Day of No Return

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This is something of an historical artifact. This book was written in 1942 by Kressman Taylor based on her interview with a German Lutheran pastor who was under FBI protection. The story follows the main character, Karl Hoffman, as he embarks on his career as a theology student at just the moment that Hitler's National Socialists are taking over the German government and german society. Karl encounters the Nazis as opportunistic thugs at the University of Berlin, where he learns that the Nazis mean to have their Cult of German Blood taken very seriously. Although his father, a prestigious pastor in Magdeburg is initially skeptical of Karl's concerns, he too, along with the rest of Lutheran Germany, come to understand that the Nazis intend to take-over the Lutheran Church and reform its dogmas to reflect Nazi dogmas. Thus, we have a number of vivid descriptions of Nazis preaching their doctrine that the Old Testament is a Jewish document that should be eliminated, that the doctrine of original sin weakened the German spirit, that Germans need no salvation since they are saved in their blood and that Hitler was appointed by God as the German savior.

The history of the book is largely accurate. It does provide a window into the hurly-burly of 1933 when so much was changing. From what I've read in history, the doctrines that the book offers as the doctrines of the “German Christians” were its doctrines. Likewise, the mocker and anti-Christian assault that Karl suffers in the labor battalion has been described in bona fide history books. Some historical figures make their appearances, such as Niemoller, Rust and Schlichter. That last is odd in that some time is given to a character named Orlando, who is linked to Schlichter. As in history, Schichter is killed as part of the Rohm Putsch, and Orlando commits suicide in grief. As a literary matter I was unsure of the point of this character, although it did make the criminality of the Night of Long Knives more immediate.I was disappointed that we did not see the meeting at the Berlin Sportzplatz that kernelized the confessional movement.

I think that what we really get from this book is the feeling of what it was like to be a devout Lutheran at this time. As an interesting aside, the plight of the Jews is not mentioned in this book, except insofar as the Aryan Paragraph - a historical fact - ruined Lutheran church members whose grandparents had been Jewish. This fact is mentioned, but we do not see the suffering of the Jews.

Likewise there is one scene where the Lutheran seminary students observe a Catholic Corpus Christi parade:

“We were aware that the Catholics were suffering persecution. Dr. Rosenberg, the powerful Nazi propagandist, had openly called the Catholic Church the “Anti-Christ,” and while there was no attempt to impose Nazi leaders upon the Catholics as they were trying to do in the Lutherans' case, they were restrained not by any religious compunctions but rather by the strong international position of the Roman Church. The attacks were being made upon individual Catholic leaders, upon priests and nuns who were arrested in great numbers upon trumped-up civil charges, many of them being accused of the grossest immoralities in order to weaken their followers' confidence in them. These unhappy men and women had disappeared into the dark silence of the concentration camps. Leaders of the Catholic Youth organizations were arrested and many of them brutally beaten.” (p. 106.)

That is virtually the only mention of the Catholic side of the Kirckenkampfe.

We might conclude from this that the various communities were neatly segregated by their mutual antipathies and suspicions.

This is fairly fast-moving book with action and suspense. I probably would have given it four stars if not for the history because the characters are subservient to the social forces that are calling the tune.