MeStrovic, S. (1997), Postemotional Society, London: SAGE Riesman, D. ([{1950], 1969), The Lonely Crowd, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Ritzer, G. (1992), The McDonaldization of Society, London: SAGE In memory of ~ Dorothee Solle An obituary by Annette Angharad Strauch of a leading critical and active theologian of Germany, who died of a heart attack on 27 April 2003, aged 73.
Dorothee Sdlle (1929-2003) was a political activist and a Lutheran theologian from Cologne. She lectured in Cologne on German literature and theology (1964-67) before becoming Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1975-1987). She was married to the theologian Fulbert Steffensky, a former Catholic monk and later Professor of Religion and Education at the University of Hamburg.
Sdlle’s childhood memories were of the Second World War, which she later recalled in Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (1999). These included watching a young Jewish girl flee in terror from the Nazis. She also recalled her own family’s suffering and her attempts to relate the German dream to the social reality: ‘From the end of 1944 onward, we experienced hunger ... I lay in bed and thought of spaghetti. I tried to make a distinction between Germany, the dream, and the Nazis who, almost without exception, I found repugnant or trivial.’ The contrast between a civilised culture and its brutality could not have been greater, and her memoirs capture this in the title of one of the chapters: ‘To love Bach in a world of torture’. Her later political activism and her theology were derived from these experiences.
Her theology is rooted in the question of theodicy.
Where was God in Auschwitz? This question troubled her all her life. Auschwitz revealed to her the death of a certain idea of God as the omnipotent ruler: ‘This great man of action who sits in heaven, gloriously ruling all things, responsible for all things and omnipotent, in the language of male theologians is in no way alive.’ Thereafter she struggled with the difficulty of speaking about God, asking in Theology for Sceptics (1994): ‘Has it become impossible in our modern age to speak about God? Is there no comprehensible, communicable language for the inner mystery of reality?’ But Sdlle did not abandon faith. In On This Gallows she wrote, "God is not in heaven; he is hanging on the cross. Love is not an otherworldly, intruding, self-asserting power — and to meditate on the cross can mean to take leave of that dream." That reinterpretation gives a terrifying vision of responsibility, as terrifying as any vision of God. In The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (2001), Sdlle cites Saint Francis’s companion, Aegidius of Assisi: ‘I know a man who saw God so clearly that he lost all faith.’ God’s hands are our hands, we ourselves have to work in order to achieve something, but the evil of this world is human too. Others, including Rudolf Bultmann and Simone Weil, led Sdlle to understand how God identified with the suffering people in the world, and this can be seen in what is arguably the best of her works, Suffering (1975).
Sdlle was aware that unquestioning obedience can lead to disaster, not only Germany’s obedience to Hitler, but women’s obedience to men, and so on.
She later explored this idea in Beyond Mere Obedience (1982). After the war she joined the peace movement and was one of the first Germans to visit Israel where she met Martin Buber. She became involved in peace and ecological movements in Hamburg, opposing nuclear weapons, and was a leading figure within the German Peace Movement.
She was also the founder of the anti-globalization network "Attac", though she claimed that she was not a Marxist but rather was a Socialist and a Democrat.
Her involvement was active, and she was involved in demonstrations and marches. In the 1960s, she travelled to Vietnam in opposition to the war and later to Nicaragua.
Sof 60 June 2003 From 1997, Dorothee Sdlle toured Germany with the Latin American musical group Grupo Sal, reading at their concerts about the global stupidity in our world. According to Sélle, the world needs a different economic globalization, which is one from below. In 2002, Dorothee Sélle organized night prayers in Cologne that were youth meetings at which young people carried signs that demonstrated against the identification of the World Trade Organization with democracy. The events that took place on 11 September 2001 appalled her. In her view we ‘should revolt against the licence to plunder, the licence to kill and the charter to war because we see the real horror in these structures of sin.’ Fully aware of contemporary suffering and human evil, she raised the question of how hope can be expressed in the face of suffering. It was her belief that the individual can make a difference. She did not Sélle did not separate theological reflection, politics and prayer In To Work and to Love, she mentions that an old name for God is ‘the lover of the living’ (Wisdom II: 26). For her, ‘religion still speaks of the sanctity of life for all that we can locate in love.’ But her publications show a radical worldly Christianity. The last subjects she spoke about publicly were God and happiness, during a conference in Bad Boll.
Iam from Germany myself, and though only half Dorothee Sélle’s age I also grew up with the terrible legacy of the war. I remember stories from my grandmother who had fled from the city of Stettin, which became Polish. Education in schools was not only very good, it was very political—with the war being discussed in every year. The questions of theodicy were raised at school and we learned about Dorothee Sille. I became a great admirer of her, and she became an example to me of how to live my life and think about religion—spiritually but at the same time critically and socially active. I later met Sélle at some of the German Protestant Kirchentage. The first one I attended was in Frankfurt in 1987, two years after my confirmation within the Lutheran Protestant accept the inevitability of structural injustice, but recognised it to be a product of human systems. She did not believe in Margaret Thatcher’s God, TINA (There Is No Alternative) of globalised market capitalism, nor would have believed it of the Iraq war. As individuals we need to be responsible, and that can change the world. We need to be aware of the political nature of all of our choices, so when we consider buying cheap clothes need to bear in mind the terrible conditions under which some people, especially women, have to work. Herein lies hope.
Sélle did not separate theological reflection, politics or prayer. In her life of faith, the inner mystical life and outer social life are connected.
Spirituality involves developing an appropriate relationship to material goods, rather than living in a system that is based on money and power. She practised an asceticism that did not seek eternal reward but, in a Western world of abundance she sought to organise a right relationship with both people and the environment. ‘The issue today is a different relationship to things, not the mortification of the body. In the context of globalization, asceticism means simplicity in the sense of simplification of lifestyle and needs. This means less, smaller, less often and more consciously.’ She regarded prayer as the language of faith rather than of theology, but considered it to be useful in organising our desire, training our wishes. She became thought of as something of a mystic. She writes of the mystical journey as involving threeparts: being amazed, letting go, and resisting. Of being amazed she has written about people who have experienced oneness, breakthrough and wholeness, nature, suffering, communion, eroticism, and joy. In The Silent Cry, she writes that ‘[t]o be aware of the ‘silent cry’ in our world means to become one with it.’ sof 60 June 2003 Church in a village close to the border to East Germany. I am very happy that when I once wrote to her she replied and sent me one of her earlier publications Gott Denken, which was also translated into English as Thinking about God.
Annette Angharad Strauch is a European Ethnologist / Cultural Anthropologist and a graduate in English literature and Middle English from the Georg-AugustUniversitat Gottingen in Germany who worxs in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.