The Issue of Resistenz: Therese Neumann and Her Circle During the Era of National Socialism

This paper explores Therese Neumann’s political significance as a symbol of both passive and active resistance during the Nazi era.  On a local level, Neumann enjoyed the loyalty of her family and the local priest, but her cult included a wider circle of influential and sophisticated friends, including members of the Bavarian nobility, of the academy, and journalists. To Catholic urban elites, Neumann’s theatre of the sacred offered a resolution of cognitive dissonance by providing proof for a value system challenged by secularization and the rise in Nazi ideology.

Members of her circle understood her stigmatized body as a symbol of what scholars of the Nazi period have coined Resistenz. A type of unorganized rejection of national-socialist politics, Resistenz was employed to protect localized cultural identity, especially as expressed by religious tradition. It is found most often in rural rather than urban areas, and is distinct from types of political resistance available to more literate, urban groups, labeled Widerstand. Whereas local people might spontaneously beat up Nazi officials who removed crucifixes from the schools, educated elites used their rhetorical skills and access to urban communication systems and produced pamphlets to denounce Hitler or plotted the military overthrow of his regime.

Therese Neumann thus lived at the intersection of both Resistenz  and Widerstand, of both local and national efforts to articulate a rejection of National Socialism rooted in a peculiar form of Christian mysticism. Although Neumann refrained from political activity during the Nazi regime, her bleeding body nourished some outspoken Catholic critics of the National Socialist regime, who in turn paid with their lives for their activism. The fact that Neumann herself chose not to employ its symbolic powers toward active resistance against Nazi abuses is theologically problematic and deserves more investigation.