Join Dr. William Theiss from University of Connecticut for his talk, "Dead Souls: The German Church Book since the Reformation." This talk will be held Thursday, April 9th, in Peabody Hall, room 115 at 4:30pm.

 

After the Reformation, churches across central Europe began tallying souls in church books that recorded the names of the baptized, married, and deceased in the spirit of Luke 10:20: "Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Compiled over centuries and handed down through generations, they eventually came to underwrite state power in the monarchies of Prussia and Austria as well as the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic. This talk examines modern German history through the tension between heavenly scribes and bureaucrats, and the strange persistence of this Reformation genre.