Karl Thieme

Karl Otto Thieme (May 25, 1902—July 26, 1963) was a German historian and political scientist. Thieme converted to the Catholic Church from Lutheranism and was part of an international intellectual network, along with figures such as Waldemar Gurian and John M. Oesterreicher (both converts from Judaism), who initially argued against anti-Jewish sentiment and for Jewish conversion to Christianity. After the Second World War, he was a pioneer in Catholic-Jewish interfaith dialogue through his work at Gertrud Luckner's Freiburger Rundbrief and numerous personal correspondencies. Although Thieme died before the end of the Second Vatican Council, his activities, along with "his intellectual sparring partner" Oesterreicher, paved the way for Nostra aetate (Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions).

Biography Early life and background Karl Otto Thieme was born in Leipzig as the son of Karl Thieme Senior, an ethnic German Lutheran Protestant theologian, who taught at the University of Leipzig. His brother was the legal historian Hans Thieme. From 1912 he attended the Königin-Carola-Gymnasium, which he left in 1921 with the secondary school leaving certificate. He then studied philosophy, history and law at the universities of Leipzig, Basel and Berlin until 1926. As early as 1924 he received his doctorate under his teacher Hans Driesch on the subject of Schopenhauer's metaphysics in its relationship to the Kantian transcendental philosophy.

From 1927 Karl Thieme was a lecturer at the Berlin Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, following his teacher Hermann Heller there. Thieme, the son of a Lutheran family from Dresden, identified as a Christian throughout his life including during his youth. Thieme became involved in left-wing politics and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1924. Thieme continued to pronounce his religious beliefs, however, editing the Religiöse Besinning publication which promoted ecumenism between Protestants and Catholics (something then condemned by the Vatican).

From 1931 to 1933 he was professor of history and civics at the Pedagogical Academy in Elbing. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, he briefly flirted with conservative revolution and "third positionist" politics, including Otto Strasser (Strasserism), the Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus (Social Democrats who were on the right of the party) and the Catholic Ring Movement of Heinrich Brüning. Controlling and arbitrarily changing the doctrines of the Catholic Church would prove more difficult for any political regime; this attracted Thieme and some German Protestants to it at the time (while not holding Jews in high regard, the Catholic Church did not exclude on the basis of racial origin, converts from taking part in the life of the Church). The correspondence between the two men lasted a number of years: in 1936, during the Berlin Olympics, Thieme helped Benjamin to publish the work German People (under the pseudonym "Detlef Holz") through Vita Nova in Lucerne, which attacked the spirit of the National Socialist-era. Here from Switzerland, together with Waldemar Gurian (a Russian-Jewish convert to Catholicism) and edited by John M. Oesterreicher (an Austrian-Jewish convert to Catholicism), Thieme wrote a memorandum in 1937 entitled "The Church of Christ and the Jewish Question", which called on all Christians, but especially the Pope and the Roman Curia, to oppose contemporary anti-Jewish sentiment and to take a public position on the movement against the Jews in Germany. Since 1943 he was entitled to live in Läufelfingen, Basel-Landschaft.

Interfaith in the post-war years From 1947 he was visiting professor, from 1953 full professor for European history, philosophy and German studies at the foreign and interpreting institute of the University of Mainz in Germersheim.

In 1950, Thieme changed his position in regards to the Christian mission to the Jews, arguing instead that the adherents of Rabbinic Judaism were pleasing to God as Jews and need not convert (contrary to the traditional Christian teaching that is sometimes referred to as supersessionism and specifically the Catholic concept of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus). As an attempt to justify this theologically, Thieme attempted to radically reinterpret a passage in St. Paul the Apostle's Letter to the Romans. The publication was founded to "oppose anti-semitism within Christianity" and was spread throughout German-speaking Catholic and Protestant parishes.

Works Das alte Wahre. Eine Bildungsgeschichte des Abendlandes. Leipzig 1934. Christliche Bildung in dieser Zeit, Verlagsanstalt Benziger, Einsiedeln, 1935 Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens (with Edgar Glässer and Alfred Hermann), München 1956 Biblische Religion heute. Heidelberg 1960 Dreitausend Jahre Judentum. Quellen und Darstellungen zur jüdischen Geschichte, Paderborn 1960 (Editor): Judenfeindschaft. Darstellung und Analysen. Fischer Bücherei des Wissens, Frankfurt am Main 1963.