Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window

Reči srpskom narodu kroz tamnički prozor — “Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window” — is the wartime text at the center of the antisemitism controversy. Traditionally presented as written by Nikolai during his 1944 imprisonment, it was first published only in 1985, three decades after his death, and both its authorship and its integrity are contested. This file sets out what the text says and the dispute over what it is, before the charge itself is weighed in the companion file.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

What the Text Is Said To Be

Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window is presented, in its own framing and in the usual accounts, as a work Nikolai composed during his wartime imprisonment in 1944 — the “dungeon window” of the title being the window of his captivity (see Arrest and Vojlovica and Imprisonment in Dachau). It takes the form of a series of addresses to the Serbian people, cast as the reflections of an imprisoned bishop meditating, from within the catastrophe of the Second World War, on the spiritual meaning of the disaster that had befallen Serbia and Europe.

Its governing argument is a theological reading of the war as divine judgment on a Europe that had abandoned God. Nikolai (or the text under his name) interprets the calamity not primarily in political or military terms but as the consequence of Europe’s — and Serbia’s own — apostasy from Christ: the war is the harvest of secularism, materialism, and godlessness, and the remedy is repentance and return to the faith of the fathers (Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, CEU Press, 2008, on the text’s central thesis that the war expressed judgment on “godless Europe”). This diagnosis is continuous with a theme that runs throughout Nikolai’s mature work (see Sin, Suffering, and Providence); what makes Words explosive is the way, at certain points, it identifies the agents of Europe’s de-Christianization — and among them, the Jews.

What the Text Says About the Jews

Certain passages of Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window are the most incriminating in the whole Velimirović corpus, and they must be quoted rather than paraphrased. Among the passages critics cite:

that the Jews showed themselves “worse enemies of God than the godless Pilate” and that “the Devil taught them through the centuries how to fight against the sons of Christ” (quoted in “Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Charges of Anti-Semitism,” East-West Church Report; Byford, Denial and Repression, 2008);
that “all modern ideas” — enumerated as democracy, strikes, socialism, atheism, tolerance of all religions, pacifism, revolution, communism, and the like — “are the inventions of Jews, or rather their father, the Devil” (quoted in East-West Church Report; Byford, Denial and Repression, 2008).

These passages weld a conspiratorial account of modernity (the “modern ideas” as a single hostile program) to a theological demonization of the Jews (as instruments of the Devil and “enemies of God”). They are the core of the case against the text, and their presence in a work circulating under Nikolai’s name is not in dispute; what is disputed is whether, and in what form, Nikolai wrote them — the question the rest of this file addresses. The full weighing of the charge, with the critics and the defenders each in their strongest form, is the subject of the companion file (see The Charge of Antisemitism).

When and How the Text Reached the Public: The Publication Problem

Here the account grows genuinely complicated, and the complication is central to the whole controversy. Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window was not published in Nikolai’s lifetime. He died in 1956 (see Repose at South Canaan); the book first appeared in print only in 1985 — some three decades after his death — issued in West Germany (Himmelsthür), in the Serbian émigré/diaspora milieu, with the editor asserting that Nikolai had written the text during his Dachau imprisonment (Srećko Petrović, “Is Nicholai Velimirovich the Author of the Book Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window?” Philotheos 20, no. 2 [2020]: 260–303; “Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia, on the 1985 West German publication and the disputed origin).

This publication history is the crux. A text that decisively shaped Nikolai’s later image — his public reputation, as scholars note, “changed significantly” after the posthumous appearance of Words — reached the public only long after he could confirm, deny, or revise it, and only through an editorial process whose relation to any autograph manuscript is not transparent (Byford, Denial and Repression, 2008, on the transformation of Nikolai’s image by the posthumous writings; Petrović, “Is Nicholai Velimirovich the Author,” 2020).

Disputed: Authorship and Integrity

[Disputed: whether *Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window* is authentically and integrally the work of Nikolai Velimirović, and in particular whether the most inflammatory antisemitic passages are his. (a) The critical/skeptical-of-defenses view — held by the scholars who treat the antisemitism as genuinely Nikolai's — is that the text is consistent in theme and idiom with Nikolai's other, securely attributed writings and speeches of the 1930s and 1940s (the 1927 sermon, the 1935 "Nationalism of St. Sava" address, etc.), so that its argument about Jews and modernity cannot be quarantined as a later forgery; on this view the text belongs to Nikolai's authentic corpus and the antisemitism is his (Jovan Byford, *Denial and Repression of Antisemitism*, CEU Press, 2008). (b) The textual-critical/defending view — argued at length by Srećko Petrović, "Is Nicholai Velimirovich the Author of the Book *Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window*?" *Philotheos* 20.2 (2020): 260–303 — raises serious questions about the authenticity and integrity of the 1985 text: the absence of publication in Nikolai's lifetime, the uncertain relation of the printed book to any autograph, the possibility of posthumous editing, compilation, or interpolation, and the thirty-year gap and diaspora provenance. Petrović does not simply assert Nikolai wrote none of it; he argues that the book's authenticity and textual integrity are not established and cannot be treated as settled. This collection reports the dispute and does not resolve it: the text exists and circulates under Nikolai's name; whether the whole of it, including the worst passages, is his in the form printed in 1985 is genuinely contested in the scholarly literature.]

Two disciplined observations follow. First, the authorship question cannot by itself dissolve the antisemitism charge, because the incriminating strand is not confined to this one contested text: Nikolai’s securely attributed 1927 sermon and 1935 speech contain related material (see The Charge of Antisemitism), so even a maximal skepticism about Words would leave the larger question standing. Second, and conversely, the authorship question is not idle special pleading either: a thirty-year posthumous gap, a diaspora publication, and an untransparent relation to any manuscript are exactly the conditions under which a critical scholar of any figure would demand caution before treating a text as verbatim and integral. Both points are true at once, and holding them together — the charge does not stand or fall with this text, and this text’s integrity is genuinely uncertain — is the honest position.

References

Petrović, Srećko M. “Is Nicholai Velimirovich the Author of the Book Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window?” Philotheos 20, no. 2 (2020): 260–303. (The textual-critical case: the 1985 Himmelsthür/West German publication three decades after Nikolai’s death; the questions of authenticity, integrity, editing, and interpolation.)
Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The text’s thesis of the war as judgment on “godless Europe”; the incriminating passages; the transformation of Nikolai’s image by the posthumous writings; the case that the antisemitism is continuous with his attested corpus.)
“Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Charges of Anti-Semitism.” East-West Church Report. eastwestreport.org. (The quoted passages: Jews as “worse enemies of God than the godless Pilate”; “all modern ideas … are the inventions of Jews, or rather their father, the Devil.”)
“Nikolaj Velimirović.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The 1985 West German publication and the disputed origin of the text; used to locate these facts.)