Debating Democracy in the German Protestant New Left

Debating Democracy in the German Protestant New Left

The protest movements that roiled Western Europe during the 1960s were about, among other things, the place of religion in society. While the history of the West European New Left is often written as a contest between church hierarchies and secular student and labor organizations, this was a moment of great dynamism in the religious sphere. My talk will take up the case of the Protestant Church in West Germany, which faced not only challenges to its teachings but demands to face its Nazi past. The decade’s protest movements catalyzed a contentious debate among dissident pastors and lay intellectuals about the very meaning of democracy, which not only reshaped the church’s political role but helped bring about a constitutional right of resistance, only the third in Europe at the time.

Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught modern European history since 2020. He was previously a College Fellow at Harvard University, where he completed his PhD in 2018. His research interests include histories of democracy, religion, human rights, memory politics, and social thought, with an emphasis on German-speaking Europe in the twentieth century. His first book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Origins of Post-Nazi Democracy, is under contract with Harvard University Press. He has published related articles in The Journal of Modern History and Central European History, and his writings have also appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Boston Review, and elsewhere.