| Charlotte
von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth is the first concentrated study
of the collaboration of the towering theologian Karl Barth and his
secretary and theological assistant for more than three decades, Charlotte
von Kirschbaum. Barth always maintained that he could not have produced
his theological oeuvre without her. Von Kirschbaum was also his constant
companion. Discussion of the two has long been aswirl in rumor and
speculation, with regard both to their personal relationship and to
von Kirschbaum’s part in Barth's theological achievement.
Drawing upon published and unpublished sources that include their
own writings, the observations of contemporaries, and correspondence
with people who knew them, Suzanne Selinger seeks to describe the
collaboration in a multidimensional way. Von Kirschbaum gave a series
of lectures in 1949, published in the same year, on women in the
perspective of Scripture, theology, and the church. In the three
volumes of Barth's Church Dogmatics that deal with humankind,
including the male-female relationship as the locus of the image
of God, Barth cites von Kirschbaum's scholarship. The subject inevitably
reflects upon their own relationship. Moreover, it is just this
subject—the anthropology of gender—that has been the source
of the categorical rejection of Barth by many feminists.
The author—a Barthian, a feminist, and a trained historian—addresses
the concerns of Barth's critics by agreeing deeply with them in
part but also by insisting upon understanding Barth and von Kirschbaum
contextually. This means biographically and in relation to early
German feminism (a phenomenon little known in the English-speaking
world), the intellectual movement known as dialogical personalism,
and the background of everything Barth and von Kirschbaum wrote
or thought in their work together: the steady, threatening growth
of the Nazi state, World War II, and the postwar German situation. |
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