A Wartime Narrative of Hope: The Freiburger Bonhoeffer-Kreis’s 1943 Memorandum as a Blueprint for Europe

Abstract

This chapter analyses the Freiburger Bonhoeffer-Kreis’s 1943 memorandum “Political Community Order: An Attempt of the Christian Conscience in the Political Hardships of Our Time”. Its authors intended the memorandum, dealing with ethical, political and economic foundations of a post-war European order, to serve as a basis for discussion at the 1948 Amsterdam conference where the World Council of Churches (WCC) was established. By conceptualising it as a ‘blueprint’, the framework it provided for both the role of Christian ethics and that of a social market economy in a new political era will be revisited. Moreover, by introducing the concept of ‘emotives’, this chapter shows how associations with a specific vocabulary were applied to oppose National Socialism and to pave the way for an alternative conception of community order. By studying the nexus between emotions and informal networks this chapter offers a framework that can shed new light on European integration history. All in all, this chapter explicates how European integration from the beginning also entailed moral and spiritual dimensions.