Walter Dirks

Walter Dirks (8 January 1901 in Hörde, North Rhine-Westphalia – 30 May 1991 in Wittnau, Baden-Württemberg) was a German political commentator, theologian, and journalist.

Life and career

From 1923 he wrote for the literary section of the Frankfurt journal Rhein-Mainische Volkszeitung,[1] described as 'left Catholic'. He also served as secretary to Romano Guardini (1885-1968), an Italian-born German priest and influential theologian of the twentieth century. In 1934 the journal was shut down by the new Nazi regime.[2]

Dirks had opposed National Socialism, and spoke in public forums to stop the Nazi's rise to power, favoring an alliance between the Catholic Center Party (Deusche Zentrumspartei) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).[3] Writing in the August 1931 issue of the journal Die Arbeit,[4] he "described the Catholic reaction to Nazism as 'open warfare'."[5]

His dissertation, on Georg Lukacs' 1923 book History and Class Consciousness, remained unfinished in part due to its likely rejection by the Nazis. The manuscript was said to have been burned to avoid its seizure by the Gestapo during house searches. In 1934 he worked as a music critic at Frankfurter Zeitung, in 1938 as editor of the literary section. Although doing no political commentary, he was in 1943 forbidden (Schreiberverbot) to publish his writing. He then worked at the Catholic publisher Verlag Herder.[6] Dirks is the author of several dozen books.

From 1946 Dirks was co-editor of Die Frankfurter Hefte.[7] He was active in the post-war reconstruction of Frankfurt, and in forming the new political party, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). Eugen Kogon, Clemens Münster, and Walter Dirks published an article advancing the vision of a Christian and socialist political future for Germany.[8][9]

At Sudwestfunk, a public radio corporation, he was a political commentator on domestic issues. During 1953-1956 he worked with Theodor Adorno at the Institut fur Sozialforschung (IfS), then home of the Frankfurt School of social criticism. From 1956 to 1967 he was manager in Cologne of public television Westdeutscher Rundfunk. In 1966 he co-founded the Bensberger Kreis, a circle of Catholic intellectuals.[10]

Dirks was a supporter of socialism, an opponent of nuclear weapons and rearmament. With other writers such as Eugen Kogon in Die Frankfurter Hefte, he articulated these positions.[11] From the 1960s until the end of his life, Dirks' point of view was in the minority among German Catholics. Gustav Heinemann referred to him as a moral conscience of the community.[12]

In 1941 he had married Marianne Ostertag (1913-1991),[13] who later served on the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK).

Marxism and Christianity

A 1947 journal piece by Dirks, "Marxismus in christlicher Sicht",[14] became influential. On the subject of Communism, it was a "decisive essay for the whole post-war German Christian thinking". Addressed were positive similarities between the prophetic passages of the young Marx and the Christian gospel of love and community. Marx was first to identify with the realities of proletarian life, which Dirks saw as an act of love. Dirks wrote of this "radical thinking out of the existence of the helpless and exploited" and Marx's "essentially Christian act... of solidarity with the other, with the neighbor, a sacrifice".[15]

In terms moral and spiritual Marx had described the "human relations in producing" and "the real world of power conflicts and selfish drives, without idealizing it." Marx thus widened the social justice project. As did then the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, Dirks saw forward from the inheritance of bourgeois idealism. Yet, unlike Tillich who countered Communism with a 'religious socialism', Dirks understood Communism as another faith. He faulted Marx for an Hegelian pantheism and for confusing spirit and ideology. Despite the prophetic quality of the early Marx, Dirks did not assume he was "the appointed bearer of an historic promise". Rather, the moral claim on the Christian was to acknowledge, to listen to, and to minister to the working class, to assist the exploited "until he can solve problems better and think better than the Communist". Dirks called on Christian churches for a responsive commitment, and renewed vigor.[16]

Selected publications
  • Erbe und Aufgabe 1931
  • Die Antwort der Mönche 1952
  • War ich ein linker Spinner? 1983
  • Der singende Stotterer - Autobiographische Texte 1983
  • Gesammelte Schriften, 8 volumes, 1987-1991 [17]

Legacy

Awards

References
  1. Rhein-Mainische Volkszeitung (German Wikipedia).
  2. French Wikipedia: Walter Dirks.
  3. German Wikipedia: Walter Dirks.
  4. Cf., Die Arbeit (Deutschland) (German Wikipedia).
  5. John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, New York: Viking, 1999, ISBN 0-670-88693-9, p. 108.
    Catholic criticism of the National Socialists was vehement and sustained in the press and from the pulpit. The Catholic journalist Walter Dirks... described the Catholic reaction to Nazism as "open warfare." The ideology of the National Socialists, he asserted, "stood in blatant, explicit contrast to the [Catholic] Church. (insert by Cornwell)
  6. German Wikipedia: Walter Dirks.
  7. Gerd-Rainer Horn and Emmanuel Gerard, Left Catholicism, 1943–1955: Catholics and Society in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation, KADOC-studies 25, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001, ISBN 9789058670939, pp. 196–202.
  8. French Wikipedia: Walter Dirks.
  9. The CDU took another direction.
  10. German Wikipedia: Walter Dirks; Bensberger Kreis (where Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde was a member).
  11. Alice Holmes Cooper, Paradoxes of Peace: German Peace Movements Since 1945, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996, ISBN 9780472106240, pp. 67–69
  12. French Wikipedia: Walter Dirks.
  13. Marianne Dirks (German Wikipedia).
  14. English: "Marxism from a Christian point of view" published in Die Frankfurter Hefte (February 1947).
  15. Charles C. West, Communism and the Theologians. Study of an encounter (London: SCM Press 1958; New York: Macmillan [pb 1963]), pp. 104-107 (at 105: West's "decisive" quote, Dirks' "radical" and "essentially" quotes) & 110, 331-333; cf. 247 (per Helmut Gollwitzer); Marx was first (105-106, 247, 331-332).
  16. West, Communism and the Theologians (1958, [pb 1963]), 104-107 (107: West's "until" quote) & 110 (West's "human relations" and "real world" quotes, and "appointed" quote), 247, 331-333; bourgeois idealism (105-106, 332), call on churches (107, 247, 332-333); Tillich, 78-87, 91-104.
  17. French Wikipedia: Walter Dirks.


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