On this day in 1943, Martyr Alexander of Munich was beheaded. In 2012, the Russian Church Abroad was preparing the glorification of Alexander Schmorell, a Russian German whom the Nazis executed. At that time, I worked as a proofreader for Pravoslavnaia Rus’, a Russian language periodical of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville. I was skeptical about the reasons for this glorification, thinking that the ROCOR would like to use it to change the perception of herself as a church that was a beneficiary of the Third Reich. However, while proofreading an issue of Pravoslavnaia Rus containing the letters of St. Alexander of Munich, it became clear to me that there were no "two sides to the story." His letters were permeated with "mere Christianity." There were no facts that may complicate the narrative. St. Alexander of Munich just stood up against the anti-Christian Third Reich. So, I converted from a skeptic to a believer. My wife and I have three children. It was my job to give them names. So, when our third child was born on August 16, 2012, I was wavering between two heavenly patrons: the venerable Vadim priestmonk and martyr of Persia (376), and St. Alexander, who was on February 4, 2012, canonized in Munich by the ROCOR German Diocese. Masha, my wife, lived, studied, and joined the Church there. And the least to say, I have been familiar with the Munich Russian Church community since 1989. Thus, this newly-born boy became Sandrik, as we call him. While St. Alexander was baptized in the Russian Church and participated in the liturgical life of the ROCOR parish in Munich, all his cultural and philosophical references belonged to the German Christian world and particularly to the one of the Confessing Church, a Protestant movement, which, unlike the Russian Church Abroad during 1933-1945, did not have a privileged status in Germany (in 1935, the Third Riech gave the rights of corporation to the ROCOR diocese there). The attitude, different from that of St. Alexander, is seen in the report of Bishop Seraphim (Lade) of Potsdam at the 1938 Pan-Diaspora Council on his participation in the conference Life and Work, which took place in Oxford in 1937. It is clear from the following quote that Vladyka Seraphim participated there as a German official: "Of course, the conference had in mind German Catholics and adherents of the confessors of the faith in the first place [as victims of persecution] and only secondarily, the Christians in the USSR. Under the term 'non-Christians,' it follows that the Jews were assumed, whose fate was very dear to members of the conference." St. Alexander could have easily chosen his comfortable “ROCOR identity” over the one of the Confessing Church, but I doubt that he would have been glorified then. I see similarities between nationalist ideologies in today's Russia and Germany of St. Alexander's time, and I wonder where his heart would have been now.
Relevant Resources to understand the climate within the Russian wartime emigre community:
Yuri P. Grabbe, At the Twilight of Jewish Power (Belgrade, 1943). Tikhon I. Troyanov, “People Often Do Not Talk About What’s Important, but Rather about Their Grievances and Frustrations” Nicolas Mabin, "Archimandrite Nicholas Gibbes: From the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile to the Moscow Patriarchate" |
