Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_bc7d5081-ef68-543f-804e-51eab33b9341">207 Through his open character and by introducing Barth to his large circle of interesting friends and acquaintances, Thurneysen was a stimulus to Barth. Barth came into contact with religious socialist conferences through Thurneysen. Barth’s acquaintances with Kutter and Ragaz were also initiated by his lifelong friend, Thurneysen. From 1914 to 1916 Barth corresponded with Ragaz on a regular basis.208 Thurneysen’s writing on Dostoevsky, his work on “Socialism and Christendom,”209 and his project on new homiletics affected and contributed to the development of Barth’s dialectical theology.
In his letter to Thurneysen (September 4, 1914) Barth expressed his opinion against the war. “Dei providentia—hominum confusion . . . The manner in which you make the ‘wrath of God’ positively fruitful is clear. The formula ‘God does not will the war’ is perhaps misleading. God does not will egotism. But he does will that egotism should reveal itself in war and become itself the judgment . . . I would relate the wrath of God yet more strongly to the ‘godless existence’ itself and would think of social injustice and war as symptoms or consequences of the latter.”210 In a sermon from August 1914, Barth denounced the war as “unrighteous, sinful, unnecessary, and stemming only from the evil of human nature. The war is not a natural phenomenon like the sun and the rain. It is not inevitable or insurmountable. One may and should expect much more from God. In the war God’s punishment has come upon us.”211 Still, Barth was not moved by Christian pacifism.
After finding Herrmann’s signature on the war manifesto, Barth expressed his disappointment to him.
Especially with you, Herr Professor (and through you with the great masters—Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher), we learned to acknowledge “experience” as the constitutive principle of knowing and doing in the domain of religion. In your school it became clear to us what it means to “experience” God in Jesus. Now however, in answer to our doubts, an “experience” which is completely new to us is held out to us by German Christians, an allegedly religious war “experience”; i.e., the fact that German Christians “experience” their war as a holy war is supposed to bring us to silence, if not demand reverence from us. Where do you stand in relation to this argument and to the war theology which lies behind it?212
Barth’s critique of war theologians, especially Harnack, traces back to Schleiermacher. “He [Schleiermacher] was unmasked. In a decisive way all the theology expressed in the manifesto and everything that followed it (even in the Christliche Welt) proved to be founded and governed by him.”213 In addition to his criticism of liberal theology, Barth expressed his bitter disappointment with socialism. Although he expected from Kutter’s book Sie Müssen! that socialism would serve as “a kind of hammer of God,” socialism also swung into line. “In the cathedral in Basel the socialists of all lands had solemnly assured each other and the world that they would be able to offer effective resistance to the outbreak of any new war.” Despite the socialist decision of resistance to the outbreak of war, what really happened was “the apostasy of the party,” and especially the “failure of German Social Democracy in the face of the ideology of war.” The status of neutrality in Switzerland required the Swiss in World War I to develop a high degree of military defense preparation. During wartime one or another of the church board members in Safenwil was absent due to military service. It was recalled that at the mobilization of the Swiss Army, Barth was at the Safenwil Railway Station every morning in order to give his good wishes to those who were called to military duty.214
However, despite his criticism of Social Democracy, Barth joined the SPS on January 26, 1915 as a token of his solidarity with it. Barth articulates his intent: “I have now become a member of the Social Democratic Party. Just because I set such emphasis Sunday by Sunday upon the last things, it was no longer possible for me personally to remain suspended in the clouds above the present evil world but rather it had to be demonstrated here and now that faith in the Greatest does not exclude but rather includes within it work and suffering in the realm of the imperfect.”215 Pejorative terms such as “the Red pastor of Safenwil” or “Bolshevik” poured down upon Barth. But “the Aargau Workers’ Party was hardly a dangerous enclave of the Red International.”216
As we have already seen in his “Workers Question,” Barth would perform his socialistic base work a year prior to his entrance to the party. From several places in the text one can discern that Barth has also formed this writing for an oral lecture. It is uncertain whether he used it already in the winter of 1913/14 in Safenwil or in Aargau. Our knowledge of this occasion is from his letter exchange with Thurneysen on January 1, 1916, in which he states that he has “made full use of” this dossier “with local workers” “every Tuesday” at the end of 1915. “I make it without enthusiasm, simply because it is necessary.” This writing on “Workers Question is an indication of the degree to which Barth understands the worker’s question in a socialistic perspective.217
Two texts without information on the time of formation consist of data and notices regarding the history of two important industry plants: the firm C. F. Bally in Schönenward, and Sulzer Brothers in Winterthur. Barth was interested in the family history of the firm owners, the technological development of their businesses, the social conditions of their companies, and also the religious self-understanding of these industry owners. It is not clear so far whether what is represented here are excerpts from the present history of the company or independent data collections of Barth. Barth’s intended use of the information can certainly be surmised. Through the collection of information Barth is concerned about the life circumstances and living conditions of his parish members and comrades. Because the two enterprises offer examples of the social conscience of certain capitalists, it is also conceivable that these texts could have been materials for the great dossier.
This work is especially interesting because it documents a way of working, namely via empirical analysis. Barth worked with hardly accessible statistical material: wage and price scales, “household [income] calculations of workers,” statistics of working hours, paragraphs of labor law in various countries, Youth labor statistics, statistics about profit and receipts, insurance statements, records of bank dividends, a report of occupational hazards (from a tobacco worker), statistics about accidents, about women in the labor force (different from Swiss cantons), about money devaluation, about the cost of business middlemen, about age structure in industry, about the housing situation, about overpopulation in living space, and about vacation time. Here we see some discussions important for Barth’s holistic perspective, such as his critique of the so-called scientific management, the Taylor system, through which nourishment, motion, and timing of the worker as a human time machine should be regulated solely from the standpoint of economic efficiency.
According to Barth, the current labor conditions included an enormous squandering of resources. Every increase in productivity was also for this reason to be welcomed because promotion of production means also progress for humanity under the given circumstances. The sole question for Barth was whether the economic effectiveness of the system operated at the cost of the humanity of the worker, whether the system displaced the “personality,” whether the ideal worker who experienced as few irritants as possible was in fact immeasurably more prone to nervousness and so to workplace accidents, and whether all this was not the quintessence and practical zeal of a through-and-through materialistic worldview. To this, Barth’s answer was unequivocal: as long as the economic principle of effectiveness stands in service to “the system,” i.e., capitalist production, then rationalization does not serve the general progress but