After two years at the Bodelschwingschen Institute at Bielefeld he received his doctorate from Bonn University in 1908 for a piece of work on Calvin's later doctrine of repentance.
[4] His habilitation, also from Bonn, followed just two years later, and by 1910[4] Hermann Strathmann appeared well set for a career in the church or as a theological scholar.
He was particularly drawn by the ideas of a Protestant version of the old "Holy Roman Empire" advocated by Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) who at this time was something of a role model for Strathmann.
[6] In 1919 Strathmann was elected to the first Bavarian regional legislature (Landtag), representing the electoral district that covered Erlangen, Fürth and Nuremberg.
("Nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung"), gone public with his opinion that the racial views of National Socialism were incompatible with Christian belief because it seemed to promoted (some) human beings to the status of gods (Kreaturvergötterung),[10] an opinion which in his paper he supported with quotations from Adolf Hitler's infamous autobiographical publication, Mein Kampf.
He became responsible in July 1935 for the publication "Theologische Blätter", in which he provided substantial content under the editorial heading "Science and Life" ("Aus Wissenschaft und Leben")[12] He also provided editorial input to the "Fränkischer Kurier", which brought him into conflict with the newspaper's managing editor, Julius Streicher as a result of which Strathmann resigned from the Kurier in 1939.
After the war Strathmann became embroiled in a controversy with an academic colleague from their time together at Erlangen, Hermann Sasse, over the extent to which they had sat back and accepted Nazism.
In 1945 Strathmann described himself as "one of the very few men who did not howl with the wolves and ... the only man in the whole university who, as long as it was possible, actively opposed the Nazis by the spoken and printed word.
[15] Not withstanding some denominational dilution caused by the arrival of refugees driven out by ethnic cleansing in parts of Poland and Russia east of the Oder-Neisse line which had been part of Germany before 1945, Hermann Strathmann remained member of a Protestant minority within an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Bavarian state.
Neither of them had been ineligible as candidates under the 1946 Law to Liberate from Nazism and Militarism" ("Gesetz zur Befreiung von Nationalsozialismus und Militarismus").
The party's decision to withdraw his Landtag mandate resonated strongly across Bavaria and more widely across Germany because Strathmann was the leading representative of Protestantism within the overwhelmingly Catholic CSU, and the party's treatment of him came to symbolise the disadvantaged status of Protestantism within the Bavarian political establishment.
Strathmann defended his position robustly, launching a case against the party leadership with the Bavarian Constitutional Court.
[18] The incident was reported as powerful evidence that Catholic tribal sectarianism was alive and kicking at the heart of the Bavarian political establishment.