Ruth Rehmann
The Man in the Pulpit: Questions for a Father
Trans. from the German by Christoph Lohmann and Pamela Lohmann
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. 215. $35.00 $15.00
Reviewed by Oliver Heimer
Twenty years after its publication in Germany, Christoph and Pamela Lohmann present the first English translation of Der Mann auf der Kanzel: Fragen an einen Vater, Rehmann’s fictionalized attempt to come to terms with her father’s behavior during the Nazi years. In the wake of the Goldhagen debate and new revelations about Swiss and Swedish entanglements with Nazi Germany, the recent shift in public and scholarly interest in history makes this translation important and welcome. Today, there seems to be a greater concern to go beyond simple interpretations of history and to explore the social structures within Europe which made possible the unbearable horrors of the Nazi years. In Germany, The Man in the Pulpit received a lot of public attention and became a wellknown model for subsequent publications in which authors dealt with their fathers’ dubious past. In the aftermath of the German ’68 movement, much of the so-called Väterliteratur was confrontational; Ruth Rehmann’s approach is more concerned with understanding as opposed to judging or condemning the way her father acted and thought.
In her (auto)biographical novel the narrator starts to investigate her father's behavior forty years after his death. As she is driving past Auel, a small town along the Rhine and once her home, her children persuade her to spend the night. Drawn back to her childhood by her son’s questions concerning their family history, Ruth-who is called “the child” throughout the novel-decides to stay behind and to explore her father's life, trying to understand his failure to recognize the moral and ethical nature of the Nazi regime. This turns out to be a difficult task due to the patriarchal family structure, for the father, a minister, dominates family life in which the mother plays the role of the caring and supporting wife while the daughter must meet the expectations of the passive and obedient child. In order to tell the story, the narrator has to force herself to leave that role behind, and, in doing so, violates the family tradition of not asking distasteful questions concerning her father’s actions. Even in the present, her investigations are not taken seriously by friends and family members, and the narrator has to fight against many obstacles, including the sexist and oppressive stance of her brother, who has followed his family’s long ministerial path.
The narrator’s portrayal of her father’s life describes an old family of Lutheran ministers with a high standard of education and social status-a family which belongs to the old bourgeoisie of Wilhelminian society. This influential class with its strong nationalist, militarist, and patriarchal beliefs and its Prussian values fails to adopt to the new Weimar Republic and contributes to the collapse of the young and fragile democracy in 1933. In the minister’s eyes, the republic and its political turmoil are the result of defeat in World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, which have replaced the supreme order of the Kaiser with an illegitimate democracy that allows dissident groups-namely communists, socialists, and Jews-to raise their voices.
When the National Socialists come to power in 1933, the distance to these uncultivated social climbers is retained, while the return to a hierarchical order, the uprising nationalism, and the new sense of unity among the people (Volksgedanke) are welcomed. The father fails to recognize the criminal nature of the regime and, worse, becomes sympathetic with for the state’s aggressive interference with church politics and even the arrests of influential church officials. More concerned with the matter of unity than social justice, he tries to keep his small congregation together in spite of its division over the question of how to judge the regime’s new aggressive policies. Instead of opposing the regime, he uses all his energy and courage to face the problems in his congregation. The narrator clearly believes her father would have stood up to the regime had he only seen reality more objectively. But “his inability to see” (ix) prevents him from believing the obvious. It is his deeply rooted trust in the social order, the German nation, and the Obrichtkeitsdenken-the blind belief in authorities-that prevent him from even considering the possibility of crimes being committed by the regime. He even repudiates the accounts of a Jewish friend. He is not able to understand the criticism from within the congregation, either. His class-bound superiority and his traditional role as “the Man in the Pulpit” prevent him to even listen; he prefers to preach.
Ruth Rehmann attributes her father’s failure to the limitations of his bourgeois background and his self-induced isolation in Auel. It would have required courage and stamina-which, according to the narrator, her father possesses-to break through these boundaries. Reading Rehmann’s novel it becomes clear that traditional roles in male-dominated hierarchies are essential to the survival and longevity of authoritarian regimes. The novel’s end is symbolic of the fate of a generation which failed to see the dangers and horrors of the regime and the destruction of a country before it was too late: the father died in 1940-too early for him to see the failure of his whole generation, the destruction of his country, and the full impact of the Nazi horrors.
The Man in the Pulpit portrays a man whose ethical and political values are representative of a large portion of the German educated middle class before 1945, and which allowed the National Socialists to establish a fascist regime, literally silencing all their opponents. Additionally, Rehmann gives an excellent insight into the human mind. Her father’s “inability to see” does not exemplify the whole population, but demonstrates the complexity of social behavior and the difficulty to comprehend a nation’s wrongdoings.
The Man in the Pulpit is a precise translation which reflects the style of the original novel very well. Christoph and Pamela Lohmann have given a lot of attention to details, and their annotations help the non-German reader to understand the context of the background and time.