Mothering the Fatherland

During the Allied bombing of Darmstadt in 1944, some Lutheran young women saw their city's destruction as an expression of God's wrath. In 1947, a small number formed the Ecumenical (now 'Evangelical') Sisterhood of Mary, one of the first post-war Protestant religious orders. They sensed God's call on them to embrace lives of radical repentance for the sins of the German people against God and against the Jews. Under Mother Basilea, born Klara Schlink, the sisters embraced an ideology of collective national guilt for the Holocaust.