Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy
This Friday Lunch talk will preview Brandon Bloch’s new book on the surprising role of the German Protestant Church in the formation of West German democracy after World War II. From a hotbed of Nazi support, the Protestant Church became a locus of West Germany’s earliest movements for human rights, disarmament, and postwar reconciliation. Bloch shows how this transformation hinged on the revival of longstanding ideologies of Protestant nationalism. Even as they imagined their church as a source of democratic values, a generation of pastors and lay intellectuals advanced selective accounts of their church’s history that forestalled a reckoning with the Nazi past and contributed toward the persistence of antisemitism, xenophobia, and confessional tensions in postwar Germany.
Please note: A catered lunch will be provided at this Friday Lunch event. Seats are limited and available on a first-come basis. To register, please send an email to rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu with your name, title, or affiliation.
Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He previously served as College Fellow in Modern European History at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2018. He is a historian of democracy, religion, human rights, and social thought, with a research focus on twentieth-century Germany and Europe. Bloch’s first book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy, will be published by Harvard University Press in August 2025. His work has also appeared in Modern Intellectual History, The Journal of Modern History, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Bloch’s new research addresses how interest groups representing postwar German “expellees” from East-Central Europe shaped international legal debates about forced migration and the “right to the homeland” during the Cold War era and beyond.