Mass migration takes its place alongside climate change, the current (and future) pandemics, and the Ukraine crisis as one of humanity’s most pressing issues. The case of Germany shows just how controversial asylum and migration have been and continue to be. An estimated 1.6 million refugees found temporary shelter in Germany in 2015–16, triggering an avalanche of responses from civil society.1 Among the most vocal supporters of the refugees were the Protestant and Catholic churches, which earned them a degree of scorn from opponents of mass migration. Jonathan Spanos’ Munich dissertation offers a detailed analysis of attitudes toward political asylum from the (West) German Protestant Church (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD), its multiple humanitarian organs, and several Protestant pastors who made names for themselves as staunch advocates for the rights of refugees outside of EKD structures. This book is a much-needed contribution to understanding the political and theological roots of German Protestant involvement in asylum debates until the early 1990s.

The book is divided into six main parts, comprising a lengthy introduction (Chapter 1) followed by four chronologically arranged chapters and an epilogue. In Chapter 2, Spanos shows how, despite the pervasive anti-communism of the 1950s and early 1960s, the West German state imposed onerous restrictions on German Democratic Republic (GDR) refugees seeking to leave their homeland, although they were legally Germans. According to völkisch-inflected Cold Warrior logic, the steady hemorrhaging of people from East Germany would depopulate the GDR and render its belonging to the German nation precarious. Thus, Federal authorities sought to limit the influx of refugees by categorizing them into “political” and “economic” camps; those unlucky enough to fall into the latter category saw themselves saddled with work prohibitions. By raising its voice against these restrictions, pro-asylum advocacy became part and parcel of the EKD’s identity. As Spanos tells us in a fascinating pen portrait, the pastor Karl Ahme (1893–1979), a staunch anti-communist since the early days of the Weimar Republic who believed that Germans were “cursed” for having produced the intellectual heirs of Russian Bolshevism, became a central spokesman for refugees’ right to come to West Germany (p. 97). Ahme’s critiques of West Germany’s restrictions on GDR asylum seekers amounted to a maximalist demand for the acceptance of all GDR citizens who wished to come to the West. It had its roots in the conservative theology of personalist human rights, which rejected Soviet totalitarianism and capitalist materialism. Theological personalism helped overcome the national and confessional framework that had dominated the discussion on behalf of GDR refugees, and the EKD duly welcomed the arrival of Hungarian and later Czech refugees with an ecumenical emphasis on Western Europe’s Christian duty to provide succor to the needy.

Chapter 3 introduces the cases of the Chilean refugees after 1973 and the Vietnamese “Boat People” who arrived from 1978 onward. The acceptance of non-Europeans, even leftists, demonstrated the power of invocations of humanity. Spanos emphasizes the engagement of pastors Helmut Frenz (1933–2011) and Helmut Gollwitzer (1908–1993), as well as left-wing Protestant activists who forged ties with the Social Democratic Party using the universal language of human rights as an overarching narrative. Advocacy on behalf of the refugees from Chile blurred the borders between left-wing political solidarity and theologically grounded pro-refugee advocacy. This strategy, however, did not convince conservatives and government bureaucrats. Moreover, the left-wing framework that dominated Protestant pro-refugee advocacy in the early 1970s clashed with the explicit antipolitical humanitarian context of the late 1970s that did attract conservative support, enabling the acceptance of 36,000 Vietnamese refugees.

The inner-Protestant rift that emerged in the 1970s only expanded in the 1980s (Chapter 4). Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s CDU/CSU and FDP government came to power in 1982 with a hardline attitude toward asylum. Drawing inspiration from the pro-refugee movements in the United States, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, as well as the World Council of Churches, pro-refugee advocates such as Jürgen Micksch (b. 1941) and Michael Mildenberger (1934–2020) countered the official policy. In 1986, Micksch was one of the founders of Germany’s most prominent pro-refugee NGO, Pro Asyl. That same year an “ad-hoc commission” of the EKD released a study sharply critical of the government’s asylum policies, and individual churches granted asylum to refugees threatened with expulsion. Protestant seminaries and the Kirchentag became fora for pro-asylum advocates. The pro-asylum movement came to resemble the activist “new social movements” that flourished from the 1970s onward, which eroded the EKD’s claim to represent the entirety of German Protestantism.

Political opposition came from Christian Democrats and the conservative Bekenntnisbewegung. These groups advocated a narrow asylum praxis grounded on national allegiance (East German refugees) or religious solidarity (Christian refugees from Turkey and Syria). The conservatives pointed their anger not just at the social movements but also challenged the EKD’s primacy within Protestantism. Post-national pro-asylum activism proved hard to stomach for those who remained committed to the nation-state.

The conflict between asylum advocates and asylum opponents was also rooted in theology. While the pro-asylum movement drew from reformed Protestantism, which emphasizes the freedom of the church, their detractors pointed to Luther’s two-kingdom doctrine that recognizes the primacy of the state in earthly affairs. Spanos notes, however, that confessional divisions between supporters and detractors of asylum mattered increasingly little in the 1980s. The EKD leadership struggled to navigate these conflicting camps and tried to avoid open confrontation with the state. Ultimately, the church opted to appease the conservatives and the state by siding with the 1993 “Asylum Compromise”, which eroded Article 16 of the Basic Law that had enshrined the right to political asylum since 1949. This is summarized as a short outlook in Chapter 5, which is followed by a conclusion in Chapter 6.

Spanos’s book successfully fulfills its goal of elucidating the complex role that protestants played in the asylum debates, though his conclusion that “Protestantism’s stance was ambivalent” did not leave this reviewer satisfied (p. 352). After all, the book amply demonstrates that we cannot speak of Protestantism in the singular. The inner-Protestant rifts from the 1970s and 1980s attest to the emergence of contradictory attitudes to the role of faith in modern politics. A more robust engagement with the impact of 1960s activism on Protestantism would have enhanced the entire framework of the book. For instance, it would have helped the reader to know that Protestant students leaned more to the left than their Catholic counterparts in the 1960s and that this had a significant impact on the EKD.2 Furthermore, some engagement with the EKD’s response to government restrictions against Yugoslavian refugees, many of whom were Christians escaping from a repressive communist state, would have provided a valuable counterexample to the story presented in Chapter 2. Did it matter to the EKD and Ahme that Yugoslavia did not have a substantial Protestant population? Finally, the discussion regarding the Chilean refugees in the 1970s and the debates of the 1980s would have benefited from a discussion of liberation theology, which influenced the World Council of Churches, Helmut Frenz, and Protestant theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann. Conversely, Protestant and Catholic conservatives fought liberation theology. Despite these shortcomings, Spanos’ book is a worthy addition to recent scholarship on Germany’s migration history.3 Unlike much of this scholarship, it is to Spanos’ great credit that he deftly incorporates humanitarianism and human rights scholarship. His book will benefit academics, activists, and policymakers and belongs in every library.

Notes:
1 Official government estimates give the number of 1.17 million persons who sought asylum in Germany in the years 2015–2016: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, Das Bundesamt in Zahlen 2017, Nürnberg 2018, https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Statistik/BundesamtinZahlen/bundesamt-in-zahlen-2017.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=17v=17 (02.09.2022), p. 11. This number most likely does not encompass persons undergoing asylum procedures, those granted subsidiary status, or those whose applications had been rejected but could stay under the status of “Duldung” (toleration). See Ben Knight, 1.6 million people seek humanitarian protection in Germany, in: Deutsche Welle, 03.11.2017, https://www.dw.com/en/16-million-people-seek-humanitarian-protection-in-germany/a-41228807 (02.09.2022).
2 Dorothee Weitbrecht, Aufbruch in die Dritte Welt. Der Internationalismus der Studentenbewegung von 1968 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Göttingen 2012, pp. 199–245.
3 See e.g. Christopher A. Molnar, Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany, Bloomington 2018; Patrice G. Poutrus, Umkämpftes Asyl. Vom Nachkriegsdeutschland bis in die Gegenwart, Berlin 2019; Jan Plamper, Das Neue Wir. Warum Migration dazugehört. Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen, Frankfurt am Main 2019; Maria Alexopoulou, Deutschland und die Migration. Geschichte einer Einwanderungsgesellschaft wider Willen, Ditzingen 2020; Lauren Stokes, Fear of the Family. Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany, Oxford 2022.