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An Inventory of Tools and a Repertoire of Possibilities...My Book and My Inner Librarian
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At the end of 1998, Penn State Press published my study of the collaboration of two theologians, the world-famous Karl Barth, and his secretary and-in his termtheological assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum. Von Kirschbaum lived in his household, consisting of his wife and five children, for more than three decades. Barth said on many occasions that he could not have accomplished all that he did without her. Besides assisting Barth, von Kirschbaum gave, and later published, a series of lectures in 1949 on the need for a Protestant doctrine of woman, proceeding from the Scriptural witness on women to the role of women in the church. Concurrently, Barth was working on the volumes of his Church Dogmatics devoted to a doctrine of "man" (by which he meantor thought he meant-humankind) which dealt recurrently with gender issues in the Christian life. It was certainly clear to me when I began the project that I would be dealing with the history of theology, women's studies, and the often delicate issues of biography.
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Evidence of a Scholar in Her Own Right
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As my data accumulation thickened and started to take on a tentative shape, I had some questions about the actual world of research and the teaching of academic theology in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany and Switzerland. As so often, a secondary information source worked also as a primary source. _RGG, or Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_ (3rd ed: 1957-65) is a standard, multi-volume encyclopedia of theological topics, largely western, including people, institutions, concepts, and technical terms. (A new edition is in progress.) I gathered a great deal of information about the universities in Barth's curriculum vitae, and at the same time, I was absorbing what historians call _mentalité_ in the academic culture in these universities. I also gathered a lot about women and religion. And in the bibliography of one of the articles on women in Christian doctrine, von Kirschbaum's _Die Wirkliche Frau_ \ [The Real Woman\], her published lectures, was cited\!
Why is this exciting? Because it was my first piece of evidence that she was recognized as a scholar in her own right, outside of Barth's orbit, to at least a limited extent. I had wondered about this possibility as part of a larger question: did Charlotte von Kirschbaum have a life of her own, outside the life defined by Barth, and Barth studies, and everyone else who has written about her? She was highly critical of the Women's Movement of her time, represented by Simone de Beauvoir, though not as intensely critical of it as Barth was. She was also highly critical of the traditional status quo for women in Protestantism as well as Roman Catholicism. Women, in her view, had a positive and active role to play in church and doctrine. In my reading about early feminism, I had encountered an article by Jürgen Moltmann about Henriette Visser't Hooft Boddaert, wife of the ecumenist and core founder of the World Council of Churches, Willem Visser'tHooft. Visser't Hooft Boddaert worked with international Christian youth organizations in Geneva and wrote several essays that, as Moltmann observed, were radically critical not only of the position of women in the church but of patriarchy itself. It just happens that Karl Barth and Willem Visser't Hooft were close friends. Hmm. Two women with strong and related opinions on a common subject, two women overshadowed by the famous men they lived with, the men being connected with each other by friendship.... I had once tried to track a rumor that von Kirschbaum and Simone de Beauvoir had corresponded, but ran into dead ends everywhere, including the Karl Barth Archiv in Basel, the director of which had told me several years earlier that there was no such correspondence. I decided to write again, and asked for another check for correspondence with Beauvoir and also with Henriett Visser't Hooft Boddaert. After many months without a response from the Archiv, I gave up on my hunch and continued with what I then regarded as final preparation of my manuscript. In the summer of 1996 I was in serious conversation with Penn State Press on publication: they were ready to send the manuscript out for a reading. On the Saturday preceding the opening of the academic year, late in the afternoon, I went downstairs for my mail and found a packet from Basel: forty pages of closely written correspondence between Visser't Hooft Boddaert and von Kirschbaum on the subject of women in theology and the church, beginning in 1935, well before Barth turned to the subject. Visser't Hooft considered von Kirschbaum the expert; she asks her for criticism of her writing; she invites von Kirschbaum to come to Geneva to talk to various women's groups with which she is involved. Von Kirschbaum did indeed have a life of her own, tightly circumscribed though it was with the enormous amount of work she did, ceaselessly it seemed, for Barth and the calling of his theology. I had the busiest September of my life.
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