Presences Felt: Encounters in a Lost Century
by Andrew Chandler
Darton Longman & Todd, London, 2005
pp 117. Rrp $34.95. ISBN 0 232 52570 6

Reviewed by Maggie Helass

The author’s focus is the power of the institutional
landscape to incarcerate the individual.
   It is one of the hybrid books straddling academic
disciplines – in this case history, ethics, political
science and theology – which are the fruits of
post-modern intellectual fusion.
   Chandler’s premise is that institutions maintain
themselves by recording themselves. On the other
hand “Private lives are generally irretrievable,
except when momentarily observed by what has
become, in our day, the greatest institution of all:
public authority”.
   In the 20th Century, democracies and dictatorships alike decreed that the life of every single man, woman or child should be thoroughly regulated within an administrative and legal paradigm. Mass politics brought with it a new culture of expertise.
   A striking number of elected governments in the
century were explicitly racist and new democracies
proved horribly prone to violence and corruption.
By 1938 all but one of the democratic states
created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had been superceded by dictatorships.
   Totalitarianism was likewise justifi ed by the rhetoric of the majority. The same culture of control and effi ciency was driven to extremes only possible in a technological age – relentless propaganda, prophetic figures of leadership, juxtaposed with a construction of mass assent. Totalitarianism used heroic imagery “to appeal to that fatal susceptibility to the grandiose which is found lurking in most societies, and disillusioned ones in particular”.
   Chandler suggests that the nuclear arsenals
of the second half of the 20th Century showed
how pervasive totalitarian dialectic and scale had
become.

Page 2

   There was no pronouncement from St Peter’s
when Poland was devastated. But this was a time of annihilation and fear; thirty-three million Catholics lived in Germany. If the Pope pronounced against Hitler, what would become of them? Whatever the allegations of betrayal, if the church had ceased to exist the debate would have died with it.
   With totalitarianism, the individual became
wholly expendable in the great purposes of the
day. Even the Christian language of self-abnegation unwittingly fed into a movement towards structures which conspired to isolate and strand the individual conscience. Out of this matrix came what Chandler dubs ‘irresponsible moralities’.
   “In this book I have adopted the idea of
irresponsible morality to explore a persistent and
resilient strain of moral conduct which denies the
power of these orderly regulations.” He includes
case histories of expressions of an intense sense of individual responsibility for colossal affairs.
   Dietrich Bonhoeffer, like Oscar Romero, was
an embarrassment to his superiors in life, although
both were embraced post-humously by their
churches. For the churches too are subject to the
strictures of their institutions, and experience thefriction between “the criteria of the corporate
apologetic and the quite independent force of
moral and spiritual individualism”.
   The Nazi occupation of Germany began
without fanfare. The public was gradually deprived
of its political rights, but its opinions were studied
assiduously by the new instruments of oppression.
   Gleichschaltung was a policy of social engineering
which took power by stealth. It was not enough
for people to be governed – they must become
supporters, evangelists.

   Historically, the Christian churches of Europe
had been eager participants in the culture of public identity — and in the pursuit of legitimisation
through self-definition.
   It is fashionable to criticise the German churches
in the Third Reich for their ‘failure’ to speak on
behalf of the Jews, but Chandler maintains that it is
too simple to write Christian history as the story of
good leaders and bad, or of good or bad theology.
   The relationship between the policies of
authority and the conversations and activities of
the untitled believer is fragile – and authoritarian
cultures often contain the most active and resistant sub-cultures.
   Chandler describes the suppression of the
Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. Hitler
used the fear this provoked by displaying a sincere religiosity, and in 1933 the Catholic Church traded its political influence in Germany for concessions for churches, schools, charitable concerns and religious journals.

the life of every man, woman or child should be regulated within
an administrative and legal paradigm by democracies and dictatorships

   But the terms of the agreement were not
honoured. Catholic youth groups were absorbed
into the Hitler Youth, prompting the Pope to
challenge the National Socialist movement in
1937.
   Protestants were generally more sympathetic
to National Socialism, but there was a minority
of stout resistance, particularly to the party’s racial
policies. By 1934 the Confessing Church had
emerged, but it was deprived of legal approval and
material resources, and its pastors were subject to
conscription.
   In the summer of 1940 the Vatican, as a state
in the heart of Fascist Italy, chose neutrality as a
calculated policy. But this appeared to many to be
a suspension of moral judgement and proved to be a deep ethical hole for the Pope.

Page 2

   German resistance to Nazism is usually defined
by the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20th
1944. But this was but one manifestation of a far
more widespread phenomenon. Following the
failure of the plot to kill Hitler 11,448 opponents
of the National Socialist regime were killed before
the surrender of Germany the following year.
   Chandler is at pains to point out what incredible
processes of resistance took place in a short time.
Insights and loyalties of individual conscience must
form into a state of dangerous conviction; become
explicit; seek, find, and harmonise with other
independent minds. Under danger of arrest at every turn the architecture of meaningful resistance must be built and acted upon, in conditions of utter secrecy in the midst of a major war. Men and women did this at extreme personal risk, in their ‘spare time’.
   It was in circles of friends that the most articulate
and persistent source of resistance emerged (e.g. the correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the English bishop George Bell).
   Chandler makes his point about the clash of
‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ moralities with
the poignant reminder of secret envoys from
Germany risking their lives to go to Whitehall
and Washington, only to be disregarded, or even
dismissed as traitors to their country.
   This absorbing ramble back into the past century
ends with a contemporary warning: “As our models
of corporate life grow more intricate still, their
burdens enforce a narrowing of perceptions which,
in turn, commands a culture of defensiveness and
conformity.”
   A useful early harvest of historical insight into
the 20th Century..