Richard Rubenstein

To what extent are the children of Holocaust perpetrators to feel remorseful or responsible for their parents' wrongdoing? Is the yearning by those offspring of Nazi sympathizers for forgiveness justified, or should they separate themselves from their parents or relatives and ignore the history? Such dilemmas have gnawed at theologian Martin Rumscheidt ever since, at age eighteen, he discovered his father's complicity in using Jewish slave labor at his workplace, IG Farben. He has written and spoken extensively about his journey in search of what he calls a theology of mourning that would preserve his concept of the reality of God and still recognize the reality--at times grim reality--of life. ""Martin Rumscheidt's In Search of a Theology Capable of Mourning is an immensely important analysis of post-Holocaust Christian theology. It is profoundly insightful, painfully sensitive, and courageously penetrating. Rumscheidt's vision of theology's incursion into history and history's incursion into theology is unparalleled. Written with a sense of calling, this book calls out to us all. And it summons us to a reckoning."" --David Patterson, Hillel Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas ""This is a moving book. Martin Rumscheidt confronts the challenges for Christian theology after the Shoah recognizing himself as a child of a perpetrator. Choosing an honest, personal approach and avoiding any abstractions he profoundly combs through major problems of contemporary theology. Everyone concerned about the troubles of Christianity after Auschwitz and in search for 'a theology capable of mourning' should read this book."" --Andreas Pangritz, Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Bonn, Germany ""This book is a fascinating and provocative collection of religious reflections by one of today's most creative and provocative theologians, Martin Rumscheidt. Drawing from his own personal experience as a son of Nazi Germany, Rumscheidt explores how Christianity might recover its integrity and lead the world forward in a moral and spiritual revolution. He speaks to Christians, Jews, and all those concerned with the consequences of war, genocide, and human cruelty."" --Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College H. Martin Rumscheidt was born in Germany, and educated there, in Switzerland, and in Canada. He holds a PhD from McGill University, and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. After serving in three different congregations he taught historical theology at the University of Windsor and at Atlantic School of Theology. His present research focuses on the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations. He and his spouse live in New England.

To what extent are the children of Holocaust perpetrators to feel remorseful or responsible for their parents' wrongdoing? Is the yearning by those offspring of Nazi sympathizers for forgiveness justified, or should they separate themselves from their parents or relatives and ignore the history? Such dilemmas have gnawed at theologian Martin Rumscheidt ever since, at age eighteen, he discovered his father's complicity in using Jewish slave labor at his workplace, IG Farben. He has written and spoken extensively about his journey in search of what he calls a theology of mourning that would preserve his concept of the reality of God and still recognize the reality--at times grim reality--of life. ""Martin Rumscheidt's In Search of a Theology Capable of Mourning is an immensely important analysis of post-Holocaust Christian theology. It is profoundly insightful, painfully sensitive, and courageously penetrating. Rumscheidt's vision of theology's incursion into history and history's incursion into theology is unparalleled. Written with a sense of calling, this book calls out to us all. And it summons us to a reckoning."" --David Patterson, Hillel Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas ""This is a moving book. Martin Rumscheidt confronts the challenges for Christian theology after the Shoah recognizing himself as a child of a perpetrator. Choosing an honest, personal approach and avoiding any abstractions he profoundly combs through major problems of contemporary theology. Everyone concerned about the troubles of Christianity after Auschwitz and in search for 'a theology capable of mourning' should read this book."" --Andreas Pangritz, Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Bonn, Germany ""This book is a fascinating and provocative collection of religious reflections by one of today's most creative and provocative theologians, Martin Rumscheidt. Drawing from his own personal experience as a son of Nazi Germany, Rumscheidt explores how Christianity might recover its integrity and lead the world forward in a moral and spiritual revolution. He speaks to Christians, Jews, and all those concerned with the consequences of war, genocide, and human cruelty."" --Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College H. Martin Rumscheidt was born in Germany, and educated there, in Switzerland, and in Canada. He holds a PhD from McGill University, and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. After serving in three different congregations he taught historical theology at the University of Windsor and at Atlantic School of Theology. His present research focuses on the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations. He and his spouse live in New England.

With an Introduction by William StyronTheologian Richard L. Rubenstein writes of the Holocaust, why it happened, why it happened when it did, and why it may happen again and again." Few books possess the power to leave the reader with the feeling of awareness that we call a sense of revelation. The Cunning of History seems to me to be one of these . . . Rubenstein is forcing us to reinterpret the meaning of Auschwitz--especially, though not exclusively, from the standpoint of its existence as part of a continuum of slavery that has been engrafted for centuries onto the very body of Western civilization. Therefore, in the process of destroying the myth and the preconception, he is making us see that that encampment of death and suffering may have been more horrible than we had ever imagined. It was slavery in its ultimate embodiment. He is making us understand that the etiology of Auschwitz--to some, a diabolical, perhaps freakish excrescence, which vanished from the face of the earth with the destruction of the crematoria in 1945--is actually embedded deeply in a cultural tradition that stretches back to the Middle Passage from the coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece and Rome. Rubenstein is saying that we ignore this linkage, and the existence of the sleeping virus in the bloodstream of civilization, at risk of our future." -- William Styron, from the Introduction.