ABSTRACT
The German dictatorship constituted a well nigh unique dictatorship with the people and not against the people, just as Widerstand was conversely Widerstand not with the people but ‘without the people’. Those who resisted have rightly been called ‘strangers among their own people’: their efforts were out of step with the immediate national effort. The predominantly sociological approach to resistance, or what Peter Hiittenberger called the Repriisentationstheorie of Widerstand stops short of the existential dimension of resistance. Resistance was, in Germany especially, a preserve of the individual or at most of the small group. As early as 1932 the young Berlin students’ chaplain Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the Church’s place was ‘where ideologies cease to be valid and new and ultimate concerns take over’.
