Nazi era

The Nazi era is presented in the book not as a broad political history but as a force entering intimate lives: it endangered German Quakers, made ordinary communication perilous, and displaced Simone Weil and her family. Its significance emerges through encounters in which religious conviction meets the consequences of fear, persecution, and war. For Thomas Kelly, seeing suffering in Germany turned an inward experience of Divine Presence toward questions of responsibility and love; for Weil, occupation and discriminatory law formed the circumstances of exile and deepened an already intense spiritual life.

Germany and Quaker concern

In 1938, American Quakers arranged for Kelly to return to Germany. Their concern was for the welfare of Quakers living under Adolf Hitler, and Kelly was expected both to assess their situation and to convey the love and concern of Friends in the United States. Many German Quakers welcomed him because they remembered his earlier visit. The journey therefore joined observation with a personal and religious responsibility: he was not simply travelling to learn what was happening, but carrying a message of solidarity to people living under the regime.

The visit took place after Kelly’s spiritual life had begun to change. In late 1937, he had described being shaken by an experience of Presence that he had not sought. By January 1938, his way of speaking had changed: rather than discussing religious experience at an academic distance, he spoke from the intimacy of his own life. The Germany journey put that inward change beside the suffering of others. His account connects the experience of God not with withdrawal from history but with an increasingly urgent recognition of what fear and lovelessness do to people.

Steere’s journeys show that this concern was not confined to Kelly. During a 1933–34 sabbatical, Steere established important relationships in Europe. In 1937, while Hitler was in power and the threat of war was real, he made a risky visit to Germany to encourage German Quakers. He returned in 1940, after war had begun in Europe. His visits belonged to a wider commitment to peace: he worked internationally, was active in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and chaired its American section from 1954 to 1966. The book places these actions within the Quaker tradition of conscientious objection and the suffering that young Quakers could face because of it.

Censorship and the experience of fear

Kelly’s account makes the danger of the German situation concrete through the limits imposed on a letter. At one point he crossed the border into France so that he could write home without German censorship. He warned his wife that he could not safely use names or place names. A casual anecdote, he explained, could have consequences extending beyond its immediate subject: imprisonment, beatings with clubs, separation of families, or death. The need to omit identifying details was itself evidence of the climate in which German Quakers and others had to live. Private correspondence could expose people to danger, so even the act of telling family what one had seen required caution.

After witnessing suffering under Nazism, Kelly questioned the contrast between that danger and his own comfortable surroundings at Haverford. He lived amid park-like surroundings and privileges while, as he understood it, the world was aflame; he wondered what he could offer a suffering world. He came to see the absence of love as having human consequences, and understood God’s final nature as love. In this account, the Nazi era tests religious language against visible suffering: love is not merely an inward conviction if its absence helps explain inhumanity.

Kelly returned to the United States in September 1938, coming off the ship last and seeming dazed. The return to his former surroundings was difficult, and the intense experiences of God he had known earlier did not remain continuously present; he experienced spiritual dryness and knew that changes in his life were necessary. The book records those changes in domestic and communal terms. He renewed his relationship with his family, showed them more love, and played with his children after teaching. He also invited students into his home to read and discuss spiritual classics. His experience of Nazi Germany thus remained consequential after the journey: it altered how he understood privilege and helped redirect his religious life toward relationships and shared study.

Occupation, persecution, and displacement

The German occupation of Paris brings the Nazi era into Weil’s personal history. After the occupation, the Weil family moved to Marseille. In 1940, the state teaching service officially dismissed her under the Vichy anti-Jewish laws. These events placed political persecution and displacement alongside the mystical experiences that were intensifying in her life; the book does not treat her spiritual development as separate from the conditions that had made her a refugee from occupied France.

In Marseille, Weil met Father J. M. Perrin, with whom she formed a deep friendship. He became her spiritual director and eventually sent her to Gustave Thibon, a lay theologian who ran a Catholic agricultural colony in southern France. Thibon initially doubted that an intellectual, especially a philosophy graduate, could sustain prolonged manual work. Perrin insisted, while Thibon’s sympathy for persecuted Jews helped bring him to accept Weil. The sequence shows how displacement led her into new relationships and a setting organized around agricultural work, with Perrin’s intervention and Thibon’s changing response shaping her passage into that community.

The book later recounts the family’s departure for the United States on May 17, 1942. Weil found American life too secure to bear while people in France suffered under Nazism and war. Her daily attendance at Mass in New York stood beside that distress, rather than resolving it. Across Kelly’s journey and Weil’s displacement, the Nazi era is therefore registered through a contrast between safety and danger, and through the difficulty of remaining spiritually attentive to people suffering elsewhere.