Nick Baines on Karl Barth

Today, apart from taking time to start on Rowan Williams’s excellent and demanding Faith in the Public Square, I met an academic friend at the University of Basel and then we went to visit Karl Barth’s house and archive. Barth’s house is not marked in any way and I wouldn’t have found it by myself. The archivist, Dr Peter Zocher, was very welcoming – and is clearly an expert on the great man. I know this is really cringy, but I found it moving to hold in my hand Karl Barth’s copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and read the margin notes, underlinings, question marks and exclamation marks he had written in pencil. Having replaced that, Peter then opened up a document file and showed me the original handwritten draft of the Barmen Declaration of 1934 – probably one of the most important political and theological documents of the twentieth century.