Karl Thieme

Karl Otto Thieme (May 25, 1902—July 26, 1963) was a German historian and political scientist. Thieme converted to the Catholic Church from Lutheranism and was part of an international intellectual network, along with figures such as Waldemar Gurian and John M. Oesterreicher (both converts from Judaism), who initially argued against anti-Jewish sentiment and for Jewish conversion to Christianity. After the Second World War, he was a pioneer in Catholic-Jewish interfaith dialogue through his work at Gertrud Luckner's '' Freiburger Rundbrief'' and numerous personal correspondencies. Although Thieme died before the end of the Second Vatican Council, his activities, along with "his intellectual sparring partner" Oesterreicher, paved the way for ''Nostra aetate'' (Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions).

Biography

Early life and background

Karl Otto Thieme was born in Leipzig as the son of Karl Thieme Senior, an ethnic German Lutheran Protestant theologian, who taught at the University of Leipzig. His brother was the legal historian Hans Thieme. From 1912 he attended the '' Königin-Carola-Gymnasium'', which he left in 1921 with the secondary school leaving certificate. He then studied philosophy, history and law at the universities of Leipzig, Basel and Berlin until 1926. As early as 1924 he received his doctorate under his teacher Hans Driesch on the subject of Schopenhauer's metaphysics in its relationship to the Kantian transcendental philosophy.

From 1927 Karl Thieme was a lecturer at the Berlin '' Deutsche Hochschule für Politik'', following his teacher Hermann Heller there. Thieme, the son of a Lutheran family from Dresden, identified as a Christian throughout his life including during his youth. Thieme became involved in left-wing politics and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1924. This shocked some of his friends, as at the time, the Social Democratic Party of Germany identified as Marxist (though democratic) and was openly anti-religious in its materials. Thieme continued to pronounce his religious beliefs, however, editing the ''Religiöse Besinning'' publication which promoted ecumenism between Protestants and Catholics (something then condemned by the Vatican).

From 1931 to 1933 he was professor of history and civics at the Pedagogical Academy in Elbing. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, he briefly flirted with conservative revolution and " third positionist" politics, including Otto Strasser (Strasserism), the ''Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus'' (Social Democrats who were on the right of the party) and the Catholic Ring Movement of Heinrich Brüning. Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the establishment of National Socialism as the ruling regime in Germany, Thieme was due to give an address at a Social Democratic Party event in Elbing celebrating Karl Marx on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, on March 14, 1933. However, the evet was cancelled as the Gestapo rounded up Marxist politicians in the city, a week later Thieme himself was placed in protective custody. Thieme was informed that he no longer had a job at the academy as Social Democrats were banned from holding state positions.

The Church and the Jews

At first, Thieme, looking to protect his family, considered joining '' Der Stahlhelm'', so that he would avoid political persecution. However, his wife forbade this. By July 1933, while visiting Berlin, Thieme heard first hand accounts of the Köpenick's week of bloodshed; violence carried out by the ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA), where at least 21 people, including Thieme's fellow Social Democrats, were killed (many more were tortured). From this point on, he went into open opposition to the National Socialist regime. By this time, many of the Protestant ''Landeskirche'' were bending to the Hitler government and adopting the " Aryan paragraph"; much to the dismay of Thieme (converts of Jewish descent were banned from holding positions within these Protestant churches). Controlling and arbitrarily changing the doctrines of the Catholic Church would prove more difficult for any political regime; this attracted Thieme and some German Protestants to it at the time (while not holding Jews in high regard, the Catholic Church did not exclude on the basis of racial origin, converts from taking part in the life of the Church). Thieme entered the Catholic Church on January 30, 1934, and around forty Protestant pastors from the "Thieme circle" followed. German officials lodged a complaint to Rome about the Thieme circle and Alfred Rosenberg, the leading NSDAP ideologue and author of '' The Myth of the Twentieth Century'', condemned Thieme for his "treasonous pilgrimage to Rome."

In 1935, with the attention of the political authorities now directly on him and political violence a viable threat, Thieme elected to leave Germany and emigrated to Switzerland. While in Switzerland, Thieme was in contact with other political exiles on the left who had fled Germany, in particular Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School. Thieme sent Benjamin a copy of his 1934 work, ''Old Verities: A History of the Personal Formation of the West''. Benjamin viewed Thieme's work positively, as it reminded him of the theology of his old German Protestant friend, Florens Christian Rang; it chimed well with Benjamin's view that Marxism is a secularisation of "Judeo-Christian messianism." The correspondence between the two men lasted a number of years: in 1936, during the Berlin Olympics, Thieme helped Benjamin to publish the work ''German People'' (under the pseudonym "Detlef Holz") through ''Vita Nova'' in Lucerne, which attacked the spirit of the National Socialist-era. Here from Switzerland, together with Waldemar Gurian (a Russian-Jewish convert to Catholicism) and edited by John M. Oesterreicher (an Austrian-Jewish convert to Catholicism), Thieme wrote a memorandum in 1937 entitled "''The Church of Christ and the Jewish Question''", which called on all Christians, but especially the Pope and the Roman Curia, to oppose contemporary anti-Jewish sentiment and to take a public position on the movement against the Jews in Germany. Since 1943 he was entitled to live in Läufelfingen, Basel-Landschaft.

Interfaith in the post-war years

From 1947 he was visiting professor, from 1953 full professor for European history, philosophy and German studies at the foreign and interpreting institute of the University of Mainz in Germersheim.

In 1950, Thieme changed his position in regards to the Christian mission to the Jews, arguing instead that the adherents of Rabbinic Judaism were pleasing to God as Jews and need not convert (contrary to the traditional Christian teaching that is sometimes referred to as supersessionism and specifically the Catholic concept of ''Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus

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