Reconceptualising “Christian-Jewish Dialogue”
Abstract
This dissertation explores the so-called Christian-Jewish dialogue in 1950s and
1960s West Germany by focussing on three women connected to its wider
networks. They are the Catholic Gertrud Luckner (1900-1995), and two Jewish
women Jeanette Wolff (1888-1976) and Eleonore Sterling (1925-1968). Gertrud
Luckner was the editor of the journal Freiburger Rundbrief, one of the first
publications featuring Jewish voices in rapprochement between some Christians
and Jews. Jeanette Wolff was an SPD politician, one of the first female members
in the German Bundestag, leading member of the Jewish community in Berlin
and West Germany and active in the Berlin Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische
Zusammenarbeit (Society for Christian-Jewish cooperation). Eleonore Sterling
was West Germany’s first female professor of Political Science from 1967
onwards and a part of a Working Group Jews and Christians at the largest biannual
Protestant Convention in (then West) Germany.
Building on the intellectual history of Christian-Jewish “dialogue” within its
political and theological context, the thesis critiques the use of this term in
contemporary theological accounts and the literature which seeks to portray
Christian-Jewish cooperation as a venture of dialogue. Using a theoretical
framework that builds on approaches to transformative justice and Martin
Buber’s work on dialogue, the first Chapter argues for the structural
impossibility of dialogue in the post-war decades. The three following chapters
which employ approaches of social, gender and intellectual history, explore the
interdependences of gender, religion and politics in the lives of the women
named above. They show the strategies they employed to negotiate gender and
difference within institutional and structural constraints that were also common
to networks of Christian-Jewish relations. I argue that these were built on their
awareness of conditions for transformative justice which they expressed in their
Christian-Jewish work and formulated into distinct political agendas for West
German society at the time.
Authors
Richardson., Tabea.Collections
- Theses [4127]