Albert Lempp: The Confessing Church’s Publisher


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Albert Lempp (1884–1943) was a prominent Protestant publisher and bookseller. He became an important figure of Christian resistance during the Nazi regime, most notably in conjunction with the persecution of Jews. Lempp came from a Swabian family of theologians. In 1911, he took over the struggling publisher Christian Kaiser Verlag in Munich and the bookstore of the same name in Munich city hall.


Lempp quickly gave the hitherto private press of a Munich Protestant parish a new image by publishing works by Bavarian proponents of liberal theology, such as Christian Geyer (1862–1929) and Friedrich Rittelmeyer (1872–1938).


Influenced by his friend, theological consultant and chief editor Georg Merz (1892–1959), he helped dialectical theology achieve its breakthrough after World War I. He procured the remaining Swiss copies of the Karl Barth’s (1886–1968) pioneering exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans and published a new edition of it in 1922. He additionally started epoch-making theological book series and journals such as “Zwischen den Zeiten”, which published works by prominent theologians such as Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), Eduard Thurneysen (1888–1977) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976).


Despite the repressive conditions during the Nazi dictatorship, Lempp became one of the Confessing Church’s important publishers from 1933 onward. In 1933, his publishing house published Karl Barth’s programmatic journal “Theologische Existenz heute!”, which decisively furthered the formation of opposition within the church.


Lempp’s publishing house additionally published such book series as the “Bekennende Kirche” (Confessing Church), which published works by, among others, the Bavarian theologians Thomas Breit (1880–1966), Julius Sammetreuther (1883–1939), Karl-Heinz Becker (1900–1968), Kurt Frör (1905–1980) and Hermann Sasse (1895–1976) as well as non-Bavarian theologians such as Hanns Lilje (1899–1977) and Hermann Diem (1900–1975).


A circle of Protestant laypersons and theologians formed around Albert Lempp and his wife Marie during the Nazi dictatorship, which sided with the steadfast Confessing Church influenced by Karl Barth and took a critical view of the Bavarian church government’s conciliatory course. This circle produced the famous “Letter from Munich Laity” in 1943, which was intended to move Regional Bishop Hans Meiser (1881-1956) to issue a public statement from the church against the persecution of Jews.


Lempp himself and various members of the Lempp Circle also rendered practical aid to persecuted Jewish fellow citizens. Lempp employed “non-Aryan” employees in his businesses. In 1938, he helped his closest colleague and general manager, the dramaturg, actor, poet and novelist Otto Salomon (1889–1971), and his wife flee to Switzerland. During the war, Lempp hid Irmgard Meyenberg (1907–2007), a bookbinder and restorer, in his house at Isabellastrasse 20 in Munich.


Lempp’s commitment to the Confessing Church did not remain without consequences: While individual titles from his publication program had been banned earlier, his publishing house was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Literature in 1939. In 1940, Lempp was forced to rename his publishing house “Ev. Verlag A. Lempp/München früher Chr. Kaiser Verlag”. Shortly after Lempp’s death from complications of a stroke, the Ministry of Propaganda’s Reich Chamber of Literature shut down his publishing house at the end of August of 1943 after the manuscripts had been reviewed once again.


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  • © Private collection of the Lempp family, Munich

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