Deutsche Theologie im Dienste der Kriegspropaganda

Despite its scientific nature and theological sharpness of thought, Dobberahn's book is an exciting epic to read. This not only because of his narrative parts, individual biography fragments and insights of war participants at the time, theologians, educators, artists and a thoughtful confirmant collecting war poems, but also because of the wealth of documentary sermons, liturgies, war songs and rituals, diary entries, letters and war postcards. The framework is wide; it starts with the wars of freedom, goes beyond 1918 and focuses on major developments in German war theology up to the Holocaust. In his committed portrayal, Dobberahn puts readers at the front, in the stage, in school classes and church rooms, at the Potsdam imperial court; he lets them feel the enormity of war just as painfully as the readiness for blood of the word, the inhuman war aesthetics of worldmaking, the theological ornament as a crime.