Towards the end of October 1945 the leaders of the newly unified Protestant Church in Germany, the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (EKD), met at Stuttgart. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, joined them. The meeting produced the famous ‘Stuttgart declaration’ on German Christians’ responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This declaration admonished Christians and churches in Germany, asking why they ‘did not confess more courageously, did not pray more faithfully, did not believe more joyously, and did not love more passionately’ during the Third Reich. Yet Bell, the representative of both the Church of England and a member of an ecumenical delegation, was keen that German Christians did not just take memories of their own guilt away from the conference. After all, he passionately believed that German Christians had been, first and foremost, victims of the Nazi regime. Accordingly, when Bell addressed them, he reminded the assembled of his ‘solidarity’ with German Christians and of the universal suffering that had been brought by Nazism and war. Crucially he also reminded the German pastors that for some Germans the pain brought by war continued:

What Bell and his ecumenical colleagues were engaged in at Stuttgart might be called the ‘politics of memory’. They were, collectively, attempting to find a ‘usable past’ – a collective sense of the meaning of the events of recent history which would allow them to move forward and to rebuild. The ecumenical community wished, for example, to find a way of understanding the past which allowed German Christians to be welcomed back into the international community of churches. The version of the past agreed at Stuttgart was consequently critical of German Christians, but it also offered a relatively comforting narrative of the Nazi era.