When Bruno Apitz published his Buchenwald novel “Nackt unter Wölfen” in 1958 – the first worldwide bestseller from the GDR – he also mentioned the Bible Students (Jehovah’s Witnesses) on the first page in a list of prisoner groups. This was historically accurate, as there were around 800 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Buchenwald concentration camp. Yet in the next 400 pages of the novel, the prisoners with the purple triangle seem to play no further role. Or do they? Did Apitz include Jehovah’s Witnesses among his Buchenwald characters without identifying them as such? If so, were there political reasons for this?
Nathan Schmidtchen explored these and other intriguing questions in his dissertation “Narren in Christo”, published in 2022. While historians have now adequately examined, and thus also recognised, the significance of Jehovah’s Witnesses during the National Socialist era, a literary or cultural studies perspective had been lacking. Schmidtchen’s work has now changed this. The first literary study to address the role of Jehovah’s Witnesses in narrative texts about National Socialism is now available. It examines Jehovah’s Witnesses in the literary discourse of remembrance of authors who experienced and survived this era, focusing particularly on their narrative prose.
In addition to Bruno Apitz’s Buchenwald novel, the author closely examines works by Wolfgang Langhoff (Die Moorsoldaten, 1935), Robert Antelme (L’espèce humaine, 1947), Hans Werner Richter (Sie fielen aus Gottes Hand, 1951), Max von der Grün (Zwei Briefe an Pospischiel, 1968) and Jorge Semprùn (Quel beau dimanche!, 1980). And he reaches surprising conclusions: “Jehovah’s Witnesses fascinate, unsettle and disturb. As saints, prophets, martyrs and scapegoats, they follow in the footsteps of the Son of God. Connections also emerge with the figure of the Christian fool: not of this world, the world of National Socialist terror, yet at the same time bearing witness within it and against it,” according to the book’s back-cover text. An important contribution that has so far received too little attention.
Book details
Title: “Narren in Christo”. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the literary discourse of remembrance of survivors of National Socialism
Author: Nathan Schmidtchen
Publisher: J. B. Metzler
Publication date: 2022
Length: 474 pages
ISBN: 978-3-662-65921-2
Price: 119.99 euros (89.99 as an e-book)
This article was translated from the German original using artificial intelligence (AI).
