This is an excellent book—for the sheer volume of information it conveys about an important historical period (including an excellent bibliography!), but also for the insight it provides into the political and personal significance of the Church in the world.

Two things set it apart:

One is Barnett's careful attention to historical context. She begins in the late nineteenth century, at the end of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II (the period during which those active on all sides of the church struggle were born), devotes significant attention to the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism before the war, and continues through the post war period up to the time of reunification. This attention to context is a corrective to the tendency to isolate the church struggle as an “heroic” period of resistance coterminous with the war.

The other is the care with which Barnett avoids the hero worship one sometimes encounters in accounts of Confessing Church leaders like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She attends to the structure of everyday life in which Nazism rose to power and flourished as well as the structure of everyday life that emerged in Germany after its defeat. Of particular importance is her account of the difficulty that the whole Christian Church in Germany—those who joined the Confessing Church and those who didn't—had confronting its own anti-Semitism.

Without “demonizing,” she paints a chillingly detailed picture of the little compromises in which institutions and individuals engage everyday for the sake of survival and emphasizes the extent to which people “just like us” can become complicit in horrors like Nazism. She avoids painting the Confessing Church as a political resistance movement but does not neglect the political significance of confession—whether in the “established” church or out. This is important in a “post Cold War” world where Capitalism appears to have emerged victorious and unchallenged. As long as there is a “confession,” it has political significance. Barnett, like many of the “radical” Confessing Church members who survived the war, sees this as bearing an inherently revolutionary potential—a potential realized neither in “heroic” resistance nor in “heroic” devotion to the Fatherland, but in consistent embodiment of the Gospel in the everyday.

That is a lesson that would please Bonhoeffer immensely, I think, and it is reason enough to read Barnett's book with care.