[584] the idea of suffering obedience--since anyhow the world is in the power^a of the Devil-^b-was the attitude of almost all Germans who were influenced by this Lutheran^c attitude. Authority^d was God^e-sent. If the authority is bad, you have to pray for a better one, but there is no right of resistance or revolution^f except if they command something which is, in your personal situation, against the law ^gof God: then you have to suffer. This point of view never was out, in Germany^h, and you cannot understand Nazismⁱ, for instance, without this point of view--not the CONTENT of Nazism (this has nothing to do with Lutheranism or, as some people think, Hegelianism), but the authoritarian acceptance of it without a serious resistance and revolt in the beginning, before it came to power^j--later on, it was impossible anyhow.--This is historical guilt, tragic guilt, connected with the German history^k. In Karl Barth, there was in these days a theologian^l who himself came from religious socialism^m, who was a member of the Swiss religious socialist movement, but who turned transcenden- talist in the beginning of the twenties; who gave up the combination of the religious principle with the socialist principle, and was, as l once told him, largely responsible for the fact that the theologyⁿ students who in the BEGINNING of the twenties, after the First World War,^o were still in sympathy for religious socialism and able to resist the coming of Hitlerism, were not able any more because the relationship to the history^p, to the historical responsibility of a theologian, was undercut by Barth's transcendentalism. Now this was the one position: Lutheranism^q, pessimistic about changing history,