Bruno Doehring (February 3, 1879 – April 16, 1961) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. A preacher at the Berlin Cathedral from 1914 to 1960, Doehring was a popular figure in the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union in Berlin. He was a strict conservative and was active in the Weimar Republic as a politician.
Life and work
Early years
Doehring was born the son of a farmer. After attending elementary school in Mohrungen and the Royal Grammar School in Elbing, he studied theology at the universities of Halle, Berlin and Königsberg. In 1906 Doehring was a pastor in Tiefensee in East Prussia, where he started a family and his son Johannes was born, and in 1908 he was a pastor in Fischau in West Prussia. After receiving his doctorate in 1911, Doehring gained the attention of Georg zu Dohna (1852–1912) through his involvement with Arthur Drews. Dohna hired him as a pastor in Finckenstein Palace. The conservative politician Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau belonged to Doehring's parish, and they became friends. After Dohna's death Doehring took over the management of the seminary in Wittenburg. For unexplained reasons, Kaiser Wilhelm II asked Doehring to give a sample sermon on April 1, 1914, with an eye to filling the recently vacant position of fourth chaplain at the Berlin Cathedral. After the sermon, an enthusiastic Wilhelm gave Doehring the position over competing candidate F. K. Otto Dibelius.
Doehring was known to the general public thanks to an open-air church service he gave to an audience of tens of thousands of believers on the steps of the Reichstag building on August 2, 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War. His sermon was a call to stand firmly and fearlessly together under the leadership of the Kaiser, with loyalty and with faith in God, through all the suffering that was to come. It was widely reprinted.
As a preacher, Doehring combined eloquence with education and populism, and was not afraid of "kitsch sentimentalism". He saw preaching as "always concrete, never abstract" and wanted to be like Martin Luther and never shy away from the problems of his time. The texts of his sermons were available in printed form to his audience immediately after the service, and could be bought for ten pfennig. Beginning in 1923, Doehring took on the additional position of official lecturer in practical theology at the University of Berlin.
Doehring, who had discounted the growing discontent and longing for peace during the war, was taken completely aback by the people's revolutionary riots of 1918. In his condemnation of the January strikes, Doehring spoke of betrayal and may have been the first to evoke the stab-in-the-back legend, which held that Germany lost the First World War not for military reasons but due to unpatriotic elements at home. Doehring blamed the subsequent defeat in the war and the following November Revolution and claimed that these events were caused by the decline in Germany's Christian faith and values. For him, most of the blame lay with the Catholic Church and the socialist labor movement. He envisioned a reformation along the lines of Luther's as a solution for Germany.
Politics
The Cathedral parish, largely composed of members of the Prussian bureaucracy and related members of the court, together with the status of the Berlin Cathedral as one of the state's representative places of worship, afforded Doehring the opportunity to lend his opinions unmistakable prestige in the middle of the German capital. By December 1918 Doehring had already lent his support to the German National People's Party (DNVP) in a call to vote.
Doehring criticized the November Revolution and its aftermath as a "de-Christianization" and thus a "deadening" of the political system. His daily pointed sermons were repeatedly criticized both in the democratic press and in statements of displeasure by prominent personalities. Gustav Stresemann saw in them "not ... an expression of Christian charity, but ... an increasingly frenzied aversion to dissent" and in 1924 Karl Barth called Doehring a "miserable cream puff" and a "theological buffoon".