The Politics of Religion in Soviet-Occupied Germany illuminates the religious policies of the Soviet military authorities and their allies in the Socialist Unity Party in the Soviet zone, and more importantly, who devised these policies and how they implemented them. Brennan illustrates how the Soviet authorities recreated the Soviet zone along Stalinist lines with regard to religious policy, focusing on the Soviet zone, and in particular its most important province, Berlin-Brandenburg. This book also demonstrates how the church leaders responded to these policies, especially as they became increasingly antireligious. Book jacket.

This book discusses the religious policies of the Soviet military authorities and their allies in the Socialist Unity Party in the Soviet zone, but more importantly, who devised them, how they did so, and how they attempted to implement them. In doing so, it illustrates how the Soviet authorities recreated the Soviet zone along Stalinist lines with regards to religious policy, a process which they implemented throughout all of Eastern Europe as well in East Germany. While I examine how these policies were devised, I place greater emphasis on their implementation in the Soviet zone, especially its most important province, Berlin-Brandenburg. Furthermore, this book demonstrates how the leadership of the Churches responded to the policies of the Soviet military authorities and their allies in the Socialist Unity Party, especially after they took and increasingly anti-religious tone during the late 1940s. The diverse responses of the Church leadership in the Evangelical Church during the Soviet occupation reveal the foundations of the eventual break within the leadership of the Evangelical church in the 1960s over the issue of how to deal with the atheist SED-regime. At the same time, the stances of Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius and the Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing as stalwart opponents of the creation of the "second German dictatorship" in the 1940s demonstrate how Churches would become central actors in the East German dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

The influence of faith in the conflicts that defined the Cold War

A pioneering exploration of the origins of German Christian Democracy in the context of 19th- and 20th-century politics and religion

“This book brings fresh light to previously marginalized subject in German history. It is an original approach, up-to-date written without scholarly jargon, easily accessible to students, both at undergraduate and graduate. It is highly focused departing from the usual “histories” of a single country arguing for the “two German states”, and the three political systems.”- Prof. Dr. László Kürti, Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Miskolc, Hungary This book contrasts three very different incarnations of Germany – the totalitarian Third Reich, the communist German Democratic Republic, and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany up to 1990 – in terms of their experiences with and responses to nonconformity, dissent, opposition, and resistance and the role played by those factors in each case. Although even innocent nonconformity came with a price in all three systems and in the post-war occupation zones, the price was the highest in Nazi Germany. . It is worth stressing that what qualifies as nonconformity and dissent depends on the social and political context and, thus, changes over time. Like those in active dissent, opposition, or resistance, nonconformists are rebels (whether they are conscious of it or not), and have repeatedly played a role in pushing for change, whether through reform of legislation, transformation of the public’s attitudes, or even regime change.

From German unification in 1871 through the early 1960s, confessional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were a source of deep division in German society. Engaging this period of historic strife, Germany and the Confessional Divide focuses on three traumatic episodes: the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and state-supported Protestantism after World War I, and the Nazi persecution of the churches. It argues that memories of these traumatic experiences regularly reignited confessional tensions. Only as German society became increasingly secular did these memories fade and tensions ease.

Explores the ways in which the British Religious Affairs Branch aimed to organise religious life in post-war Germany.