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Understanding German Catholics—the work of H.G. Barnes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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H.G. Barnes was baptised ‘Harry’ but usually known, in Oxford at least, as ‘Roger’. To simplify, I will call him Barnes from now on. He spent many years teaching German language and literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, becoming a Fellow of the College in 1957. He was my tutor from 1955—58. Although we stayed in touch and indeed became friends, he rarely spoke about his past life—or if he did, I missed the significance of it. This article is about the unknown Barnes who worked for the BBC’s German service during the war. At a time when the cliches of propaganda filled the air, Barnes insisted that German Catholicism was an important element in the national tradition, and therefore in the post-war reconstruction. He devoted his life to the teaching of German literature, but was always attentive to religious factors.
His main work as a literary critic was on Goethe’s enigmatic novel, Die Wahlverwandschaften. In 1958 he was invited to address the Tagung of the newly revived Gorresgesellschaft in Salzburg. The result was a paper on Catholic responses—mostly negative, it turned out—to Goethe’s novel. In Modern Language Review for 1963 he reviewed the Jahrbuch in which his Salzburg lecture had been published. He reported Romano Guardini’s suggestion that had Rainer Maria Rilke ever completed Kindheit, an elegiac fragment, it would have surpassed the Duineser Elegien. (Barnes was surprised to find a priest and theologian who could also be a good literary critic.)
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- Copyright © 1987 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 ‘Goethe's “Wahlverwandschaften” vor der Katholischen Kritik’, in Literaturwissenschaftiches Jahrbuch 1960, pp. 53—65.
2 Manuscript of a lecture on ‘German Catholicism and National Socialism’, read before the Catholic Society of Swansea University College, 13 November 1934, p. 4. Henceforward referred to as ‘Swansea ms.’.
3 ‘Karl Adam and the Council’ by John E. Thiei, The Month, November 1984, pp. 378—381.
4 Sheed & Ward, Unicorn Books.
5 This is a well‐authenticated story. It is found in ‘Les Sources Francaises de G.B. Montini’ by Jacques Prévotat, in Paul VI et la Modernité dans ľ Eglise, Ecole Francαise de Rome, 1984, p. 119. In my forthcoming biography of Paul VI I will show the influence of Karl Adam's work on his first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam.
6 Swansea ms., p. 8a.
7 See Stechlin, Stewart A, Weimar and the Vatican 1919—1933, Princton University Press, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar He argues that the negotiations for partial concordats had been going on with the Weimar regime and that, therefore, there was nothing unusual about the conclusion of the Reichskonkordat.
8 Hofmann was later the author of Der Kirchenbegriff des heiligen Augustinus, became an expert orperitus at the Second Vatican Council, and died in 1977. Barnes was delighted to meet him again in Wuzerberg after the war.
9 Kittel's sad fate has been studied in Eriksen, Robert P., Theologians under Hitler, Yale University Press, 1985Google Scholar. However, it should be added that the Barnes knew that most Swabians were sound anti‐Nazi Protestants, and later they came to admire the Confessing Church and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The German resistance movement was a school of ecumenism.
10 Barnes, a scrupulous convert, took the Index very seriously, and carefully preserved his 1931 dispensation from the Bishop of Rottenberg. Dr Johannes Baptist Sproll was the first German Bishop to speak out clearly against the Nazis.
11 This vocabulary is interesting. The corpus mysticum or mystical body as an expression of the deepest nature of the Church had been developed by Karl Adam, among others. It could be seen as a response to the false collectivism advocated by the Nazis. It stressed that Christian salvation, according to St Paul, is not an individual matter. We are ‘co‐redeemed’. This had liturgical and possibly political consequences. Civitas dei was another image of the Church, this time borrowed from St Augustine; 1930, the year of Barnes’ conversion, was the 1500th anniversary of Augustine's death. There was a burst of Augustinian scholarship, typified by the collective work A Monument to Saint Augustine, published by Sheed & Ward in 1930. Of course, what Barnes wrote in 1934 looks simpliste with hindsight and he later had a much less rosy view of German Catholics.
12 Barnes was not guessing about this. By 1943 he was joined at the BBC by Hans Meier‐Hultschin, a Silesian journalist who fled to Poland in 1933, where he founded and edited a paper, Der Deutsche in Polen, which lasted until September 1939. After the war Meier‐Hultschin was press officer for the Land in Dusseldorf. He died 18 October 1958.
13 The general truth of Barnes’ remark was proved in September 1946, when Herder Korrespondenz began life. It was headed by a text from John Henry Newman and ended with a quotation from Fr Vincent McNabb's last sermon in June 1943. And it came from Freiburg‐in‐Bresgau—the French zone!
14 On Scheler, see Scheler, Max, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, translated by Frings, Manfred S.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, introduction by Kenneth W. Stikkers. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. One of the Catholics who ‘pinned such extravagent hopes on Scheler’ was Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, who wrote his thesis on him. See my ‘Husserl, Scheler and Wojtyla, a Tale of Three Philosophers’ in The Heythrop Journal, September 1986, pp. 441–445.
15 The phrase comes from Steiner, George, Heidegger, Fontana Modern Masters, 1978, p. 16Google Scholar. He does not agree with this judgment, which he attributes to T.W. Adorno in his Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 1964.
16 Cf. Hoffmann, Peter, ‘Peace through Coup ? Etat: The Foreign Contacts of the German Resistance 1933–1944’ in Central European History, Volume XIX, Number 1, March 1986, pp. 3–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar