'Intimately Associated for Many Years'

Gerhard Besier is a historian (PhD), theologian (DD) and psychologist (Diploma). In 2009, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund, Sweden. He has held chairs in Contemporary (Church) History at the Universities of Berlin, Heidelberg and Dresden, is currently Director of the Sigmund Neumann Institute, and teaches at Stanford University. His book The Holy See and Hitler's Germany was published by Palgrave in 2007. This was followed in 2013 by European Dictatorships: A comparative history of the twentieth century (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), co-edited with Katarzyna Stoklosa, and then by Neither Good Nor Bad. Why Human Beings Behave How They Do (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

'[T]he value of these exchanges is that they fill in the details of the frequent consultations between these church leaders. In particular, they provide information about how the two men dealt with the three principal obstacles they faced in these years. The first was the fear expressed by many churchmen that this new World Council would evolve into a vast ecumenical enterprise which would swallow up the individual entities in some sort of super-church. The second fear, expressed by many more Orthodox leaders, was that this new World Council would produce a new doctrine of Christianity which would override the traditions and individual heritages of these Protestant or Orthodox churches. The third obstacle was the refusal of the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic Church, to be associated in any way with this new venture.'John S. ConwayUniversity of British ColumbiaContemporary Church History Quarterly, 22:4 (2016)'Gerhard Besier has done a tremendous job in supplying a commentary on the extensive correspondence between the English Anglican Bishop George Bell and the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Willem A. Visser't Hooft between 1938-1958. The work is a significant addition to the source material for the history of the ecumenical movement.'Professor Aila LauhaFaculty of Theology, University of HelsinkiTeologia.fi, 07.03.2017'The reader can find interesting exchanges on the questions that Western Christians were asking themselves at the time: the future of Jews in Europe, the attitude to adopt towards the Russian Orthodox Church, and communism. Some letters provide evidence of established contact with Catholic officials, often with regard to the fledgling WCC. But other letters report on ecumenical matters that might hardly be believed to be possible at the time.'Franck P. LemaîtreIstina 62 (2017)