Michael Heymel - Böcker

After 1933, Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was regarded as the one outstanding personality in Germany whose inflexibility revealed the totalitarian traits of National Socialism. In December 1940, the front page of the weekly magazine Time wrote about Niemöller: "Martyr of 1940: In Germany only the cross has not bowed to the swastika." This volume describes Niemöller's international reception in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and analyzed for research for the first time in the USA. In addition, in dealing with the four biographies that have been published since 2017, Niemöller's attitude towards the Weimar democracy, the rise of the National Socialists to power and the disenfranchisement of Jews is reassessed and related to his commitment to peace, anti-racism and women's politics in the post-war period. Overall, Niemöller appears as a figure with ruptures, who began to break away from national patterns and, in constant new beginnings, developed into a leading representative of a cosmopolitan Protestantism.