Church Bells and the Toll of Culture in Postwar Germany

During the Second World War, nearly 200,000 church bells in German and German-occupied Europe were destroyed, most melted down for armaments to fuel the Nazi war machine. This talk tells of the silence left in the aftermath of these events, as German Lutherans and Catholics collaborated on a monumental, costly, and unlikely effort to restore this signature feature of the German sonic landscape amidst the ruins of the postwar period. In doing so, they faced difficult questions about the entanglement of bells in the perpetration of wartime violence, and their role in the reconstitution of German society in its wake. This history offers an opportunity to reflect on the widespread faith in the redemptive power of Germany’s cultural rehabilitation after 1945, and to examine this faith’s human and material costs.

Alice Goff is an historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the modern period. Goff’s research and teaching center on material culture, the history of museums, and the history of aesthetics. Goff’s first book, The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of German cultural politics and aesthetics during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Goffis currently at work on two projects which shift her focus from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both forward and backwards in time. The first project, Postwar Premodern: A Baroque History of Germany after 1945 investigates how the artistic and craft traditions of the baroque period became political, personal, and aesthetic resources for making sense of the future of German society amidst the proliferating critiques of modernity in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust. The second project examines the restitution of European church bells after 1945. During the Second World War, the National Socialist regime requisitioned bells from across German and German occupied territory to be melted down and recast as armaments.

Goff received her PhD in History from the University of California Berkeley, and holds an MSI in Archives and Records Management from the University of Michigan and a BA from Bryn Mawr College. From 2015-2017, Goff was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures. Goff’s research has been funded by the Neubauer Collegium and the Center for International Social Science Research at the University of Chicago, the American Academy in Berlin, the Mabel Mcleod Lewis Foundation, the DAAD, and the Council for Library and Information Resources.

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