerful in the last 10 years.)
In 1920 Muck gathered a Neue Schar (new host or crowd) of young people who walked through Franconia and Thuringia. They gathered on Pentecost Day bound for the Wartburg (associate with Luther and German purity), advocating a nationalist commune against exploitation, and practicing meditation and an intense group life. Over 10,000 young people gathered in Erfurt, evoking the Children's Crusade. Although some Protestant clergy welcomed Muck-Lamberty and his crowd, Catholic clergy, workers groups and socialist parties condemned him, and German Nationalists regarded him as a "Bolshevik." In winter of 1920-1921 the group set up communal life at a rural hostel that was intended to produce handicrafts. Elements of this movement evoke the later "Summer of Love" of 1967 in San Francisco, and later communal experiments.
During that winter Muck-Lamberty was accused of sexual promiscuity and running a "harem economy" (Haremwirtschaft), accusations made particularly credible because of the strongly erotic and "naturist" mood of the movement. The group had to leave their winter quarters in February 1921, and Muck-Lamberty and the Neue Schar retired from public view. (Subsequently Muck married; he scorned the Weimar Republic, but kept his distance from the Nazis, then re-located to West Germany after trouble with the Soviet occupation. His craft business was continued by his children after his death in 1984.
Unsurprsingly, Barth was not impressed by Muck-Lamberty. When commenting an "an episode:" Romans 9:19-21, on human fallibility, "the appalling disturbances which can occur on the frontier where the Gospel is proclaimed . . . do not constitute an argument against the Truth" [of the Gospel]. Nietzsche's life (and illness) demonstrated that for humans The Truth is intolerable: when approaching God too closely, "they are thrown out of gear." So also for the conclusion of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, the destiny of Hölderlin, and ". . . the inevitable catastrophes in the history of the Baptists—Muck Lamberty—make it all too clear that . . . humanity has no alternative but death when confronted by the Truth." (p. 354, die unvermeidlichen Katastrophen alles Täufertums (Muck-Lamberty!), sie können doch nur erschütternd klar machen . . . daß der Mensch in seiner vermeintlichen Fülle, Gesundheit und Gerechtigkeit an der Wahrheit nur sterben kann, page 358).
Barth judged Muck-Lamberty very harshly, and it is a fair point that "the Messiah of Thuringia" had little to do with real Baptists—this is a derisive snort from a sometimes rather smug Swiss Reformed pastor (who himself would become involved in controversial household sexual relationships). Nevertheless, by referring to Muck-Lamberty, Barth pointed his central argument squarely against any such a "youth movement." The modernist impulse that in part moved Barth to write Römerbrief, especially in its pointed second edition, is part of the same cultural context that gave force to Muck-Lamberty's protest against industrial exploitation and the bourgois pretensions of post-war Germany. For both, all was not well (and would get far worse than they might have imagined i 1922).
Barth also has an unfortunate, sarcastic reference to "most heroic, most powerful prayers" of Prophets, Apostles, and Reformers, "not mention the artistry in prayer of the Ama-Xosa and the "Kekchi Indians" (p. 316, wahrhaftig auch das der Propheten, Apostel und Reformatoren, um von den Künsten der Xosakaffern und Kekchiindianer gar nicht zu reden! p. 320). Barth alluded to Friedrich Heller's book on prayer, which used "history of religions" and "religious psychology" disciplinary approaches which Barth despised. But this unfortunate reference also has more than a whiff of German-speaking imperialist racism, mocking as it does the Xhosa people of South African and the Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan people of Belize, Guatemala, and Chiapas state of Mexico. Xosakaffern in German is plainly derisive and racist (Kaffir). Barth's cultural references do not insulate him from the widely-shared racism of his time which mars his text in this passage.
Reading Römerbrief in 2020-2021 evokes a cultural and political context uncannily reminiscent of those tumultuous post-World War I years of populist revolt, social and economic disorder, famine, natural disaster, and epidemic. By summoning up the images of military defeat, the violence of the battlefield, the cowardice and ineptitude of national leadership, alt-right political language, and sexual episodes, Barth situated his hand-grenade of a book not only in dialectical theology, existentialist philosophy (as then known) and Russian literature, "masters of suspicion," (per David Tracey) but squarely in the provocative and perilous cross-currents of German-speaking Europe. His book, taken seriously, is still a hand-grenade of an argument in 21st-century Europe and North America (and very probably elsewhere as well).