Rebirth for Germans?

Europe's great Protestant theologian is Calvinist Karl Earth. Expelled from Bonn University in 1935 for refusing to take the Hitler oath of allegiance, he has been lecturing at Basel University in his native Switzerland. He leaves this month to lecture at the Russian-sponsored University of Berlin. Sometimes called "a theologian's theologian," neo-orthodox, nonhumanist Earth has exerted great influence in both Europe and America; when he speaks, churchmen listen.

In 1938, anti-Nazi Barth prophesied that after Hitler had finished with the German church, "efforts to recapture the [religious] interest of the new godless Germany will have to be those of a missionary." Last Fall, Churchman Barth went back to Germany to see for himself. He set out with misgivings, returned somewhat reassured to announce his conclusions before a jampacked audience in Zurich.

Hope for Tomorrow. The most encouraging sign for Christian Germany, said Barth, had been the stiff-necked resistance of the Confessional Church leaders who stubbornly continued throughout the war to pray for peace instead of victory, aided the Jews, consequently kept themselves in constant hot water with the Nazis. In this tough nucleus Barth saw hope for the rebirth of German Christianity. The new, united Evangelical Church, formed last August at the Treysa conference, was a good beginning. But Calvinist Barth looked with less favor on those conservative churchmen who were more interested in getting back to the good old pre-Hitler days by safeguarding hierarchical arrangements and hoary institutions. German churches, he said, could retain their freedom in the new social democracy not by turning back to the past, but by seeking to safeguard the values of the individual within the community.

On the purely temporal aspects of Germany's road back, Theologian Barth also had ideas. From TIME's correspondent in Switzerland came cabled excerpts from the latest Barth brochure, How to Cure the Germans. Excerpts:

"The German people today are sick; they must be taught how to recover their health. . . . They must be deprived of the dangerous illusion of their military invincibility, made to lose confidence in their military power. . . . The most urgent task is for the Allies to make the German people individually responsible for their own affairs. . . . The greatest trial the Allies can impose on them is [to give them] liberty, and no chance to elude their responsibilities."

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