Word: thaddens
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Bismarck, Not Hitler. In the beginning, Reinold von Thadden's world and his church were comfortably unified. His family were old East Prussian nobility with a strong religious tradition. His great-randfather made the family estate a famous center of pietism-at 31, a hitherto skeptical young Otto von Bismarck prayed for the first time in 15 years during a visit there. Reinold fell into the family tradition, became a lay leader of the Pomeranian state church...
When Hitler came to power, Thadden realized the change and the challenge. Throughout the '30s he denounced Naziism in the church synods, but he was too good a Junker not to enter Hitler's army when he was called up, on the strength of his World War I service, in 1940. He was released from duty in 1944, after his sister Elizabeth was beheaded for complicity in the Hitler bomb plot...
...spring of 1945, the Russians arrested Landowner von Thadden and sent him to Arctic Russia, with other German prisoners, for eight months. To help his fellow prisoners, he began to give short prayer services in the camp. Before long, nearly everyone was attending. Says Thadden: "Then & there I discovered that the modern young generation, whether they are pro-Nazis, or Communists, or "intellectuals, are all human beings with a great longing for something that will provide a background for their lives...
...Deeper Power. In 1949 he set about organizing the new laymen's movement. His aim: "To call upon Protestant lay-Christians to assume . . . responsibility in all provinces of public life." Although Thadden was once active in practical politics (as a Conservative deputy in the prewar Reichstag), he does not want to convert the Kirchentag into a political party...
...goal of the Kirchentag is an active Christianity outside the churches as well as in them-one not so capable of being captured by a totalitarian government as it was in 1933. "The layman who is trying to be as much like a clergyman as possible," Thadden says, "is not the person we need, but the layman who recognizes his Christian vocation in his daily work . . . That is political power in a deeper sense...