Review Article From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic

Transcrição

Review Article
From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic
Society in Recent Historiography*
Oded Heilbronner
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“Catholic history professors are and remain a monstrosity.”1
After 1866, the work of German Catholic historians was thrust aside by the Protestant-Prussian version of history, which became dominant in nineteenth- and
* I would like to thank Margaret L. Anderson for her critical response to an earlier draft of
this article. Reviewed here are: David Blackbourn, The Marpingen Visions: Rationalism, Religion
and the Rise of Modern Germany (London: Fontana Press, HarperCollins, 1995), pp. xviⳭ463;
Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, eds., Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten-Krisen (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1996), pp. 542, DM 148 (paper); Eleonore Föhles, Kulturkampf und katholisches Milieu 1866–1890 in den niederrheinischen Kreisen Kempen und Geldern
und der Stadt Viersen (Viersen: Kreis Viersen, 1995), pp. 450, DM 48; Erwin Gatz, ed., Geschichte
des kirchlichen Lebens in den deutschsprachigen Ländern seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,
vol. 4, Der Diözesanklerus (Freiburg: Herder, 1995), pp. 453, DM 98; Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, Klerus und abweichendes Verhalten: Zur Sozialgeschichte katholischer Priester im 19.
Jahrhundert: Die Erzdiözese Freiburg (Göttingen: Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft,
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 503, DM 78; Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, ed., Wunderbare
Erscheinungen: Frauen und katholische Frömmigkeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: F.
Schöningh, 1995), pp. 254, DM 51; Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, ed., Frauen unter dem Patriarcht der Kirchen: Katholikinnen und Protestantinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1995), pp. 216, DM 44.80; Winfrid Halder, Katholische Vereine in Baden und
Württemberg, 1848–1914 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1995), pp. xxixⳭ409, DM 84; Jürgen Herres, Städtische Gesellschaft und katholische Vereine im Rheinland, 1840–1870 (Essen: Klartext,
1996), pp. 977, DM 68; Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Prerevolutionary Baden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. xⳭ252, $49.50
(cloth), $16.95 (paper); Wilfried Loth, ed., Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1991), pp. 284, DM 49; Christoph Kösters, Katholische Verbände und
moderne Gesellschaft: Organisationsgeschichte und Vereinskultur im Bistum Münster, 1918–1945
(Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1996), pp. 684, DM 104; Thomas Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland, 1790–1914, Bürgertum Beiträge zur europäischen
Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 9 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. xivⳭ460, DM
112; Wolfgang Schieder, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1993), pp. 280, DM 118; Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung: Die katholische Stadt—Köln, Aachen, Münster, 1700–1840 (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1995), pp. 497,
DM 118; Ute Schneider, Politische Festkultur im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Rheinprovinz von der
französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1806–1918 (Essen: Klartext, 1995), pp.
376, DM 88; Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. xiiiⳭ271;
Christoph Weber, “Eine starke enggeschlossene Phalanx”: Der politische Katholizismus und die
[The Journal of Modern History 72 (June 2000): 453–495]
䉷 2000 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2000/7202-0005$02.00
All rights reserved.
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Heilbronner
twentieth-century German historiography.2 As in the case of Jewish academics,
prejudice played a part here, as we can see from Friedrich Meinecke’s remark
quoted above. Both prejudices have lasted well into the present decade, and in
view of Protestant-Prussian cultural hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, one can say that Catholic historians have been trapped in what might be
called a historiographical ghetto. In this article I would like to offer some thoughts
concerning the marginal position of the historiography of nineteenth-century German Catholicism in the light of some new works on this topic.
I
Max Weber’s attitude toward Catholic society and his dismissal of its role in Germany from the middle of the nineteenth century onward have influenced many
scholars dealing with the social, domestic background to politics. Hans U. Wehler,
Jürgen Kocka, Heinrich A. Winkler, and Wolfgang Mommsen, to name only a few
of the pioneering figures of the sociocritical school of thought that arose in Germany during the 1960s, were deeply influenced by Max Weber and the ideas about
Imperial Germany he developed toward the end of the nineteenth century. Thus,
it came about that in the modernization theory so central to the thought of Wehler,
Kocka, and others, no room was found for such a marginal social group as the
German Catholics. The Catholic population did not fit easily into their premodern
versus modern dichotomy nor into the bourgeois versus proletarian model. They
were perceived as a fossilized anachronism, manifesting socioeconomic and cultural patterns that presented a stark contrast to the Second Reich with its dynamics
of modernization, industrialization, and capitalism.3
erste deutsche Reichstagswahl 1871 (Essen: Klartext, 1992), pp. 162; Siegfried Weichlein, Sozialmilieus und politische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, Lebenswelt, Vereinskultur, Politik in
Hessen, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1996), pp. 407, DM 98.
1
Cited in Ludwig Dehio, ed., Friedrich Meinecke Werke, vol. 4, Ausgewählter Briefwechsel
(Stuttgart, 1962), p. 25.
2
For an excellent discussion of the role of Catholic historians in the nineteenth century, the
Protestant historians’ attitude toward them, and their relationships after 1945, see Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz, 1992), pp. 24–35,
125–36, 208; Roland Engelhart, “Wir schlugen unter Kämpfen und Opfern dem Neuen Bresche”:
Philip Funk (1884–1937) Leben und Werk (Frankfurt, 1996), pp. 190–96; Helmut W. Smith,
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton,
N.J., 1995), pp. 61–68; Bernhard Giesen, Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a
German Axial Age (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 137–38; Holger Th. Gräf, “Reich, Nation und Kirche
in der Gross- und kleindeutschen Historiographie,” Historisches Jahrbuch 2 (1996): 367–94;
Matthias Klug, Rückwendung zum Mittelalter? Geschichtsbilder und historische Argumentation
im politischen Katholizismus des Vormärz (Paderborn, 1995), pp. 16–18; Guy Marchal, “Zwischen
‘Geschichtsbaumeistern’ und ‘Römlingen’: Katholische Historiker und die Nationalgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland und in der Schweiz,” in Krisenwahrnehmungen in fin-de-siècle: Jüdische und katholische Bildungseliten in Deutschland und der Schweiz, ed. Michael Graetz and
A. Mattioli (Zurich, 1997), pp. 177–210; Kevin Cramer, “The Lamentations of Germany: The
Historiography of the Thirty Years War, 1815–1890” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1998), pp.
25–31.
3
Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
Historiography of German Catholic Society
455
Nor was it only Max Weber whose influence gave the German Catholics and
Catholic historians such a marginal position in historical investigation. Both Catholic and Protestant scholars have tended since the close of the nineteenth century
to write off Catholic society as backward and underdeveloped, with preindustrial
behavior patterns. Catholic backwardness in all areas of human endeavor—economics, commerce, culture, scholarship, the civil service, and the army—has become a byword in studies written from the Wilhelmine period up to the last decade.4
Meinecke’s remark about Catholic historians quoted above reflected a common
belief among German scholars.5
Until the last two decades, research concerning German Catholicism was carried
out mainly by a group of German Catholic scholars who might aptly be described
as the German Catholic research establishment. The productions of this group,
centered chiefly in research institutes such as the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte
and published by houses such as those of F. Schöningh and M. Grünewald, were
characterized (except in the case of some of the earlier works of Christoph Weber,
Josef Becker, and Rudolf Morsey) by the lack of any critical approach to German
Catholicism, especially in the twentieth century. Their investigations failed, as they
still do, to make any use of the sociopolitical and sociocultural research methods
so important for the identification and study of social groups such as the bourgeoisie or the workers, or for the study of everyday life among Catholic families
and other social and cultural phenomena.6
1996), p. 74; Roger Fletcher, “Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and Its Critics,” German Studies Review 3 (1986): 460 ff.; Gerhard A. Ritter, “Neuere
Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik,” in Sozialgeschichte im Internationalen überblick, ed.
Jürgen Kocka (Darmstadt, 1989), pp. 44 ff; Richard J. Evans, Rethinking German History (London, 1987), p. 35; for Weber’s influence on Wehler, see: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Max Webers
Klassentheorie und die neuere Sozialgeschichte,” in Aus der Geschichte lernen? ed. Hans-Ulrich
Wehler (München, 1988), pp. 152–60. For critical literature on this “Weberian-Bielefeldian
school,” see Margaret L. Anderson, “Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the
New Franchise in Imperial Germany,” American Historical Review 5 (December 1993): 1448–
74; Margaret L. Anderson and K. Barkin, “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of
the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany,” Journal of
Modern History 54 (1982): 647–86.
4
Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte
Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, ed. Max Weber (Tübingen, 1988), vol. 1; Hartmut Lehmann and
Gunther Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge, 1993);
Weber’s negative approach had a deep influence on contemporary researchers investigating the
backwardness of Catholicism in the Second Reich; see Hans Rost, Die wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Lage der deutschen Katholiken (Köln, 1911).
5
For one example, see Hans-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, 1700–1815
(München, 1987), p. 270.
6
Wolfgang Schieder, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1993), p.
12; for some representative historians in the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, see Rudolf Lill, “Der
deutsche Katholizismus in der neueren historischen Forschung,” in Der deutsche Katholizismus
in der Zeitgeschichtlichen Forschung, ed. Ulrich Hell and Konrad Repgen (Mainz, 1988), pp. 41–
64. See Winfried Becker’s attack on social history methods in his “Christliche Parteien und
Strömungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Historisches Jahrbuch 2, no. 114 (1994): 461–63; for
some suggestions for new directions in Catholic historiography, see Ulrich von Hehl, “Umgang
mit katholischer Zeitgeschichte: Ergebnisse, Erfahrungen, Aufgaben,” in Staat und Parteien: Festschrift für Rudolf Morsey zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher et al. (Berlin, 1992), pp.
456
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Pioneering studies on the social aspects of Catholic society and culture did exist,
but most of them were written by scholars who were neither Catholics nor workers
in the ghetto of the Catholic establishment in Germany. The research on the Catholic bourgeoisie is a good example: this burning question in contemporary German
historiography was dealt with exclusively by Protestant historians, who naturally
laid the emphasis on the Protestant Bürgertum and its cultural hegemony in small
Germany (Germany without Austria). True, there have been some exceptional
studies in the historiography of the middle classes. Thomas Mergel has recently
published his social history of the Catholic bourgeoisie in Cologne and Bonn. Hans
J. Henning—although he had very little to say about religious confessions—had
already in the 1970s contributed to our understanding of the Bildungsbürgertum
and the civil service (many of whose members were Catholics) in the Rhineland
and Westphalia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dieter Schott and Gert
Zang have extended our knowledge of the Catholic bourgeoisie in the Constance
area, and recently (as we shall see) Rudolf Schlögl has studied the bourgeoisie of
Münster, Cologne, and Aachen. Yet, apart from these studies, no attempt was made
before the past ten years, either by the sociocritical historians or by the historians
of the Catholic establishment, to examine Catholic social groups and modes of
thought.7
The past few years, however, have seen the rise of a group of German and
Anglo-American scholars who utilize socioeconomic and cultural methods for a
critical study of the Catholic milieu that evolved in nineteenth-century Germany.
Some of their works will be discussed here. The starting point for all these scholars
is the backwardness of Catholic society, not only in the economic, social, and
political life of the Second Reich but also in its contribution to the historiography
concerning that period. Their goal, as it were, is to let German Catholicism out of
the prison of its historiographical ghetto—a new trend that has been especially
marked among the scholars of the German sociocritical school. These scholars—
most ably represented in Germany by Werner Blessing, Olaf Blaschke, Erwin Gatz,
Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, Jürgen Herres, Wilfried Loth, Michael Klöcker,
386–87; some outstanding studies by C. Weber, J. Becker, and R. Morsey, see Christoph Weber,
Kirchliche Politik zwischen Rom, Berlin und Trier, 1876–1888 (Mainz, 1970); Josef Becker, Liberaler Staat und Kirche in der Ära von Reichsgründung und Kulturkampf (Mainz, 1973); Rudolf
Morsey, “Die deutschen Katholiken und der Nationalstaat zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem
Weltkrieg,” Historisches Jahrbuch 90 (1970): 31–64; see also a debate between the author of this
article and Rudolf Morsey on Catholic historiography in the twentieth century and the roll of
Catholic historians during the Third Reich. Oded Heilbronner, “Katholische Vision des Reiches
unterm Nationalsozialismus,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 25 (1996): 219–32;
Rudolf Morsey, “Görres-Gesellschaft, Historisches Jahrbuch und Nationalsozialismus: Eine notwendige Richtigstellung,” Historisches Jahrbuch 117 (1997): 220–29; Oded Heilbronner, “Katholische Historiker im Dritten Reich: Erwiderung auf Rudolf Morsey,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für
Deutsche Geschichte 27 (1998): 529–37.
7
Thomas Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland,
1794–1914 (Göttingen, 1994); Hansjoachim Henning, Das Westdeutsche Bürgertum in der Epoche der Hochindustrialisierung, 1860–1914, pt. 1: Das Bildungsbürgertum in den Preußischen
Westprovinzen (Wiesbaden, 1972); Gert Zang, ed., Provinzialisierung einer Region: Zur Entstehung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in der Provinz (Frankfurt am Main, 1978); Dieter Schott, Die
Konstanzer Gesellschaft, 1918–1924: Der Kampf um Hegemonie (Konstanz, 1989).
457
Mergel, Josef Mooser, Rudolf Schlögl, and Christoph Weber, and in the United
States by Margaret L. Anderson, David Blackbourn, Ronald Ross, Helmut W.
Smith, and Jonathan Sperber—are fully alert to the historiographical problem concerning the Catholic bourgeoisie.8 My argument here is that, although these scholars have succeeded in freeing the historiography of Catholic society from its traditional methodological ghetto, the picture that emerges from their studies is
nevertheless that of a society which, until the end of the nineteenth century at least,
lived in a mental and sociocultural ghetto.9 The following analysis will examine
some of the above-mentioned scholars’ new studies as well as others in support
of my “ghetto-to-ghetto” argument.
II
The Catholic milieu provides the starting point for those scholars of German Catholicism who began producing critical studies during the last decade. The use of
8
Their studies will be discussed below. See the list at the beginning of the article. For other
studies by the same scholars, see Wilfried Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich: Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984), “Soziale Bewegungen im Katholizismus des Kaiserreiches,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3 (1991): 279–310; Werner
Blessing, “ ‘Kirchenfromm—Volksfromm—Weltfromm’: Religiosität im katholischen Bayern,”
in Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne, ed. W. Loth (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 95–123,
Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft: Institutionelle Autorität und mentaler Wandel in Bayern
während des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1982); Josef Mooser, “Volk, Arbeiter und Bürger in
der katholischen öffentlichkeit des Kaiserreich,” in Bürger in der Gesellschaft der Neuzeit, ed.
Hans Puhle (Göttingen, 1991), pp. 259–73, and “ ‘Christlicher Beruf’ und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’: Zur Auseinandersetzung über Berufsethik und wirtschaftliche Inferiorität im Katholizismus um 1900,” in Loth, ed.; Michael Klöcker, “Katholizismus und Bildungsbürgertum: Hinweise
zur Erforschung vernachlässigter Bereiche der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert,”
in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Teil II, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1990), pp.
117–38; for an important study of C. Weber see his Kirchliche Politik; Jonathan Sperber, Popular
Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1984); David Blackbourn, Class,
Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg before
1914 (London, 1980), and Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London,
1987), chap. 3; Margaret L. Anderson, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981), “Piety
and Politics: Recent Works on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 681–
717, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century
Germany,” Historical Journal 38, no. 3 (1995): 647–70, “The Kulturkampf and the Course of
German History,” Central European History 19 (1986): 82–115, and “The Zentrumsstreit and the
Dilemma of Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Central European History 4 (1988): 350–78;
Ronald Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial
Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, D.C., 1997).
9
I am using the word ghetto to describe ethnic, racial, and religious groups that were forced
to, or voluntarily agreed to, live in a state of cultural and social segregation. See “Ghetto” in Peter
Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History (New York, 1994), pp. 305–7. Using the word ghetto
was already common in the 1950s; see, e.g., R. Grösche, “Der geschichtliche Weg des deutschen
Katholizismus aus dem Ghetto,” in Der Weg aus dem Ghetto, ed. R. Grösche (Köln, 1955); see
also James Hunt, “Between the Ghetto and the Nation: Catholics in the Weimar Republic,” in
Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic Collapse of the Weimar Republic, ed. M.
Dobkowski and I. Wallimann (London, 1983), pp. 213–26; Hugh McLeod, “Building the ‘Catholic Ghetto’: Catholic Organisations, 1870–1914,” in Voluntary Religion, ed. W. J. Sheils et al.,
Studies in Church History, vol. 23 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 411–44.
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the term milieu is characteristic of these scholars and serves as the basis for their
critical conclusions. Siegfried Weichlein, Blaschke, Frank-Michael Kuhlemann,
and Mooser, however, have attempted to offer some fresh definitions of the milieu
concept that place greater stress on its cultural dimensions. Weichlein has done so
by studying the bishopric of Fulda and Mooser the bishopric of Paderborn, treating
the patterns of cultural, social, economic, and political behavior that prevailed
among the German Catholics in these mainly agrarian regions of Germany as the
model of the Catholic milieu. These were patterns that bore the definitive imprint
of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Center Party, and the Catholic workers’ unions
and Vereine.10 Mooser, Weichlein, Blaschke, and Kuhlemann argue that the Catholic milieu contributed to popular piety among large sections of the society, chiefly
as a result of institutional and personal initiatives on the part of the local priest,
who organized and led the local rites; the local Catholic club (Vereine); and the
Catholic missions. Conversely, Mooser suggests that the basis for the Catholic
milieu was popular piety—a piety that was spasmodic in the second half of the
nineteenth century and represented a sort of challenge to the local Catholic authority and institutions.11 According to Weichlein (p. 161), as late as the Weimar
Republic—a period of “classic modernity” (Detlev Peukert)—popular religion
was still one of the main pillars of the Catholic milieu in North Hessen. Thus, it
appears that both official and popular religion contributed to the establishment and
consolidation of the Catholic milieu.
In contrast, I argue that, by overconcentrating on this milieu, German historians
have forgotten the activities of a Catholic population that existed on the fringes of
the Catholic milieu or even beyond and have lost sight of the fact that there were
Catholic milieus utterly different from the one portrayed by these scholars. Blaschke and Kuhlemann argue in favor of several different milieus of diverse character,
not only religious but also political, social, and economic (p. 27). They distinguish
between “micromilieus”—local (usually village) societies with their specific habits, traditions, and institutions (family, neighborhood, friends); “mesomilieus”—
large areas (the Catholic regions of Upper-Lower Bavaria, the Protestant districts
of Upper Franconia) where a specific religious identity reflected local religious
habits and institutions (Catholic workers’ Vereine); and, finally, the “macro10
Josef Mooser, “Das katholische Vereinswesen in der Diözese Paderborn um 1900,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 141 (1991), pp. 447–61, “Das katholische Milieu in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft: Zum Vereinswesen des Katholizismus im späten Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Religion im
Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten, Krisen, ed. Olaf Blaschke and Frank-M. Kuhlemann (Gütersloh, 1996), pp. 59–92, “Katholische Volksreligion, Klerus und Bürgertum in der zweiten Hälfte
des 19. Jahrhunderts: Thesen,” in Schieder, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft, pp. 144–46; Siegfried
Weichlein, “Konfession und Region: Katholische Milieubilding am Beispiel Fuldas,” in Blaschke
and Kuhlemann, eds., Religion im Kaiserreich, pp. 193–232; see also the brilliant analysis in
Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Münster, “Katholiken zwischen Tradition und Moderne:
Das katholische Milieu als Forschungsaufgabe,” in Westfälische Forschungen 43 (1993): 588–
654; Michael Klöcker, “Das katholische Milieu: Grundüberlegungen—In besonderer Hinsicht auf
das Deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 44 (1992):
241–62; Wilfried Loth, “Integration und Erosion: Wandlungen des katholischen Milieus,” in Loth,
ed., Deutscher Katholizismus, pp. 266–81, and “Soziale Bewegungen.”
11
Mooser, “Katholische Volksreligion,” pp. 154–56.
459
milieu”—that of the whole of German Catholic society (pp. 47–48). All three
milieus are either closely or loosely related to the church. In Blaschke and Kuhlemann’s thesis, however, another important Catholic milieu is missing: not only
were there many Catholics whose connection with the Catholic milieu was due to
some isolated factor, but in addition there were many others who did not even
bother to establish this connection. This means that many Catholics lived in a
milieu or milieus that represented different Catholic codes. Mergel’s, Schlögl’s,
and Weber’s studies are the best representations of such Catholics, most of them
middle-class bourgeois of the first half of the nineteenth century (e.g., Schlögl’s
and Mergel’s Catholics in the Rhineland) and of the initial years of the Kulturkampf
(C. Weber). In their work, the gap between those within the “walls” of the Catholic
ghetto and those outside is brought out clearly.12
Another factor involved in discussion of the milieu, especially as conceived by
Blaschke and Kuhlemann, is the cultural element. The factor of culture is paramount to understanding the Catholic milieu in several studies, such as those of
Helmut W. Smith, Mergel, Schlögl, and Blackbourn. By culture they mean the
totality of values, beliefs, modes of thought, and lifestyles common to a group of
people living in a given area. The region, the mesomilieu, is of crucial importance
here. Obviously, different regions will display diverging behavioral patterns in
accordance with the cultural variables of these regions. The Rhenish Bürgertum
of Mergel and Schlögl represents a mesomilieu that crystallized over a period of
time: according to Schlögl, a large stratum of the Catholic middle class already
existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Münster, Cologne, and Aachen. Their unique mesomilieu was represented by their cultural habits, particularly
in the sphere of learning: reading, library activities, and disputes with the priests
over cultural hegemony. The secularization process was the chief basis of their
milieu, which stands in sharp contrast to the ultramontane milieu that came into
being in the cities of the Rhineland in the 1830s.13 Through an analysis of thousands of bourgeois library catalogs, obituaries (Totenzettel), and testaments,
Schlögl argues convincingly in favor of the existence of a Catholic-bourgeois mesomilieu at least until the 1840s. In this Catholic-bourgeois mesomilieu, religion
became a problematic issue for many members of the bourgeoisie. Mergel indicates
certain later periods as crucial for the creation of the Catholic mesomilieu: the
1850s and 1860s, which saw the emergence of an antiultramontane bourgeois
milieu, and the period of the Kulturkampf and the economic depression that de12
In addition to Schlögl, Mergel, and C. Weber, some important studies have appeared in recent
years which give us a better insight into the life of those who “left the walls”; see, e.g., Oded
Heilbronner, “In Search of the Catholic (Rural) Bourgeoisie,” Central European History 29, no.
2 (1996): 176–201; Ralf Zerback, Stadt und Bürgertum in München (München, 1997); Ralf Roth,
“Katholisches Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main, 1800–1914: Zwischen Emanzipation und Kulturkampf,” Archiv für Geschichte Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 46 (1994): 207–46.
13
Here it is important to cite two studies that give a different periodization of the development
of the ultramontane milieu in the Rheinland. Sperber, in his Popular Catholicism, sees the 1860s
as the crucial period; Anderson, “Piety and Politics,” and Simon Hyde, “Roman Catholicism and
the Prussian State in the Early 1850s,” Central European History 24 (1991): 95–121, see the
1840s and the 1850s as critical.
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stroyed the semimonolithic anticlerical image of the Rhenish urban Catholic bourgeoisie. Mergel is at his best when describing a crucial element of the Rhenish
bourgeois milieu neglected by Schlögl: the Spagat (splits) performed by members
of the local bourgeoisie, who had one leg in the liberal-secular bourgeois world
and the other in the Roman Catholic church (p. 144). This situation forced many
Catholics during the Kulturkampf to choose one of three different worldviews: (1)
proliberal and radically antiultramontane; (2) proliberal within the walls of the
ultramontane ghetto; (3) liberal bourgeois but without entirely abandoning Catholicism.14
Mergel and Schlögl (in their studies on the Rhineland) and Dagmar Herzog (as
we will see later in the case of Baden) have through cultural analysis increased
our understanding of the reasons why class and religion played such an important
role in the form of daily life in certain areas and a lesser role in others. Their work
is based on the assumption that cultural variables establish and mold the infrastructure of local society. Cultural hegemony greatly influences the value system and
mode of thought in any given area, together with social, economic, and political
behavioral patterns. Of great importance for this argument are the local notables:
the local Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland (Mergel, Schlögl) and the liberals
in Baden (Herzog). This group was able to determine the local norms of behavior,
values, beliefs, and modes of thought and could even wield an influence over local
electoral patterns. Obviously, this stratum was always engaged in a struggle with
other groups for local cultural hegemony (and hence for economic or political
hegemony)—in the cases we are studying, a struggle with the conservative Catholics or ultramontanes. Although this Gramscian term traditionally envisages the
local bourgeoisie as the main contenders for this position, some new studies point
to other local notables as candidates for hegemony: the Catholic priests and the
educated local leaders of opinion (Meinungsführer), that is, the local poets, writers,
and folklorists, all of whom were Catholics and supporters of the ultramontane
orientation of the church. Here, Smith’s impressive study can contribute to our
discussion.
Although the main topics of Smith’s study are nationalism and religion and the
connection between them and the way religious conflicts were developed and exploited in the process of nation building, his discussion in the first chapters of his
book of popular culture within the Catholic mesomilieu is as good as anything I
know on the subject. At the local level, Smith argues, popular Catholic culture
deepened the gap between Catholics and Protestants. In south and west Germany,
where Smith made his findings, anti-Protestant Catholic cultural sentiments centered on local cultural phenomena such as saints, customs, religious books, almanacs, and penny pamphlets. “For this Catholic audience, the words in bold print
evoked a whole series of social, cultural and political associations: all of them
negative, all of them directed against Protestants” (p. 72). Although Smith does
not enter into a discussion on the concept of the milieu, his arguments concerning
14
In addition see also Thomas Mergel, “Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political
Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German Catholic Bürgertum, 1848–1914,” Central European History 29 (1996): 151–75.
461
Catholic popular culture support the hypothesis of a Catholic ghetto existing in
southern and western Germany toward the end of the nineteenth century. Later in
this article I trace the origins of the Catholic ghetto and the liberal hegemony in
Herzog’s south Germany. This ghetto was dominated chiefly by “Catholic popular
culture . . . which stood in contrast to the Protestant high culture which had become
largely synonymous with German national culture” (p. 85).15
From Smith’s study, the conclusion is unavoidable that, toward the end of the
century, the Catholic popular printed culture created a kind of cultural ghetto.
Although one should not always connect religion with backwardness (and, as an
Israeli, I find it hard to avoid this association in view of the present situation in
Israel), one gains the impression from Smith’s findings on southern Germany that
this ghetto was a backward one where saints, superstitions, and anti-Protestant
hatred played a major role (p. 86). His discussion on the role of the local parish
priests supports the idea of the backwardness of German Catholic society.16 According to Smith, the parish priest was the most influential notable in the Catholic
micromilieu. In remote and underdeveloped villages, where most Catholics lived
until the turn of the century, the priest was responsible for building the ghetto walls
by controlling the religious life of the congregation and by restraining the desire
to “leave the tower” (or the fortress, in the words of the famous Zentrumsstreit of
the year before the First World War).17 In short, it was impossible to build a Catholic macromilieu without such clerical activity.
15
I was not able to consult the recently published study by Norbert Busch that deals with
Catholic popular culture and beliefs. See his Katholische Frömmigkeit und Moderne: Die Sozialund Mentalitätsgeschichte des Herz-Jesu-Kultes in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem
Weltkrieg (Gütersloh, 1997). For further discussion on Catholic popular culture, see Helmut W.
Smith, “The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the
Kaiserreich,” Central European History 27 (1994): 315–29; Michael Langer, Zwischen Vorurteil
und Aggression: Zum Judenbild in der deutschsprachigen katholischen Volksbildung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg, 1994); Olaf Blaschke, “Kontraste in der Katholizismusforschung: Das antisemitische Erbe des 19. Jahrhunderts und die Verantwortung der Katholiken,” Neue Politische
Literatur 3 (1995): 411–20, and Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich
(Göttingen, 1997).
16
Out of the vast literature on this topic some useful observations can be found in Martin
Offenbacher, Konfession und Soziale Schichtung: Eine Studie über die wirtschafltiche Lage der
Katholiken und Protestanten in Baden (Tübingen, 1908); Alfons Neher, Die wirtschaftliche und
soziale Lage der Katholiken im westlichen Deutschland, vol. 1, Statistische und kulturpolitische
Untersuchung von Rheinland-Westfalen (Rottweil, 1927); Karin K.-Hanisch, “The Titled Businessman: Prussian Commercial Councellors in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the Nineteenth Century,” in German Bourgeoisie, ed. David Blackbourn and Richard Evans (London,
1992), pp. 101–2; Rudolf Boch, Grenzloses Wachstum? Das rheinische Wirtschaftsbürgertum und
seine Industrialisierungsdebatte, 1814–1857 (Göttingen, 1990), pp. 244–45; Werner Rösener,
“Das katholische Bildungsdefizit im deutschen Kaiserreich,” Historisches Jahrbuch 1, no. 112
(1992): 104–24. See the historiographical conclusion in Martin Baumeister, Parität und katholische Inferiorität: Untersuchungen zur Stellung des Katholizismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich
(Paderborn, 1987). For some critical suggestions, see Antonius Liedhegener, “Marktgesellschaft
und Milieu: Katholiken und katholische Regionen in der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung des
Deutschen Reichs, 1895–1914,” Historisches Jahrbuch 2, no. 113 (1993): 283–354.
17
I would like to thank Margaret L. Anderson for drawing my attention to the meaning of the
word Turm in this case as a “fortress” and not a “tower.” Many studies shed new light on the role
462
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A different picture of Catholic clerical activity emerges from Gatz’s Der Diözesanklerus.18 Gatz and other scholars, mainly from the theological seminaries attached to German universities, have been trying to exonerate the priests from
responsibility for the backwardness of the Catholic milieu. By tracing the development of the parishes from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century
to the first half of the twentieth century, Gatz shows the popularity of the priesthood
as a profession among many young Catholics (p. 37) and reveals the active role
played by the priests in modernizing the political behavior of their congregations
in the second half of the nineteenth century (pp. 121–22, 382–84). Gatz and his
colleagues stress the role of the theological seminaries in training large numbers
of priests in the second half of the nineteenth century not only to serve the pope
but also to act as “agents of modernity,” encouraging democratic modes of behavior. In the second part of the book, Gatz and other scholars examine different
aspects of priests’ lives in central Europe: daily life, priests as social politicians,
priests as journalists. Although Gatz’s book was published by Herder, the house
publisher to the Bishopric of Freiburg, which may account to some degree for its
lack of critical analysis, scholars who are interested in the everyday life of the
Catholic ghetto will find it a very important one.
Götz von Olenhusen’s priests from the diocese of Freiburg are another matter.
Their sexual hypocrisy and social intolerance play a major role in her account.
The Freiburg historian based her findings on 3,677 personal files of the bishopric
of Freiburg of the period from 1830 to 1890. Without hesitation one can say that
this is one of the most important studies of the Catholic mesomilieu. The fact that
Olenhusen discusses only one region should not prevent us from regarding her
book as relevant to other German bishoprics as well. But the priests’ anomalous
of the priests in Catholic Germany. On their role as rejects of the modern world, see Helmut
Smith, German Nationalism (n. 2 above), pp. 106 ff.; Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, Klerus und
abweichendes Verhalten: Zur Sozialgeschichte Katholischer Priester im 19. Jahrhundert: Die
Erzdiözese Freiburg (Göttingen, 1994), and “Die Ultramontanisierung des Klerus: Das Beispiel
der Erzdiözese Freiburg,” in Loth, ed., Deutscher Katholizismus, pp. 46–75; for a different view,
see Martin Persch, “Zur Lebenskultur des Trierer Diözesanklerus im 19.u.20 Jahrhundert” (pp.
374–96), and H. W. Wurster, “Zur Lebenskultur des Passauer Diözesanklerus” (pp. 357–73), both
in Romische Quartalschrift 88 (1993). Anderson, in her “The Limits of Secularization,” points to
the ambiguous role of the priest not only as a backward notable who symbolized the conservative
spirit of ultramontanism but also as a private person “described by his admirers as extremely
ascetic . . . raising a glass at the inn, the active club-man” (p. 660), and see also “Clerical Election
Influence and Communal Solidarity: Catholic Political Culture in the German Empire, 1871–
1914,” in Elections before Democracy: The History of Elections in Europe and Latin America,
ed. E. Posada-Carbo (New York, 1996), pp. 139–62. I would like to thank Margaret Anderson
for letting me consult chapters 4 and 5 from her forthcoming book, Practicing Democracy: Authority and Elections in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J., 2000). Olaf Blaschke, “Die Kolonialisierung der Laienwelt: Priester als Milieumanager und die Kanäle klerikaler Kuratel,” in Blaschke and Kuhlemann, eds., Religion im Kaiserreich, pp. 93–135.
18
This is volume 4 in a series of studies all edited by E. Gatz under the title Geschichte des
kirchlichen Lebens in den deutschsprachigen Ländern seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Other
volumes in the series that were published until 1997 are vol. 1, Die Bistümer und ihre Pfarreien
(Freiburg, 1991); vol. 2, Kirche und Muttersprache (Freiburg, 1992); and vol. 3, Katholiken in
der Minderheit (Freiburg, 1994).
463
behavior is not the only topic in her work. The first part of the book points to the
degree to which, at least in the first half of the nineteenth century, Catholicism in
south Germany demonstrated a modern, tolerant attitude. According to Olenhusen
in the second part of her study, the Catholic ghetto came into being after the 1860s,
and its creators were uneducated priests from lower-class backgrounds. The Freiburg ultramontane mesomilieu was a truly backward milieu (p. 11), where the
guards of the ghetto were the priests and their superintendant was the bishop.19
When one considers these pioneering studies of the role of the Catholic clergy,
there is no doubt that there is still much work to be done on the social and political
function of the Catholic priesthood.20
Our analysis of the Catholic milieu and its culture would not be complete without mentioning the most important study ever written on Catholic culture and
politics in the nineteenth century. Blackbourn’s micromilieu in Marpingen exemplifies one of the main elements in my ghetto-to-ghetto argument: how the religious
history of Germany can be written using methods derived from anthropology and
cultural history together with the methods of the traditional social history of politics
and how the use of these methods can show us how encompassing the walls of
the Catholic ghetto were.
In the summer of 1876, three young girls in the village of Marpingen in the
region of the Saarland saw in the forest a woman clothed in white. The woman
told them: “I am the immaculately conceived.” The village people who heard the
story identified the woman as the Virgin Mary. News of the apparition spread
rapidly. Within a week there were said to be twenty-five thousand pilgrims in the
village. Blackbourn takes this story as the starting point for a study of the Catholic
micromilieu, particularly during the Kulturkampf and in the succeeding period. He
approaches the story first from the inside: What did the vision mean for the Catholics in the village and those who believed in it or at least who belonged to the
ultramontane circles in Europe? Second, he asks: What did the vision mean for
the German secular-liberal circles?
By taking the growing Marian cult in the European Catholic world as the object
of his study of popular religious manifestations (showing how the Marian cult
“engendered Catholic belief” and revealing the role of children as intermediaries
between pure belief and manipulative forces), Blackbourn, like Smith, demonstrates the premodern, almost primitive modes of behavior that existed in the Catholic micromilieu. It was not only the liberals that saw the cult as a bastion of the
enemies of progress in the ideological struggle for Germany’s future. Blackbourn
himself seems to have accused the German ultramontane milieu of being a backward one, noting the absence of “a male bourgeoisie” among the pilgrims to Marpingen (p. 160), the emotional violence that accompanied the event (p. 168), and
19
In the same year that Götz von Olenhusen published her book, a study on the Protestant
priests was published: Oliver Janz, Bürger besonderer Art: Evangelische Pfarrer in Preussen,
1850–1914 (Berlin, 1994). Janz’s Protestant priests were described, in contrast to Götz von Olenhusen’s, as “bürgerlich,” a well-educated social group.
20
Here I am fully in agreement with Anderson’s conclusion in her “Piety and Politics” (n. 8
above), that the “social history of the German clergy is a crucial desideratum” (p. 697).
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the superstitious nature of the gathering in Marpingen. It is above all when he
describes the pilgrims’ belief “in the power of the Virgin Mary as intercessor, and
in the power of the water” (p. 183) that the full character of the Catholic ghetto
emerges. In a fascinating chapter (“Pilgrims, Cures and Commercialization”), the
Catholic ghetto is exposed as a truly primitive phenomenon, in the eyes not only
of Blackbourn and the liberals but also of the educated Catholics and the leaders
of the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum).
Last but not least, I would like to mention that in recent years some attempts
have been made to give a more modern image to the Catholic macromilieu—or,
at least, to blame the Protestants for its backwardness. Loth and Michael Ebertz
of the social-history school of historiography are the main representatives of the
first approach; many Catholic historians belonging to the German Catholic establishment represent the second. Both emphasize the modern cultural, political, and
economic activities of many middle-class and intellectual Catholics.21 Some new
studies argue that it was mainly the surrounding Protestant society that was responsible for creating the Catholic ghetto. Some Catholic scholars maintain that
the German Catholics developed a “ghetto” mentality as a result of three major
historical events: the wars of the Reformation and the resulting political arrangements in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the influence of the French Revolution in the Central European countries, culminating in the process of secularization begun by Napoleon, which almost completely undermined the authority of
the Catholic Church in the territories that later formed part of the Second Reich;
and, finally, the Kulturkampf, the struggle of various German states (Bavaria, Baden, and Prussia) and the liberals in those states against the Catholic Church. This
struggle, which began in Baden in the 1850s, was to reach its culmination in Prussia
in the 1870s and continue in one form or another throughout the period of the
Second Reich.22 These events, together with economic, political, and demographic
processes of tremendous social significance (industrialization, the rise of the nation-state, the change in the status of women, the increasing birthrate, etc.) helped
to give some of the German Catholics a mentality of self-imprisonment within a
geographical, social, economic, and political fortress, on the one hand, and led to
an intense internal debate in Catholic society, and especially in its bourgeois sections, on how to break out of those walls, on the other.23 Hence, these studies
21
Loth, ed. (n. 8 above); Michael Ebertz, “ ‘Ein Haus voll Glorie schauet . . .’ Modernisierungsprozesse der römisch-katholischen Kirche im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Schieder, ed. (n. 6 above), pp.
62–85; August Leugers-Scherzberg, ed., “Die Modernisierung des Katholizismus: Das Beispiel
Felix Porsch,” in Loth, ed., pp. 219–36; Johannes Horstmann, Katholizismus und Moderne Welt:
Katholikentage, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft, 1848–1914 (Paderborn, 1976). For modern tendencies
in German Catholic theology, see Thomas O’Meara, Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860–1914 (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991); Hans Maier, “Zum Standort des deutschen Katholizismus in Gesellschaft, Staat und Kultur,” in Zur Soziologie des Katholizismus, ed. Karl Gabriel
and Franz-Xaver Kaufmann (Mainz, 1980), pp. 57–65.
22
Hans Maier, “Katholisch-protestantische Ungleichgewichte in Deutschland: Ein Vorspiel zum
Kulturkampf,” in Staat und Parteien, pp. 275–82.
23
Loth, ed.; Schieder, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft; Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in
der Säkularisierung: Die Katholische Stadt-Köln, Aachen, Münster, 1700–1840 (München, 1995).
465
represent the history of the German Catholics in the nineteenth century in general
and in the Second Reich in particular as the chronicle of a struggle between the
principles of separateness and union, between a desire to leave the confines of the
church fortress and the right to remain within them, between the claims of a backward ghetto mentality and the wish to belong to a modern liberal society that prided
itself on its progress and modernity. The following sections will be devoted to an
analysis of these tendencies based on regional studies published in recent years.
III
Throughout the whole period of the Second Reich and even afterward, there was
a clear geographical and demographic distribution of Catholics and Protestants in
Germany. About two-thirds of the population was Protestant and about one-third
was Catholic. But within the different regions of Germany the geography of the
religious denominations was complex and varied. In some areas there was a great
deal of religious homogeneity, in others religious mixing.24 The source of this
complex distribution was chiefly the arrangements resulting from the wars of the
Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, but also the arrangements imposed on the
various German territories after 1806 and those made by the Congress of Vienna
in 1815–16.
Moreover, in many communities, Catholics and Protestants lived together in the
same localities, and in many areas there were purely Catholic localities next to
purely Protestant ones.25 The result of these complex distributions was often (as
Helmut Smith demonstrated in his book) social tensions and clashes of a religious
nature.26 The tension between the Catholics and Protestants was the outstanding
religious feature of the Second Reich, not only because of rival traditions or convictions or as a result of the geographical distributions described above but also
because this tension was partly created and deliberately exploited by the Protestant
elites intent on building a German nation and nation-state with a predominantly
liberal, modern, Protestant, and Prussian character. The Catholic Church and its
leaders, the heads of Catholic organizations and parties, for their part, exploited
this tension in order to strengthen Catholic consciousness, among other things (as
Ute Schneider pointed out in her study of political-national festivities in the Rhine-
24
H. A. Krose, Konfessionsstatistik Deutschland (Freiburg, 1904), and “Die Bevölkerung nach
Reichstagswahlkreisen am 1. Dezember 1900,” Statistik des Deutschen Reichs 150 (1903): 249–
82.
25
Helmut W. Smith, “Religion and Conflict: Protestants, Catholics, and Anti-Semitism in the
State of Baden in the Era of Wilhelm II,” Central European History 3 (1994): 283–314.
26
Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1995); for the background to this situation, see also Heinz
Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle
Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Thomas Brady et al. (Leiden, N.Y., 1995), pp. 641–75;
Joel Harrington and Helmut W. Smith, “Confessionalization, Community and State Building in
Germany, 1555–1870,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 1 (1997): 77–101.
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land), by arousing anti-Prussian sentiments among the Catholics, at least until the
1890s, and, above all, by setting up the Catholic ghetto.27
The geographical distribution in Central Europe has a religious significance,
although the scholarly literature on the subject in recent years has chiefly emphasized its socioeconomic significance. The Catholic population tended to concentrate in backward areas—areas that, for most of the nineteenth century, industrial
changes had passed by, areas that only toward the end of the century were connected to a railway. Southern Baden-Württemberg, the areas of Oberpfalz and
southern Swabia in Bavaria, the districts of Moselle and Eiffel in the Rhineland,
and southern Lower Silesia (the districts of Frankenstein, Glatz, and Habelschwerdt) in eastern Germany were regions of this kind. Whether this was due to
some intrinsic backwardness in Catholicism derived from the character of the Catholic religion, or to the superiority of the “capitalist-Protestant spirit,” or to the fact
that the Catholics were discriminated against by antiecclesiastical Protestant or
Catholic rulers, it is clear that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, some
segments of the German Catholic population lived in backward rural areas.28 Most
of them were farmers, artisans, or petty merchants. In towns with a Catholic majority, most of the manual workers were Catholics and the employers were Protestants. One of the features of the economic changes of the nineteenth century—
the emigration from villages to cities—characterized the Catholic population as
well. Many of the rural Catholics moved to the cities, which explains their concentration as simple workers in factories.29 Mooser also points out their poor representation in academic circles, in the higher echelons of the army, and in the
bureaucratic and legal apparatus at least until the 1890s.30
Notable exceptions to this sad situation could be found in cities with a large
Catholic majority such as Munich, Cologne, Aachen, or Münster, and also in
smaller towns like Bonn, Constance, Würzburg, or Augsburg. We have already
drawn attention to Schlögl’s study dealing with an educated, prosperous, and modern Catholic bourgeoisie in the cities of western Germany. But it not only existed
27
The most illustrative example is Sedan Day, which the ultramontane camp refused to celebrate. See Ute Schneider, Politische Festkultur im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Rheinprovinz von der
französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1806–1918 (Essen, 1995), chap. 6; see
also Werner Blessing, “Gottesdienst als Säkularisierung? Zu Krieg, Nation und Politik im bayerischen Protestantismus des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Schieder, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft, pp.
216–55; Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and
National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), pp. 58–59; Rudolf Lill, “Grossdeutsch
und Kleindeutsch im Spannungsfeld der Konfessionen,” in Probleme des Konfessionalismus in
Deutschland seit 1800, ed. Anton Rauscher (Paderborn, 1984), pp. 29–48; Smith, Nationalism
and Religious Conflict, pp. 61–78; Altgeld (n. 2 above); on the national-liberal motivations, see
David Blackbourn, “Progress and Piety: Liberals, Catholics and the State in Bismarck’s Germany,”
in his Populists and Patricians (n. 8 above), pp. 143–68; Adolf Birke, “Zur Entwicklung und
politischen Funktion des bürgerlichen Kulturkampfverständnisses in Preussen-Deutschland,” in
Aus Theorie und Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. D. Kurze (Berlin, 1972), pp. 257–79.
28
See Maier’s conclusion in his “Katholisch-protestantische”; for the regional aspect, see Liedhegener, “Marktgesellschaft” (n. 16 above), and Baumeister (n. 16 above).
29
Liedhegener in his “Marktgesellschaft,” and Baumeister in his Parität und katholische Inferiorität give the exact social breakdown in many areas where Catholics were the majority.
30
Mooser, “ ‘Christlicher Beruf’ und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft,’ ” in Loth, ed. (n. 8 above).
467
there: in other cities too, in southern Germany, there were Catholic academics,
industrialists, and judges. In most of these cities there were universities in which
the majority of students studied nonreligious subjects. In the Catholic townlets and
villages in South Germany, one could also find a stratum of wealthy, educated
Catholic bourgeois.31 Although they were poorly represented in the economic and
intellectual elites in relation to their proportion in the German population as a
whole, if one considers the regional distribution described above and examines the
social and economic activities of the Catholics in the light of the theory of modernization as Loth, Schlögl, Mooser, and Ebertz have done, not only is the picture
of Catholic backwardness so characteristic of German historiography from the end
of the past century until the present time greatly modified, but it also appears that
in Catholic areas one could find broad groups of Catholic bourgeois, not all of
whom supported the ultramontane order that the church tried to impose on them.
In short, there were Catholics who lived outside the walls of the ghetto. We will
study them below.
Another phenomenon that modifies the picture of Catholic inferiority was the
strong position of the German Catholic Party, the Zentrum (Center), in the Reichstag. The Zentrum, like all political parties, went in for political horse trading between various lobbies, party leaders, and government representatives; it tried to
extract as many benefits as possible for its supporters and contributed by this means
to Catholic self-confidence. The Zentrum’s demand for parity (Parität) in the conditions of life of Catholics with those of Protestants encouraged the Catholics to
demand and sometimes obtain an economic “compensation” from the Protestant
authorities, chiefly in the form of a budgetary policy that would benefit the Catholic
middle classes. Twenty years ago, Blackbourn had already maintained, in his book
on political Catholicism in Württemberg, that the Zentrum was a party like any
other German political party, without any specifically religious characteristics. Loth
confirmed this view in his many studies.32 Both these scholars are challenged by
C. Weber, who claims that the Zentrum was founded as a clerical party and remained so for many years. In his study, C. Weber demonstrates how the special
situation created among European Catholics by the doctrine of papal infallibility
and the Syllabus Errorum in the 1860s made it difficult for those who opposed the
conservative spirit and dogmatism issuing from Rome and how the pressures from
31
On the Rheinland bourgeoisie, see Schlögl; Mergel, Zwischen Klasse (n. 7 above); a detailed
analysis can be found in Oded Heilbronner, “Regionale Aspekte zum katholischen Bürgertum.
Oder: Die Besonderheit des katholischen Bürgertums in ländlichen Süddeutschland,” Blätter für
Deutsche Landesgeschichte 131 (1995): 223–59. On Konstanz and Augsburg, see Gert Zang,
Konstanz in der Grossherzoglichen Zeit (Konstanz, 1993), vol. 2, and Zang, ed. (n. 7 above); W.
Zorn, “Das Augsburger Patriziät im Königreich Bayern, 1806–1918,” Zeitschrift des Historischen
Vereins für Schwaben 87 (1994): 167–88; Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Politische Topographie und Nationalismus: Städtegeist, Landespatriotismus und Reichsbewusstsein in München, 1871–1914,”
in his Nationalismus und Bürgerkultur in Deutschland, 1500–1914 (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 219–
45; Zerback (n. 12 above). On the rural Catholic bourgeoisie, see Heilbronner, “In Search” (n.
12 above).
32
Blackbourn, Class Religion (n. 8 above); Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich (n. 8 above),
“Soziale Bewegungen”; and “Integration und Erosion” (n. 10 above).
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the south (from Rome) and from the north (from the Prussian liberals at the time
of the Kulturkampf ) drove liberal, educated Catholics into the arms of the ultramontanes, and not only in Germany. The creation of the Zentrum in 1870 as a
result of these pressures was the political response of the Catholics in Prussia.33
It is hard to say whether the social and economic situation described above,
together with the special geographical conditions, merely served to harden a
closed-in mentality that already existed among most Catholics from the beginning
of the century or whether it produced it. It seems that the two processes were
complementary. Toward the end of the century, the ghetto walls grew thicker for
two reasons. First, the church and its representatives increasingly and successfully
used modern means of buttressing the walls: the process of bureaucratization that
began to take place in the organization of the church, the founding of associations
(Vereine), the use of railways and newspapers, and the mass commercialization of
art are only some of the examples given by Blackbourn in Marpingen of the
modern methods used by the church to increase its strength and its hold over its
flock.34 Second, the Kulturkampf, which reached its climax in Prussia in the 1870s
and was continued afterward by different methods, was a major element in
strengthening the walls of Catholicism. The Catholic ghetto of the 1880s, despite
the many shades it possessed in that period, embraced about 80 percent of the
Catholic population in Prussia and up to 50 percent in the southern German states.
The political and organizational features of the Catholic ghetto survived in roughly
the same form until the First World War, although embracing fewer and fewer
Catholics, particularly in Prussia.
IV
Although this is an article on German Catholicism, I would like to stop for a
moment and briefly look beyond the boundaries of Imperial German history. The
peculiarity or lack of peculiarity of the Catholic ghetto in Germany may be revealed by placing the German case in a broader context and providing an overview
of the development of Catholic ghettos in England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria.
Different forms of Catholic ghetto existed in all these countries.35 Although
Catholic-Protestant relations did not always play a role in creating the ghettos (e.g.,
in France or Austria), shared experience, rituals, and organizations gave ultramontane Catholics a strongly felt common identity and separated them from their Protestant, liberal-Catholic, and Jewish neighbors. The Swiss historian Urs Altermatt
described how it came about that so many Catholics in Switzerland were born in
a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools, read Catholic newspapers, voted for
a Catholic party, were insured against accident and illness with a Catholic welfare
33
Christoph Weber, “Eine starke enggeschlossene Phalanx”: Der politische Katholizismus und
die erste deutsche Reichstagswahl 1871 (Essen, 1992).
34
Ebertz (n. 21 above); Mooser, “Katholische Volksreligion” (n. 10 above); David Blackbourn,
The Marpingen Visions: Rationalism, Religion and the Rise of Modern Germany (London, 1995).
35
See the review by McLeod (n. 9 above).
469
organization, and were buried as Catholics.36 Although it relates to Switzerland,
Altermatt’s study reflects a widespread European phenomenon that applied not
only to Catholics but also to socialists, Calvinists, Jews, and nationalists, groups
that also in many places created their own insulated cultures. The rise of an anticlerical liberalism to a position of dominance and the upsurge of popular piety as
a reaction to modernity and the Kulturkampf played a major role in creating the
Catholic ghetto.37 This happened in most European countries, particularly in the
period from the 1850s to the turn of the century.
Catholic organizations played a supremely important role in building the Catholic ghetto. Particular regional and political conditions are highly significant here.
The ghetto was most developed in the Netherlands, where support for ultramontane
organizations was greatest. Primary schools, a political party, a trade union, and
newspapers were founded after the 1850s and formed part of the Catholic subculture, which was protected by a coalition between antirevolutionary Calvinists and
ultramontanists.38 By 1914 a similar set of organizations existed in France, Belgium, and Austria, apart from the Catholic Party and school system. France lacked
a political party and, after the turn of the century, a Catholic school system, and
both the Belgian and Austrian Catholic school systems were limited to certain
regions and were not general phenomena. In Germany there was no separate system of Catholic elementary schools at all after the 1870s. Regional and political
peculiarities were important in other cases also: for example, the ethnic factor. A
unique element in Switzerland was that the Catholic ghetto was concentrated in
the German-speaking areas and not in the French ones. In Austria, ultramontanist
norms were established by exploiting an ecclesiastical autonomy authorized by
earlier liberal regimes. A conservative coalition of German clerics and non-German
ethnic groups, among whom Catholic feeling was strong, was created during the
1870s. Within the German-speaking ethnic group, Catholic politics and social organizations developed rapidly, particularly in the countryside, and were dominated
by the clergy and local aristocracy. Only the rise to a dominant role in Vienna and
Lower Austria of Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party, which opposed a narrow
liberal oligarchy of notables, and the expansion of Austrian social democracy challenged the “status quo of harmony,” as John Boyer described the relations between
church and government that were established by the Austrian liberals in the late
1860s and that dominated Austrian political culture.39 The social basis of anticlericalism is another example of regional uniqueness: in France it was the growth of
36
Urs Altermatt, Katholizismus und Moderne: Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der
Schweizer Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Zürich, 1989), and Der Weg Schweizer Katholiken ins Ghetto (Zürich, 1972), pp. 20–21; Peter Stadler, Der Kulturkampf in der Schweiz (Stuttgart, 1984).
37
David Blackbourn, “The Catholic Church in Europe since the French Revolution: A Review
Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1991): 778–88.
38
John A. Coleman, The Evolution of Dutch Catholicism (Los Angeles, 1978); John Whyte,
Catholics in Western Democracies (Dublin, 1981), p. 41.
39
John Boyer, “Religion and Political Development in Central Europe around 1900: A View
from Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 13–57, esp. pp. 29–30, and his excellent
study, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago,
1995).
470
Heilbronner
anticlericalism among the lower classes and the political dominance of the republicans from the 1870s onward that caused the strong assault on ultramontanism.
In Belgium, the years after the breakup of a coalition of liberals and Catholics
(1847) were witness to a party conflict between the latter, who also represented
the conservative elements in society, and the liberals, who initiated a “small” Kulturkampf. The Catholics won and remained in power for thirty years.40
Sporting organizations, charity and welfare associations, trade unions, and political parties were imbued with a deep piety that was also expressed in the mass
pilgrimages, Catholic devotion, and regional, national, and international congresses
that were common features of the European Catholic ghettos in the second half of
the nineteenth century. All sprang from the same causes: the church’s reaction to
the social and political upheavals following the French Revolution; the revival of
specifically Catholic forms of piety, which also witnessed a great revival of the
religious orders and a series of appearances by the Virgin Mary; the Liberal attacks
on the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations from the 1860s onward; and
the attempt by Catholics all over central and western Europe to take advantage of
the opportunities offered by urbanization and the democratization of politics. The
ghetto was partly created by the hostile surroundings, but also partly by the church
itself, whose leadership thought it could make use of the above social and political
manifestations to create a unique Catholic-ultramontane environment. Here Victorian England represented an interesting but typical case. Anti-Catholicism was
a prominent feature of the British political culture.41 While defending themselves
against outside attacks, Roman Catholics had to distinguish themselves from their
hostile surroundings. Through a concentration on specifically Catholic devotional
forms of piety, the almost ghetto-like character of late Victorian and early twentieth-century English Catholicism came into being.42 Popular public acts of devotion like benediction and the public rosary were common among the English
Catholics. They also had a social and political character: these rituals helped draw
a large number of working-class Catholics and poor Irish immigrants into the
ghetto. The sanctity of poverty as a means of unifying the church across class lines
became a distinguishing mark of English Catholicism and, as in the case of the
continental Catholic ghettos, reinforced the communal sense of superiority and
exclusivity.
40
Ralph Gibson, The Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London, 1989); Roger
Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (London, 1987), pp. 261–306; Paul Seeley,
“O Sainte Mère: Liberalism and the Socialization of Catholic Men in Nineteenth-Century France,”
Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 862–91; Carl Strikwerda, “A Resurgent Religion: The Rise
of Catholic Social Movements in Nineteenth-Century Belgian Cities,” in European Religion in
the Age of Great Cities, ed. Hugh Mcleod (London, 1994), pp. 61–89.
41
G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820–1830 (Oxford, 1964); J.
F. Supple, “Ultramontanism in Yorkshire, 1850–1900,” in Religion in Victorian Britain, ed. Parsons Gerald, vol. 4 (Manchester 1993), pp. 135–49; Quinn Dermot, Patronage and Piety: The
Politics of English Roman Catholicism, 1850–1900 (London, 1993).
42
Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford, 1995).
471
V
We see, then, that the chief elements of the Catholic ghetto were: (1) social and
religious associations; (2) acts of pilgrimage, missions to spread the faith, and the
manipulative use of apparitions and popular beliefs; (3) the priesthood; (4) hostility
between Catholics and Protestants, which persisted after the 1860s; (5) the Catholic
press; and (6) political Catholicism. I would like to return to the German Catholic
ghetto and draw attention to perhaps its most important element (and perhaps the
one most emphasized in the contemporary historiography of German Catholicism
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries): the Catholic associations (Vereine). The
German historian Thomas Nipperdey claimed that “German Catholicism had become a Catholicism of social organizations and associations.”43 The important
studies of Herres, Christoph Kösters, and Winfried Halder have stressed the regional aspects of the activities of the Catholic Vereine in Baden (Halder), Aachen
(Herres), and Münster (Kösters) in connection with the modernity of the Catholic
milieu.
Kösters’s study of the period after 1918, ending in 1945, lists several types of
Vereine. First, it mentions a group of social organizations connected with the
church, dealing with ecclesiastical affairs: Glaubenvereine—associations dealing
with the Sunday rituals, feast days, the sacraments, and spreading the faith; the
Borromäusverein—the society for the dissemination of popular Catholic literature;
the Caritativer Vinzentinerverein—a charitable society; the Bonifätiusverein—for
German Catholics outside Germany; and many others, all of which had a high
degree of dependence on the church and an ultramontane ideology. Second, it
discusses social organizations for people of a particular sex and a particular age
group: Jugend und Katholische Jungfrauenvereinigung, Frauenbund, Muttervereine, and Jungmännervereine. These associations were also closely connected to
the church. Third, it distinguishes a group of social organizations aimed at people
in various occupations, most of them beyond the reach of the church, despite the
fact that the priesthood was directly involved in setting up and running these
organizations: the Gesellenvereine for trainees and artisans, the Katholische Arbeitervereine for workers, and the Bauernvereine for farmers, for example. Last
(and of great importance for this article), Kösters’s study mentions a number of
associations connected with the Catholic milieu but in conflict with the church.
The most prominent of these was the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland,
about which I shall have more to say in due course.44
Kösters (like Weichlein in his study of the bishopric of Fulda) claims that, as
late as the Weimar period, the Catholic milieu depended chiefly on the activities
of the Vereine. He sees them as a modern influence, however, generally contrib-
43
Thomas Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch (München, 1988), p. 24; Hubert Jedin et al., eds.,
Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte (Freiburg, 1973), 6, pt. 2:220; Mooser, “Das katholische Vereinswesen” (n. 10 above).
44
In addition to Kösters, see “Vereine,” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 10 (1965);
Wilhelm Bürger, Das Erzbistum Freiburg in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Freiburg, 1927), pp.
161–230; Mooser, “Das katholische Vereinswesen.”
472
Heilbronner
uting in the Weimar period to an improvement in the educational and cultural level
of the Catholics in the Münster area, in contrast to the situation before the First
World War, in which the Vereine served as an instrument for church domination
and the encouragement of piety (p. 373). With regard to the present subject, Kösters
distinguishes between the Catholic milieu and the ghetto. In the period of the
Second Reich, the Catholics (and especially the younger ones in the Münster area)
lived in a ghetto. In the Weimar period, the activities of the Catholic Vereine—
especially those of the second kind mentioned above, which were more modern
in their character and objectives—took many Catholics out of the mental ghetto
in which they had been imprisoned (pp. 190–91) and placed them in a milieu.45
The economic crisis also impelled many to look for cultural fulfillment outside the
traditional frameworks, which did not always provide adequate protection against
economic difficulties. Kösters took his investigation into the Nazi period as well,
and here he found an interesting ambivalent situation. In the period before the
Second World War, the Catholics returned to the ghetto, both because of the difficulty of the crisis and because of the opposition of many Catholics (especially
the younger ones) to Nazi policies toward the churches. At the same time, in the
ghetto itself there were signs of a crisis of values. Many Catholics stopped practicing their religion, especially in the industrial towns of northwest Germany. Here
Kösters finds the beginning of the end for the Catholic milieu, a process that
reached its conclusion after 1945.
Kösters’s study grew out of his work in the Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte—Münster. This workshop (founded at the end of the 1960s by the local
bishopric and council) has given rise to dozens of studies of the area in the period
from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Studies of
this kind, investigating the development of the Catholic milieu over such a long
period, enable us to understand the processes whereby the Catholic milieu progressed from a sphere with a backward, conservative ghetto mentality to one with
a more modern outlook.46 Another area that has been of great importance in the
45
See also, Heinz Hürten, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Katholizismus, 1800–1960 (Mainz,
1986); for the Catholics in Münster and Westphalia (the most researched Catholic region in
Germany) in the Weimar period, see Antonius Liedhegener, “Gottessuche, Kirchenkritik und
Glaubenstreue unter Münsters Katholiken in den Krisenjahren der Weimarer Republik: Untersuchung zur katholischen Deutungskultur anhand einer frühen pastoraltheologischen Meinungsumfrag,” Westfälische Forschungen 47 (1997): 323–75; Hans J. Smula, Milieus und Parteien: Eine
regionale Analyse der Interdependenz von politisch-sozialen Milieus: Parteiensystem und Wahlverhalten am Beispiel des Landkreis Lüdinghausen, 1919–1933 (Münster, 1993); Stefan Rüping,
Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur in zwei dominant katholischen und überwiegend ländlichen
Regionen, 1912–1972 (Münster, 1987); Doris Kaufmann, Katholisches Milieu in Münster, 1928–
1933: Politische Aktionsformen und geschlechtsspezifische Verhaltensräume (Münster, 1984).
46
“Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte—Münster,” Westfälische Forschungen, vol. 43
(1993), is the most comprehensive analysis of the region from the nineteenth to the twentieth
centuries. See also from this broad perspective, Antonius Liedhegener, “Katholisches Milieu in
einer industriellen Umwelt am Beispiel Bochum, 1830–1974,” pp. 545–98. Frank Nienhaus,
“Transformations- und Erosionsprozesse des katholischen Milieus in einer ländlich-textilindustrialisierung Region: Das Westmünsterland,” pp. 597–630, both in Politische Zäsuren und gesellschaftlicher Wandel im 20. Jahrhundert: Regionale und vergleichende Perspektiven, ed. Mi-
473
study of the Catholic Vereine is the Rhineland. In this area, also under ultramontane
domination in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was already beginning in the 1830s a growth of bourgeois Vereine (Mergel) that was subordinate to
the Catholic Church. Many studies deal with the formative period of the Catholic
Vereine in the 1840s and 1850s, and Herres’s study, based on his doctoral thesis,
skillfully describes not only how the ultramontane milieu gained ascendancy over
the bourgeois-liberal one (especially in Aachen), finally leading to the formation
of the ultramontane ghetto in the Rhineland, but also the difficulties it faced until
the 1870s.47 In the period before the 1860s, the Catholic-ultramontane ghetto
sounds like a success story. Herres notes the creation of a wide variety of Vereine
for charitable, educational, and political purposes. Here, Herres is in agreement
with Sperber on the formation of ultramontanism in the Rhineland before 1848.
But unlike Sperber, who in his classic study also perceived ultramontanism in the
Rhineland after this date and especially from the 1860s onward, Herres claims,
from an examination of the records of the Catholic Vereine, that only with the
Kulturkampf in the 1870s did ultramontanism gain hegemony there. Moreover,
Herres examines patterns of religious behavior, such as taking Easter communion
and the Holy Sacrament, and finds a sharp decline in the number of Catholics
participating in these ceremonies prior to the 1870s (p. 403). This is not a new
claim. Anderson and many others have maintained that the period of the Kulturkampf created ultramontane hegemony, but Herres is one of the few to examine
by means of precise statistics and through the study of internal ecclesiastical
sources not only the Catholic revival of the 1850s and 1860s but also the difficulties
and obstacles it encountered.48 Thus, for instance, Herres claims that “a careful
study of the formation of the Catholic Vereine shows a religious revival, but it also
demonstrates the fact that this rebirth (in the 1850s and 1860s) affected only limited
groups of Catholics” (pp. 343–44).
In contrast to northwestern Germany, where ultramontanism already dominated
Catholic rural areas in the 1860s and the towns from the 1870s, in southwestern
Germany the process began only in the 1880s, and the Catholic Vereine played a
marginal role there at least until the 1880s. Halder claimed in his study of the
bishopric of Freiburg and the bishopric of Rottenburg in Württemberg that the
Kulturkampf in Baden, which had already begun in the 1860s, had a delaying effect
chael Frese and Michael Prinz (Paderborn, 1996); Heiner Wirtz, “Katholische Vereinskultur und
Kultur im katholischen Verein: Das Beispiel Gesellenvereine im Bistum Münster, 1852–1960,”
Westfälische Forschungen 47 (1997): 377–426.
47
Eric Yonke Eric, “The Emergence of a Roman Catholic Middle Class in Nineteenth-Century
Germany: Catholic Associations in the Prussian Rhine Province, 1837–1876” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1990); Ursula Krey, “Gesellschaftliche Spannungen und das Vereinswesen in Westfalen zwischen 1840 und 1854,” Westfälische Forschungen 39 (1989): 18–56;
Jonathan Sperber, “The Transformation of Catholic Associations in the Northern Rhineland and
Westphalia, 1830–1870,” Journal of Social History 15 (1981): 252–63; Mooser, “Das katholische
Vereinswesen”; Wirtz.
48
Anderson, “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” pp. 82–115, and Windthorst, pp. 203–70 (both in n. 8 above). Anderson also stresses, unlike Sperber, the period before
the 1850s as a crucial period for understanding the Catholic revival of the 1850s. See her “Piety
and Politics” (n. 8 above).
474
Heilbronner
on the formation of Vereine (p. 176). He also argued that the weakness of political
Catholicism and ultramontanism in southwest Germany may be explained against
the background of the Kulturkampf, in contrast to the process that took place in
northwest Germany and Silesia. Halder claimed that in the Catholic areas of Württemberg and Baden, it was the passage of the antisocialist laws of the year 1878
that gave the proletariat a hostile image in the eyes of the Catholic Church (p.
187). This factor encouraged the formation of Vereine of a social and professional
nature (compare the third and fourth types mentioned above), whose purpose was
to keep Catholic workers and artisans away from the socialist peril. Because this
danger threatened the authorities as well as the church, the authorities, from the
1880s onward, did not prevent the founding of Gesellenvereine and Arbeitervereine
or, at the end of the 1890s, of the Volksverein für das Katholische Deutschland—
associations whose task was to encourage workers to remain within the framework
of Catholic organizations. Halder also uses the Vereine to examine the process of
the creation of the Catholic milieu. The Vereine in south Germany did not play an
important part in this process (p. 400). Halder disagrees with Kösters’s claim that,
in the period of the Second Reich, the Vereine played an important role in bringing
the Catholics into the ghetto; he sees the Vereine in southwest Germany as a sign
of the modernization of Catholic life. But Halder deals mainly with Vereine whose
aim was to prepare Catholics professionally for life in an industrial society, unlike
Kösters, who deals mainly with Vereine for cultural and religious purposes. At the
same time, one cannot overlook the cultural-religious differences between the two
areas (i.e., Münster and southwest Germany), which undoubtedly contributed to
the creation of ghettos of a different nature in the period of the Second Reich.
In addition to the four types of social organization we have discussed, there
were many others for various cultural purposes. Thus, for example, there were
societies for popular literature (Augustinusverein) and for Catholic scholarship
(Görres Gesellschaft), and of course the society for political objectives (the Zentrum). Apart from the associations with close ties to the church, all the others were
in conflict with the church in this or some other period. The Zentrum, for example,
accepted papal authority in matters concerning the church, but it preserved a relative independence in political and economic matters.49 In the 1870s and 1880s,
about 80 percent of the German Catholics voted for this party, but only 50 percent
did so on the eve of the First World War. Most of the voters belonged to the middle
and lower-middle class. In the 1880s and 1890s it was the strongest party in the
Reichstag.50
Together with the Zentrum, there was the Volksverein für das katholische
Deutschland (People’s Association for Catholic Germany). This large Verein was
49
On the Zentrum, see Noel Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and
the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
50
For the voting patterns for the Zentrum, see Johannes Schauff, Das Wahlverhalten der
deutschen Katholiken im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Mainz, 1975); Josef Henke,
“Die Hochburgen der katholischen Parteien: Materialien zum Wahlverhalten vom Kaiserreich bis
zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Deutschland in Europa, ed. Jost Düllfer et al. (Frankfurt,
1990), pp. 348–73; Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial
Germany (Cambridge, 1997), chap. 2.
475
the most important in the Catholic ghetto and has been of great interest in studies
of the Catholic milieu. It was founded in 1890 by Ludwig Windthorst, the leader
of the Zentrum at that time. Its task was to promote Catholic interests, to explain
to the German people the value of Catholicism in the modern era, and to “oppose
destructive and sinful tendencies in Catholic society and to raise the social and
spiritual standards of all Catholic professional groups.” The Volksverein served as
the umbrella organization and coordinator for all the professional associations.
Most of its activity consisted of organizing meetings in every locality where there
was a Catholic community. On the eve of the First World War, the Volksverein had
about eight hundred thousand members. It became increasingly socially and socialistically oriented: its activities were chiefly focused on the workers. There is
no doubt that it was a primary support of social Catholicism (sozial Katholizismus),
and in many cases its aims were in opposition to those of the Catholic hierarchy.
The latter, despite the hostility it felt toward the social organizations that sprang
up in its shadow, did not dare to touch the Volksverein because of its great popularity among the Catholic population within the ghetto walls.51
Apart from the associations, there were two social groups that played a central
role in bringing most of the German Catholics into the ghetto: the Catholic priests,
who served as the engine that ran the Catholic-ecclesiastical system and whom I
discussed earlier, and the Catholic women. The women (in addition to the children)
were the human ammunition of the Catholic Church and its organizations and the
heroes of Catholic piety. Research in this matter is still in its infancy, but it seems
that, as in other European countries in the nineteenth century, in Germany the
women were the popular force that moved the wheels of ultramontanism. Although
they were of marginal importance for political Catholicism, as they did not have
the vote, they constituted the majority in the various organizations and societies,
especially the ecclesiastical ones. They were present more often than the men in
the confessional, in church on Sundays, at the Easter communion, at the priest’s
sermons, on pilgrimages, at Catholic feasts and festivals, and, most important of
all (from the priest’s and the church’s point of view), they had children. At the
beginning of this century, the church lost an increasing number of adherents, but
these were mainly men. The women stayed behind and “defended the walls of the
ghetto” even in the following period.52
51
Dirk Müller, Arbeiter, Katholizismus, Staat: Der Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland
in der Weimarer Repubik (Bonn, 1995); Heitzer Horstwalter, Der Volksverein für das katholische
Deutschland im Kaiserreich, 1890–1918 (Mainz, 1979), and “Krisen des Volksvereins im Kaiserreich: Gründe und Hintergründe zum Rücktritt von August Pieper als Generaldirektor im Dezember 1918,” Historisches Jahrbuch 99 (1979): 213–54; Gotthard Klein, Der Volksverein für
das katholische Deutschland, 1890–1933 (Paderborn, 1996).
52
On the role of women in European Catholicism, see Caroline Ford, “Religion and Popular
Culture in Modern Europe,” Journal of Modern History 65, no. 1 (1993): 152–75; Anderson,
“Piety and Politics,” pp. 695–96; John F. McMillan, “Religion and Gender in Modern France:
Some Reflections,” in Religion, Society and Politics in France since 1789, ed. Frank Tallett and
Nicholas Atkin (London, 1991), pp. 55–66; Bonny Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The
Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1981), chap. 5; in
Germany, see Blackbourn, Marpingen (n. 34 above); Götz Irmtraud von Olenhusen, ed., Wun-
476
Heilbronner
Historians have shown that a feminization of religion took place in the nineteenth century. Götz von Olenhusen and Hugh McLeod have seen it as chiefly a
Catholic phenomenon, as have Blackbourn and many others who have considered
the matter.53 In two collections of articles compiled by Götz von Olenhusen (one
on the cult of the virgin Mary and the other on the feminization of religion and
the church), women are represented as bearing the chief burden of the Catholicultramontane movement, which was, paradoxically, a male-dominated phenomenon. Why was the women’s support regarded as so desirable? How did they benefit
from it? The Catholic family was a sphere where women were extremely important.
In an article by Mergel, the bourgeois Catholic woman is shown coping with the
difficulty of running her family according to middle-class criteria and at the same
time fulfilling the requirements of the Catholic faith. Moreover, many bourgeois
Catholic women, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, sought
greater equality in relations between the sexes.54 Mergel claims that one way they
improved their status was by using their influence (since they had the responsibility
of running the home) to increase their families’ piety. Being responsible for running
a bourgeois family, they were able to introduce religious elements into family life
and thus increase the religious orientation of their families (pp. 47–48). (Leonore
Davidoff and Catherine Hall made a similar claim in their classic study of women
in the English bourgeoisie.)55 However, women in families where the husband and
wife had different religions were not able to decide the religion of all their children
but only that of the daughters. The fathers decided the religion of the sons.56
Apart from Mergel’s article, the collection of essays on women in the Catholic
and Protestant churches deals mainly with the organizational life and the history
of German Catholic and Protestant women. The second collection of articles suggests by its very title a more cultural/intellectual approach to the study of religion
among women, and it is fascinating.57 It begins with Schlögl’s article on the
church’s manipulation of Catholic women in the first decade of the nineteenth
century to bring them into its fold and repair the losses it had suffered to secularism.
derbare Erscheinungen: Frauen und Katholische Frömmigkeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 1995). For the use of children by the church, see B. Aspinwall, “The Child as Maker of
the Ultramontane,” in The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History,
vol. 31 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 427–46.
53
Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, “Die Feminisierung von Religion und Kirche im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert: Forschungsstand und Forschungsperspektiven,” in Frauen unter dem Patriarchat der
Kirchen: Katholikinnen und Protestantinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Irmtraud Götz von
Olenhusen (Stuttgart, 1995), pp. 9–21; Hugh Mcleod, “Weibliche Frömmigkeit—Männlicher
Unglaube? Religion und Kirchen im bürgerlichen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Bürgerinnen und Bürger,
ed. Ute Frevert (Göttingen, 1988), pp. 134–56; Blackbourn, Marpingen, pp. 21–28; Ford, “Religion and Popular Church,” pp. 171 ff.
54
Thomas Mergel, “Die subtile Macht der Liebe: Geschlecht, Erziehung und Frömmigkeit in
katholischen rheinischen Bürgerfamilien, 1830–1910,” in Frauen unter dem Patriarchat der
Kirchen, ed. Götz von Olenhusen, pp. 22–47.
55
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987).
56
Gunilla-Friedrich Budde, Auf dem Weg ins Bürgerleben: Kindheit und Erziehung in deutschen
und englischen Bürgerfamilien, 1890–1914 (Göttingen, 1994), p. 384.
57
Götz von Olenhusen, ed., Wunderbare Erscheinungen.
477
Here the theory is put forward that the feminization of religion (expressed in the
excessive proportion of women among churchgoers, e.g.) was a manipulative tool
wielded by the Catholic Church in order to prevent the flight of women from its
ranks.58 Moreover, the theologian Otto Weiss claims in his article that the use of
the stigmata by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century was directed chiefly
toward women. Weiss studies four women who were declared by the church to
have received the stigmata and were consequently regarded as specially favored.
This was another manipulative element in church policy aimed at preventing
women from leaving its ranks. However, at the same time, by recognizing them
as “near saints” in this way, the church gave them a kind of emancipated status
(p. 79).59 In Weiss’s study, modernization and backwardness in Catholic Church
policy went hand in hand. But this type of manipulative manifestation was not the
only one in which women played a prominent role. Blackbourn describes the feminization of the Marpingen phenomenon and also notes the idealization of the child.
The use of apparitions did not depend solely on the church. It could not have
succeeded if the women had not been ready and even eager to accept a religious
sign of this nature. The various apparitions created a new feminine identity that
many women wanted. And, in addition to the role they played in apparitions of
Mary, their participation in various rituals such as the Herz-Jesu-Verehrung was
an opportunity for them to express their personalities and, where piety was concerned, to demonstrate their superiority to men.60
Götz von Olenhusen’s own conclusion with regard to the role of women is
significant: namely, that since women were the main target of the Catholic Church
and its most enthusiastic supporters, the feminization of religion could only have
occurred in places where ultramontanism flourished. In a place like Baden where
ultramontanism was weak, the phenomenon could not exist.61 Only in the Catholic
ghetto could the feminization of religion and feminine piety flourish. It is thus
obvious why the study of German Catholicism has to be treated region by region.
The mesomilieu, which changes from region to region, will now be the focus of
this study.
VI
This historiographical survey thus far has perhaps given the impression of a certain
dual sociocultural uniformity among German nineteenth-century Catholics: there
was an ultramontane ghetto on the one hand and a group of modern Catholics
58
Rudolf Schlögl, “Sünderin, Heilige oder Hausfrau? Katholische Kirche und weibliche Frömmigkeit um 1800,” in Wunderbare Erscheinungen, Götz von Olenhusen, ed., pp. 13–50.
59
Otto Weiss, “Seherinnen und Stigmatisierte,” in Wunderbare Erscheinungen, Götz von Olenhusen, ed., pp. 51–82.
60
David Blackbourn, “ ‘Die von der Gottheit überaus bevorzugten Mägdlein’—Marienerscheinungen im Bismarckreich,” pp. 171–203; Norbert Busch, “Die Feminisierung der ultramontanen
Frömmigkeit,” pp. 203–20, esp. pp. 210–11.
61
Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, “Fundamentalistische Bewegungen im Umkreis der Revolution von 1848/49,” in her Wunderbare Erscheinungen, pp. 131–70, esp. pp. 132–35.
478
Heilbronner
beyond its walls on the other. Many scholars confirm this dichotomy. However, it
seems to disappear when the assumption is examined from the regional point of
view. It is hard to speak of a Catholic society, the Catholic milieu, or the Catholic
ghetto in general terms. Regional differences are of great significance.
In view of the cultural differences that existed among Catholics in the various
parts of Germany, reflecting different cultural traditions resulting from the process
of confessionalization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is obvious that
various Catholic regions passed through different processes at different periods.
Thus, for example, the Catholics in Baden experienced the Kulturkampf about ten
years before their brethren in Prussia. In northern Germany, in the area of Münster,
“political Catholicism” was successful from the late 1860s until the eve of the First
World War; in southern Württemberg the Zentrum was organized only in the 1890s;
and in Baden it never became dominant.62
With regard to Catholic political organization, at least until the 1880s, a rough
distinction can be made between the Catholics who lived south of the Main River
(in Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg) and those north of the river (in Prussia). In
south Germany, conditions were unsuitable for promoting a political Catholicism
because of the opposition of large parts of the population as well as the Catholic
elite (and certainly the Protestant ones) to ultramontanism. Many people there
supported the democratic-liberal forces during the revolutions of 1848–49 and
aided in the struggle of the southern states against the church at the time of the
“reaction” in the 1850s. In the 1860s, when the question of German unification
came up for consideration in the southern regions and in the elections to the Zollparliament, many of the Catholic elites supported the idea of a “small Germany”
(Kleindeutschland)—that is, Germany without Austria (which of course was Catholic) and with a Prussian-Protestant dominance.63 The capacity of these elites,
including many Catholic priests, to draw the rural Catholic masses after them in
opposition to the church in certain areas (southern Baden is a good example)
created a situation in those years in which the liberal authorities found allies among
the masses in their struggle with the church. Thus it was no problem for them to
enforce anti-Catholic laws in schools, in fraternities, and in foundations belonging
to the church. Götz von Olenhusen claims that, because the Kulturkampf was less
fierce and violent in southern Germany than in Prussia, it was difficult for the
62
On the Catholics in Baden, see Josef Becker, Liberaler Staat und Kirche (n. 6 above); Julius
Dorneich, “Der Kirchenkampf in Baden (1860–1876) und die katholische Gegenbewegung,”
Freiburger Diözesan Archiv 94 (1974): 547–88; Hans. J. Kremer, Mit Gott für Wahrheit, Freiheit
und Recht: Quellen zur Organisation und Politik der Zentrumspartei und des politischen Katholizismus in Baden, 1888–1914, trans. Hans. J. Kremer (Stuttgart, 1983); Carl Zangerl, “Courting
the Catholic Vote: The Center Party in Baden, 1903–1913,” Central European History 3 (1977):
220–40; Hans-Peter Becht, “Politik und Milieu in Stadt und Land: Überlegungen zur Formierung
und Entwicklung des badischen Parteiensystems, 1819–1933,” in Vom Städtebund zum Zweckverband, ed. Bernd Kirchgässner and Hans P. Becht (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 45–82; in the region
of Münster, see Smula (n. 45 above); Rüping (n. 45 above); see also the works cited in nn. 17,
18; for Württemberg, see Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics (n. 8 above).
63
Georg Windel, The Catholics and German Unity, 1866–1871 (Minneapolis, 1954) is in my
opinion the best study on the political behavior of the southern German Catholics.
479
church and political Catholicism to gain mass support there in the 1860s and to
create a Catholic ghetto true to ultramontanism. Only with the Prussian victories
over Austria and France in the mid 1860s, the emergence of a new generation of
priests who were less liberal and educated than their predecessors, and the deterioration of the economic situation of the Catholic lower classes due to the excessively liberal policies of the southern governments were the church and political
Catholicism able to enlist some support from the masses. Even this support was
weaker than that in Prussia, and at the beginning of the twentieth century there
were still many areas in the south that refused to support the church and the
Zentrum.64
The strength of liberalism in southwest Germany and the difficulties it created
for ultramontanism go back to the post-Napoleonic era, particularly the 1830s and
1840s. Herzog’s study of (among other things) the formation of the liberal milieu
and the ultramontane ghetto in prerevolutionary Baden gives an original and interesting account of these phenomena from two unexpected methodological angles:
the history of gender relations and the history of religious cultures. Baden, with
its Protestant minority, was the most liberal of the German states (Musterland).
The Baden parliament was a liberal stronghold. According to Herzog, it dealt not
only with constitutional and economic issues but also, and above all, with religious
questions. Matters such as the legal status of marriages between Catholics and
Protestants, Jewish emancipation, the rule of celibacy for the Catholic priesthood
64
In addition to the works on Baden cited above, see also Paul Nolte, Gemeindebürgertum und
Liberalismus in Baden, 1800–1855 (Göttingen, 1994); Zang, Provinzialisierung (n. 7 above),
which is in my opinion the best study that exists on the topic; Lothar Gall, Der Liberalismus als
regierende Partei: Das Grossherzogtum Baden zwischen Restauration und Reichsgründung (Wiesbaden, 1969); Götz von Olenhusen, Klerus und abweichendes Verhalten (n. 17 above), pp. 359–
73. On south-German regions that did not support the Zentrum, see Jurgen Schmädeke, Wählerbewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1995), pp. 238–41; Dietrich Thränhardt, Wahlen und politische Strukturen in Bayern (Düsseldorf, 1973), pp. 71–78, 91–94; Jürgen
Winkler, Sozialstruktur, politische Traditionen und Liberalismus (Opladen, 1995), p. 337; Karl
Rohe, Wahlen und Wählertradition in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 76–77; Sperber, The
Kaiser’s Voters (n. 50 above), pp. 145, 221. On Bavaria, see Manfred Hänish, Für Fürst und
Vaterland: Legitimitätsstiftung in Bayern zwischen Revolution 1848 und Deutscher Einheit (München, 1991); Blessing, “Kirchenfromm,” and Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft (both in n. 8
above); Jürgen Schmidt, Bayern und das Zollparlament: Politik und Wirtschaft in den letzten
Jahren vor der Reichsgründung (München, 1973); C. Stache, Bürgerlicher Liberalismus und
katholischer Konservativismus in Bayern, 1867–1871 (Frankfurt, 1981); Herbert Hesse, “Behördeninterne Information über die Volksstimmung zur Zeit des liberal-ultramontanen Parteikampfes,
1868–1869,” ZBLG 34 (1971): 618–51. On antiultramontane regions in south Germany, see
especially Oded Heilbronner, Catholicism, Political Culture and the Countryside: A Social History
of the Nazi Party in South Germany (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998), “Regionale Aspekte” (n. 31 above),
“Bürgerliche Vereine in West und Süddeutschland als Elemente des Nationalliberalismus zwischen
1866 und 1914,” Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung 8 (1996): 121–41, and “In Search” (n.
12 above); Oded Heilbronner and Detlef Mühlberger, “The ‘Achilles Heel’ of German Catholicism: Who Voted for Hitler Re-visited,” European History Quarterly 27 (1997): 217–46; Oded
Heilbronner, “Reichstagswahlkämpfe im Allgäu, 1871–1932: Ein abweichender Fall?” Zeitschrift
für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 61 (1998): 297–326, and “Populärer Liberalismus in Baden:
Die Reichstagswahlkämpfe in Südbaden, 1871–1912: Entwicklungstendenzen der badischen
Wahlkultur,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins (ZGO) 146 (1998): 481–521.
480
Heilbronner
(to mention only a few important issues touched on in Herzog’s study) defined
liberal identity in Baden. At the same time, liberal hegemony in Baden was a threat
to Orthodox Catholics, who built up their defenses against liberal attacks.
This is not the place to discuss Herzog’s approach to texts and issues of gender
(“an experiment,” she calls it: pp. 15–16), which is influenced by the conceptual
models created by Joan Scott, Davidoff, and Lynn Hunt, to name only a few. Her
work breaks new ground in the study of liberal-ultramontane relations in nineteenth-century Germany. For our purposes, it is important to consider her models
of “exclusion” and “inclusion,” which help to explain the “fundamental duality of
German liberalism: its simultaneous tolerance and intolerance” (p. 83) as well as
its tragic fate: attitudes toward “difference,” she says, are “crucial as an indicator
of the quality of a nation’s liberalism” (p. 169).65 Her work, together with Götz
von Olenhusen’s study of the priests in Freiburg (from a different methodological
and conceptual viewpoint), also explains why ultramontanism was so weak in
Baden until the late nineteenth century. The liberal hegemony in Baden allowed
the liberals to decide “who should be included in the realm of formal politics and
who should be excluded” (p. 168), and they decided to exclude Catholic conservatives from the public sphere by raising religious and gender issues. In the 1840s,
Jewish emancipation and the emancipation of women were the main issues with
which the liberals were concerned. From the conservative-Catholic perspective,
the liberal approach to these issues helped the excluded (i.e., the Catholic leaders)
“to insist on a strict separation between Catholics and all others” (p. 52)—one of
the essential preconditions for erecting the Catholic ghetto wall. In Herzog’s view,
both sides, liberals and Catholics, utilized the same policies of exclusion and inclusion to achieve their respective aims. Although Herzog’s arguments are not
based on the changing socioeconomic and cultural milieu of the local liberalbourgeois family and its sociopolitical existence—which is something that casts
doubt on certain of her arguments—her work supports the main thesis.66 It leads
us once again to discover the ghetto mentality of German ultramontanism in the
nineteenth century—this time, in the ghetto where the Catholics had already been
placed by the Baden liberals in pre-1848 Germany. Herzog’s pioneering work calls
for a study comparing the situation in other Catholic regions of Vormärz Germany,
which would indicate how far her findings from Baden apply to other parts of
Germany.
The existence of a hegemonic liberal-bourgeois public sphere among the southern Catholic elites at that time, and even after the 1870s, is undoubtedly an exceptional phenomenon. We are not just speaking here of ruling elites such as
ministers, judges, diplomats, and counselors. The local elites in many Catholic
rural areas were supporters of the National Liberal Party. Many of them were “Old
65
See also in this direction, Manfred Meyer, Freiheit und Macht: Studien zum Nationalismus
süddeutscher, inbesondere badischer Liberalen, 1830–1848 (Frankfurt, 1994).
66
As L. Gall did in his Bassermann’s biography, Bürgertum in Deutschland (München, 1991).
For a microstudy on the same events that were discussed by Herzog, see Wolfgang Gall, “ ‘Ein
Signal zur Schilderhebung in Deutschland’: Zu den Hintergründen religiös-politischer Unruhen
in der Stadt Offenburg, 1845–1846,” ZGO 145 (1997): 269–94.
481
Catholic.” They and many others were anticlerical and supported most of the antiecclesiastical measures of the Protestants.67 It can be clearly established that in
southern Germany some areas were more religious than others, and there were
areas where political Catholicism (or its local equivalent) enjoyed mass support
and other areas where it was weak.68 As a general rule, however, political and
cultural diversity among Catholics, contact with Protestants, and Catholic anticlerical activities were much commoner there than in the north.
The inability of ultramontanism to impose its hegemony in an unequivocal manner in the south was also due to the special character of political Catholicism there
(it had a dual loyalty: to the German state and to the pope) and to some special
features of its particular form of nationalism—a local patriotism that took the form
of a glorification of the king and of the history of Bavaria or Baden, on the one
hand, and an attraction for German-Prussian nationhood, which gained some sympathy even in the south, on the other.69 In many places in south Baden there were
still priests with a liberal outlook until the 1880s, and they permitted their flocks
67
For the Baden elites, their power and their weakness after the 1860s, see Zang, Provinzialisierung (n. 7 above), “Der kurze Sommer des Liberalismus in Überlingen,” in Seegründe, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bodenseeraumes, ed. Dieter Schot and Werner Trapp (Weingarten, 1984),
pp. 147–63, and Konstanz in der Grossherzoglichen Zeit (n. 31 above); H. Siefken, Verkehrspolitik
und liberales Bürgertum in Konstanz im 19. Jahrhundert (Konstanz, 1975); Claudia Kolling,
Liberale Agrarpolitik im Seekreis (1860–1880): Strategie und Probleme ihrer Durchsetzung (Konstanz, 1979); Renate Ehrismann, Der regierende Liberalismus in der Defensive: Verfassungspolitik
im Grossherzogtum Baden, 1876–1905 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). For Bavaria, see Blessing,
“Kirchenfromm,” and “Eine Krise des Katholizismus im vorigen Jahrhundert: Das katholische
Bürgertum Bayerns und die Religion nach dem Ersten Vatikanischen Konzil,” Unbekanntes Bayern 11 (1980): 107–25, and Staat und Kirche, pp. 169–73; Zorn (n. 31 above); Werner Chrobak,
“Politische Parteien, Verbände und Vereine in Regensburg, 1869–1914: Teil II,” Verhandlungen
des Historischen Vereins für Oberpfalz und Regensburg 20 (1980): 306–85; Friedrich Hartmannsgruber, Die Bayerische Patriotenpartei, 1868–1887 (München, 1986); Frank Wright, “The Bavarian Patriotic Party, 1868–1871” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, 1975). A good example
of mass anticlerical activity in Bavaria is the Bavarian Peasant League (Bayerische Bauernbund);
see Ian Farr, “Peasants Protest in the Empire—The Bavarian Example,” in Peasants and Lords
in Modern Germany, ed. Robert Moeller (London, 1986); “From Anti-Catholicism to Anti-clericalism: Catholic Politics and the Peasantry in Bavaria, 1860–1900,” European Studies Review 2
(1983): 249–68, and “Populism in the Countryside: The Peasant Leagues in Bavaria in the 1890s,”
in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London, 1977); Anton
Hochberger, Der bayerische Bauernbund, 1893–1914 (München, 1991); for anticlerical activity
in Württemberg, see C. Köhle-Hezinger, “Religion als Protest: Zur Dissoziation kirchlicher und
bürgerlicher öffentlichkeit,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 82 (1986): 44–71, esp. pp. 58 ff.
68
For the difference between north and south Baden, see Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, “Klerus
und Ultramontanismus in der Erzdiözese Freiburg,” in Schieder, ed. (n. 6 above), pp. 138–41; on
Bavaria, see Blessing, “Gottesdienst als Säkularisierung?” (n. 27 above), pp. 243–51; Farr, “Peasants Protest,” “From Anti-Catholicism,” and “Populism in the Countryside”; C. Probst, “Die
Frömmigkeit des Landvolkes: Aus den Berichten bayerischer Amtsärzte um 1860,” Zeitschrift für
Bayerische Landesgeschichte 54 (1994): 405–34; on south Germany in general, see Smith, German Nationalism (n. 2 above), chap. 3.
69
On the tension between local and German nationalism, see esp. Celia Applegate, A Nation
of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Confino (n. 27 above); Katharina
Kennedy, “Regionalism and Nationalism in South German History Lessons, 1871–1914,” German
Studies Review 12 (1989): 11–33; Hans M. Körner, Staat und Geschichte im Königreich Bayern,
1806–1918 (München, 1992), pp. 276–95; Hänish.
482
Heilbronner
to share this point of view. The city of Munich was a center of opposition to
ultramontanism. In the 1870s, groups of Old Catholics opposed to ultramontanism
were more active in the southern regions than in Prussia, and the same applied to
the Liberale Reichspartei (Liberal Reich Party) and the Bavarian Peasant League,
which were Catholic anticlerical parties. However, toward the end of the nineteenth
century, there was a return to ultramontane piety among the Bavarian bourgeoisie,
and against the background of the Bavarian crisis of government on the eve of the
First World War all sections of the Catholic Church (orders, monasteries, associations) engaged in intense religious activity, now conducted through modern
means: railways, newspapers, mass production. Yet, despite all this, among the
lower strata of the Catholic population a process of secularization was at work,
and many members wavered between loyalty to the Reich and loyalty to the church.
Moreover, between the years 1907 and 1914, the Zentrum experienced a crisis set
off by a conflict between its left-wing and conservative factions; consequently, it
lost strength, and the liberals and socialists gained strength in many areas of Catholic Bavaria.70 To sum up, if we agree that geographical, social, and economic
conditions together with religious persecution (the Kulturkampf) created the Catholic ghetto with its unfortunate cultural characteristics, we must remember that in
the south the persecution was much milder than in Prussia, and thus the Catholic
ghetto was less in evidence there.
To the north of the Main River, different conditions prevailed, as Schneider’s
study makes clear.71 Although in the Rhineland and Westphalia the church was in
alliance with the Prussian government both at the time of the disturbances of 1848
and in the 1850s, it showed its capacity to enlist the masses in opposition to the
Prussian government when the latter sought to harm the church (as when the
Bishop of Cologne was arrested and imprisoned in 1837 or in the 1840s at the
time of the pilgrimage to Trier).72 Schneider shows in her study of political festivities in the Rhine area that the strength of the church organizations (derived from
their financial resources), the proximity of the Rhineland to France, and the hatred
70
On bourgeois piety toward the end of the century, see Blessing, “Kirchenfromm,” pp. 106
ff. On the Zentrum in Bavaria, the crisis of political Catholicism there, and the new configuration
of the political culture, see Karl Möckl, Die Prinzregentenzeit: Gesellschaft und Politik während
der Ära des Prinzregenten Luitpold in Bayern (München, 1972), pp. 535–48, 557–58, and “Liberaler Staat und christliche Demokratie: Zur Bedeutung des Bayerischen Katholikentages von
1889,” in Beiträge zu Kirche, Staat und Geistesleben: Festschrift für Günter Christ, ed. Jürgen
Schröder (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 208–26.
71
I could not find any comparative study on the differences between south and north German
Catholics. Some fresh ideas relating to the Vormärz period can be found in Thomas Mergel, “Für
eine bürgerliche Kirche: Antiultramontanismus, Liberalismus und Bürgertum, 1820–1850: Rheinland und Südwestdeutschland im Vergleich,” ZGO 144 (1996): 397–428; see also Sperber’s conclusion in Popular Catholicism (n. 8 above).
72
Hyde (n. 13 above); Hans J. Behr, “Rheinland, Westfalen und Preussen in ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältnis, 1815–1945,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 133 (1983): 37–56. For a different opinion,
see Sperber, Popular Catholicism. On these opposition events, see Friedrich Keinemann, Das
Kölner Ereignis: Sein Widerhall in der Rheinprovinz und Westfalen, 2 vols. (Münster, 1974);
Wolfgang Schieder, “Kirche und Revolution: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trierer Wallfahrt
von 1844,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14 (1974): 419–54.
483
of Prussia in the region had already in the 1860s made it easier for these organizations to enlist the rural Catholic masses in support of a “greater Germany”
(Grossdeutschland) under Austrian leadership. This position was in opposition to
the interests of Bismarckian Prussia in the 1860s and especially to those of the
Prussian liberals (both Catholics and Protestants) who, although they were embroiled in the constitutional struggle (Verfassung Konflikt), were culturally dominant in those years. Mergel, as we said, points out that in the 1860s and early
1870s the Catholic bourgeois elites in Prussia were torn between support for ultramontanism and loyalty to the State of Prussia and the German Reich.73 The
Catholic bourgeoisie—both the educated and the economic bourgeoisie—tended
in the 1860s to support the state. This bourgeoisie (as Schlögl demonstrates), which
was concentrated in towns with a Catholic majority, such as Cologne, Mainz, Trier,
Düsseldorf, and Koblenz, had been culturally dominant in these towns since the
1830s. It had close ties with the Protestant minority in those towns, sometimes
intermarried with it, and had Protestant social and cultural connections. These
common economic and cultural interests cemented the Catholic-Protestant bourgeois relationship. The economic prosperity of the 1850s and 1860s prevented the
Catholic bourgeoisie from deserting to the ultramontane, conservative, anticapitalist and antiliberal side.74
Thus, at the end of the 1860s, the Catholic bourgeoisie and many liberal Catholic
politicians found themselves in a Spagat situation (being pulled in two directions)
when called on to demonstrate clearly their loyalty either to a “small Germany”
under Prussian authority, in which liberal-capitalist values prevailed, or to a
“greater Germany” under reactionary Austria, subservient to the pope and ideologically antimodern.75 Indeed, among the church leaders in Germany there were
some who were initially drawn to ultramontanism, or who tried to find a third way
that would act as a bridge between liberal-capitalist values and the positions of the
church.76 But the declarations of the church in the 1860s condemning liberalism,
capitalism, and modernity (Syllabus Errorum) and demanding absolute obedience
to papal decisions (the doctrine of papal infallibility) made it difficult for these
people, under the leadership of Emmanuel von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz, to support the movement. They were aware of the darker aspects of the liberal-capitalist
73
Sperber’s Popular Catholicism is still the best account on this topic. See also Mergel,
Zwischen Klassen (n. 7 above).
74
Mergel, Zwischen Klassen, and “Grenzgänger: Das katholische Bürgertum im Rheinland
zwischen bürgerlichem und katholischem Milieu, 1870–1914,” in Religion im Kaiserreich, ed.
Blaschke and Kuhlemann, and “Gute Katholiken und gute Preussen: Die Katholiken im wilhelminischen Minden,” in Unter Pickelhaube und Zylinder: Das östliche Westfalen im Zeitalter des
Wilhelminismus 1888 bis 1914, ed. J. Meynert (Bielefeld, 1991), pp. 157–76; Helmuth Croon,
“Krefelder Bürgertum im Wandel des 19. Jahrunderts,” Die Heimat: Zeitschrift für niederrheinische Heimatpflege 19 (1958): 19–39; Beate-C. Padtberg, Rheinischer Liberalismus in Köln während der politischen Reaktion in Preussen nach 1848/49 (Köln, 1985), pp. 20–30.
75
Mergel, Zwischen Klassen, pp. 144–47, esp. p. 144; Christoph Weber, “Eine starke enggeschlossene Phalanx” (n. 33 above).
76
For example, the bishops Holzer from Trier and Hermann from Münster. See Christoph
Weber, Liberaler Katholizismus: Biographische kirchenhistorische Essays von Franz Xaver Kraus
(Tübingen, 1983), and Kirchliche Politik (n. 6 above), pp. 4–11; Hyde.
484
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world—its exploitation of the lower classes, the social problems raised by the
unjust distribution of wealth—but they nevertheless saw liberalism as the basis
for the reorganization of society, and they did not want the church to miss taking
part in it.77 Together with the Catholic bourgeoisie and with sections of the middle
classes they tended to support the Prussian liberals, but at the end of the 1860s a
number of new circumstances caused even those who were doubtful concerning
the church’s policies, or who supported the liberals, to go over to the church’s side.
First of all, the victory over Austria and the founding of the North German Confederation under Prussian hegemony—events accompanied by anti-Catholic rhetoric—swept the ground from under the feet of the Prussian liberal Catholics. Second, the decisions of the Vatican Council (Konzil) in 1870 confronted the liberals
with a stark choice: acquiescence or opposition.78 Finally, the Prussian victory over
Catholic France only aggravated the problem.
Before proceeding further, I should like to draw attention to the regional differences within the Catholic mesomilieu in Prussia. The Catholic aristocracy in
Silesia was different from that in Westphalia, and the same applied to the bourgeoisie. As Mergel and Herres have shown, the bourgeoisie in Aachen, Bonn, and
Cologne was more liberal than that in Koblenz or in the industrial towns of the
Ruhr. The farmers in the Eiffel and Moselle regions were more backward than
those in Silesia and than their brethren in the northern Rhineland.79 In general,
Catholicism was more liberal in the area of Cologne, in Bonn, and in the towns
of the Ruhr than in eastern Germany. These differences make it difficult to generalize about the behavior of the Prussian Catholics; thus we will focus on the
ghetto in the Rhineland, which also had its regional differences but was the most
influential and important of all the bastions of Catholicism in Germany. The Catholic elites—or, more precisely, the church and the dominant classes in the area—
were confronted in the 1870s, as Schneider demonstrates, with a number of special
77
Adolf Birke, Bischof Ketteler und der deutsche Liberalismus: Eine Untersuchung über das
Verhältnis des liberalen Katholizismus zum bürgerlichen Liberalismus (Mainz, 1971); Klaus Grenner, Wirtschaftsliberalismus und katholisches Denken: Ihre Begegnung und Auseinandersetzung
im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhundert (Köln, 1967).
78
Christoph Weber, “Eine starke enggeschlossene Phalanx” and Kirchliche Politik; Mergel,
Zwischen Klasse, pp. 197–99; Sperber, Popular Catholicism.
79
I could not find a modern study on political Catholicism in Silesia; see, meanwhile, Paul
Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus in Schlesien (Breslau, 1925); Helmut
Neubach, Parteien und Politiker in Schlesien (Dortmund, 1988), deals briefly with the topic; C.
Andree, “Kulturkampf in Schlesien,” Archiv für schlesische Kirchengeschichte (1995), pp. 151–
68, briefly makes some suggestions mainly concerning the strength of the Catholic church which
was based on the Catholic aristocracy; for the West German Catholic nobility, see Horst Gründer,
“Rechtskatholizismus im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rheinlande und Westfalens,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 134 (1984): 107–55. On the
Köln bourgeoisie, see the recent studies, “Schwerpunkt: Kölner Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert,”
Geschichte in Köln 38 (December 1995); Giesela Mettele, “Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie:
Kölner Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert” (Ph.D. diss., Frankfurt University, 1994); in other cities
and towns, see Günter Bers, “Der ‘Katholische Bürgerverein’ zu Jülich,” Beiträge zur Jülicher
Geschichte 55 (1987): 52–73; Joseph Lange, Constantia und Bürgergesellschaft zu Neuss, 1861–
1986 (Neuss, 1986); Herres, Städtische Gesellschaft und katholische Vereine im Rheinland, 1840–
1870 (Essen, 1996).
485
problems. First, they were sandwiched between the South German Catholic elites
that supported Prussia, even after 1871, and Prussia itself, which was dominated
by liberal-capitalist anti-Catholics and which collaborated with Bismarck, the Hohenzollern dynasty, with its tradition of hostility to the Catholic Church, and the
Junkers. This sense of constriction led, among other things, to both extreme anticlericalist and extreme proclericalist behavior, as is shown by Blackbourn in the
case of Marpingen, Schneider in the case of the Düsseldorf area, and E. Föhles in
the case of Kempen and Geldern in the northern Rhineland.80 This sense of “encirclement” was accompanied by long drawn-out processes that were initiated by
the church in the 1850s and reached their climax in the 1870s and 1880s: a voluntary mass enlistment into the priesthood of men loyal to the spirit of ultramontanism; the enlistment of the lower classes into the Catholic associations; and the
rise of “popular religion” outside the church orders in the form of acts of pilgrimage, visions of apparitions, and the founding of fraternities. All this made it easier
for the church and its agents (newspapers, writers, intellectuals) to gain the support
of the masses, especially in times of crisis like the beginning of the 1870s.81 The
edict declaring papal infallibility forced the waverers among the Catholics in the
Rhineland to decide which camp they belonged to—the liberals or the ultramontanes—and, last and most important of all, the Kulturkampf that began in Baden
at the beginning of the 1860s forced all the above-mentioned groups to choose
their allegiance.82
Research has shown that the focus of the Kulturkampf was the Prussian Rhineland. The Kulturkampf was a watershed for both Catholics and liberals in Prussia.83
80
See also Mergel, Zwischen Klassen, p. 210. Some examples for the radicalization process
during the Kulturkampf can be found in Blackbourn, Marpingen (n. 34 above); Schneider (n. 27
above); Heinrich Schiffers, Der Kulturkampf in Stadt und Regierungsbezirk Aachen (Aachen,
1929); Herbert Lepper, Die politischen Strömungen im Regierungsbezirk Aachen zur Zeit der
Reichsgründung und des Kulturkampfes, 1867–1887 (Bonn, 1968); Karl Kammer, Trierer Kulturkampfpriester (Trier, 1926); Wolfgang Dietz, “Die Auswirkungen des Kulturkampfes im Regierungsbezirk Koblenz” (Ph.D. diss., Bonn University, 1992); Aegidius Ditscheid, Matthias
Eberhard, Bischof von Trier im Kulturkampf (Trier, 1900); J. van Gils, “Der Kulturkampf und
seine Auswirkung im Jülicher Land,” Heimat Kalender für den Kreis Jülich 13 (1963): 59–63;
Lydia Huskens, “Vereine und Politik: Politische Vereine exemplarisch untersucht für den Kreis
Geldern in den Reichsgründungsjahren und während des Kulturkampfes” (Ph.D. diss., Münster
University, 1990).
81
Blackbourn, Marpingen; On the mobilization of the bourgeoisie for the ultramontane issue,
see Mergel, Zwischen Klassen, pp. 271–76; on popular piety in the region, see Sperber, Popular
Catholicism (n. 8 above), chap. 2; Eerwin Gatz, Rheinische Volksmission im 19. Jahrhundert
(Düsseldorf, 1963), pp. 163 ff.; Gottfried Korff, “Kulturkampf und Volksreligiosität,” in Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Schieder (Göttingen, 1986), pp. 137–
51; Dietz, pp. 291 ff.; Paul S. Wynads, “Rhein-maasländische Wallfahrt des 19. Jahrhunderts,”
Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 91 (1988): 113–31, esp. pp. 125 ff.; Thomas
Hubert, Georg F. Dasbach: Priester, Publizist, Politiker (Trier, 1975); Ulrich Fohrmann, Trierer
Kulturkampf-Publizistik im Bismarckreich: Leben und Werk des Presskaplan Georg F. Dasbach
(Trier, 1977).
82
Weber, “Ein starke enggeschlossene Phalanx” and Kirchliche Politik.
83
This is the central thesis in Sperber, Popular Catholicism, chap. 5; Mergel, Zwischen Klasse
(n. 7 above); Blackbourn, Marpingen; Smith, German Nationalism (n. 2 above), chap. 3; Christoph
Weber, Kirchliche Politik.
486
Heilbronner
Föhles’s study shows how it began on a local level as a reaction of the local
Protestant elites to the general suffrage instituted by Bismarck—a step that could
have undermined their local dominance (pp. 33–40). The growing power of the
priests, who were now more easily able, by means of elections, to enlist the support
of the Catholic masses and thus to increase the power of the church, was perceived
as a threat. And finally, in the area of Kempen and Geldern, but not only there,
the Catholic side exploited the Kulturkampf to democratize the church, to augment
the power of the priests, to introduce changes in the traditional Catholic elites, and
to replace the old class of leaders with a younger leadership that was more bourgeois in its background. The struggle helped the new generation of priests to gain
positions of leadership in the Zentrum and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which,
from the 1870s onward, needed increasingly to consider the priests’ opinions.84
The struggle faced the hesitant and those who declined to enter the Catholic ghetto
that began to take shape at the end of the 1860s with a difficult decision. It was
not just a question of loyalty to ultramontane principles. The attacks (partly physical) by the Prussian government on the church and its representatives necessitated
the adoption of a clear position. One had to take up a stand either “inside or outside
the walls,” knowing that “outside the walls” (according to Föhles’s study of the
Rhineland) would inevitably mean collaboration with the Prussian bureaucracy.
Föhles describes, as an example of this conflict, the confrontation between the
Landrat Förster and the mayor of Kempen, Herr Mooren. Until the beginning of
the 1870s they were both conservatives. The Kulturkampf forced them to declare
their allegiance either to the liberals or to the church. The Catholic Mooren was
obliged to support the Zentrum and was persecuted by the conservative Förster
(pp. 157–60).
The Catholic educational system was at the center of the conflict, and Föhles’s
study gives it an important place. The educational laws of March 1872 lessened
the church’s control of the Catholic schools.85 The influence of the church on the
entire public sector, according to Föhles, was thereby diminished (p. 110). Thus,
as Schneider argues, the church not only had less influence on education, but in
addition the generation that was born and grew up in the 1870s and 1880s was
more Prussian in character than its predecessors, and this was reflected in the
German national festivities that were increasingly celebrated by the Catholics in
the Düsseldorf area from the 1890s onward (pp. 206–7). Additional laws were
passed in 1873 and in the following years. These were accompanied by discrimination, isolation, prosecution, and sometimes violent action to impose the laws. In
general, it can be said (Föhles gives examples from the northern Rhineland) that
on the bureaucratic level there was a definite anti-Catholic bias, and the whole
administrative system was pressed into the struggle.86
84
Here I agree with Margaret L. Anderson, who studied the issue on the national level; see
“Voter, Junker” (n. 3 above), and “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History” (n. 8
above).
85
Marjorie Lamberi in her State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany
(New York, 1989), and “State, Church, and the Politics of School Reform during the Kulturkampf,” Central European History 19 (1986): 63–81, gives a full account of these laws.
86
The Kulturkampf laws were summarized by Rudolf Lill, “The Kulturkampf in Prussia and
487
The actual implementation of the laws was sometimes a problem. In most cases,
the laws were promulgated but not implemented.87 But the blow represented by
the Kulturkampf was felt in other areas as well. Many priests were arrested and
imprisoned. Their congregations were disbanded. Five of the eleven bishops in
Prussia were arrested and imprisoned for short periods and their positions were
left unfilled, and Catholic newspapers and associations were placed under police
supervision.88 Most of the Catholic public in the Kempen-Geldern area supported
the church’s position, as was shown by a massive enrollment in the Catholic Vereine (p. 210). The attacks on the church strengthened their mutual ties. The Catholic lower strata, who were more vulnerable to manipulation, saw the attacks on
them not only as a blow against their faith but also as an attempt by the bourgeoisie
(both the Protestant liberal bourgeoisie and part of the Catholic one) to perpetuate
their inferiority. The Kulturkampf acquired characteristics of a class struggle not
only in the Kempen region (pp. 198–99) but also in the towns of the Ruhr, where
there was a clear division between Protestant factory owners and Catholic workers
(some of whom were Polish). Even the priests in rural areas commiserated with
their congregations for the economic exploitation they suffered from the Protestant
bourgeoisie and from Catholics with high economic positions in the village or the
local town.89
VII
The Kulturkampf served to bolster the walls of the Catholic ghetto. The politicalorganizational structure of German Catholicism was built up in the 1870s. The
popes, in a number of ordinances issued in Rome from the 1860s to the 1890s,
provided the spiritual “cover” for these isolationist tendencies. The Zentrum gave
in the German Empire until 1878,” in History of the Church, vol. 9, ed. Hubert Jedin et al. (London,
1981), pp. 26–45; and Der Kulturkampf (Paderborn, 1997); Ronald Ross, “Enforcing the Kulturkampf in the Bismarckian State and the Limits of Coercion in Imperial Germany,” Journal of
Modern History 56 (1984): 456–82, and Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (n. 8 above); the early
historiography on the Kulturkampf concentrated mainly on the legal aspect of the conflict; see
Erich Schmidt-Volkmar, Der Kulturkampf in Deutschland, 1871–1890 (Göttingen, 1962), pp. 60–
124; Heinrich Bornkamm, “Die Staatsidee im Kulturkampf,” Historische Zeitschrift 179 (1950):
41–72, 273–306; Michael Schmölke, Die Preussische Strafjustiz im Kulturkampf (Marburg, 1974).
87
This is the main argument in Ross, Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and “Enforcing the
Kulturkampf.”
88
We still need a work that will treat all the regional aspects of the Kulturkampf in one comprehensive study. Sperber in Popular Catholicism tried to do it for the Rhineland.
89
The class-conflict aspect of the Kulturkampf is another neglected area of research. Some
directions are given in Gert Zang, “Die Bedeutung der Auseinandersetzung um die Stiftungsverwaltung in Konstanz (1830–1870) für die ökonomische und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung der
lokalen Gesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der materiellen Hintergründe des Kulturkampfes,”
in her Provinzialisierung (n. 7 above), pp. 307–73; Heilbronner, “In Search” (n. 12 above). For
Prussia, see Jonathan Sperber, “The Shaping of Political Catholicism in the Ruhr Basin, 1848–
1881,” Central European History 4 (1983): 364 ff.; Klaus-M. Mallmann, “ ‘Aus des Tages Last
machen sie ein Kreuz des Herrn . . .’? Bergarbeiter, Religion und sozialer Protest im Saarrevier
des 19. Jahrhundert,” in Volksreligiosität, ed. Schieder, pp. 160 ff.
488
Heilbronner
political protection: in the 1880s it was the largest party in the Reichstag, and more
than once it held the balance in voting, especially where the budgets for the army
and navy were concerned. The priests provided spiritual protection, while the attraction necessary to prevent many Catholics from leaving the ghetto was provided
by acts of pilgrimage, saints and angels, superstitions, and the newspapers of the
Catholic Vereine. Nevertheless, one should notice the internal changes that took
place in political Catholicism: Loth has written a great deal about it in recent years.
The Zentrum changed its character in the 1890s. It was still the political arm of
the church, the main shield of Catholic interests, but the social composition of the
party altered. The core of its electoral strength was provided by workers and members of the lower middle class. In its leadership, there were fewer and fewer priests
and officials of the church and more and more bourgeois wishing to find their place
in the modern bourgeois world. Workers, farmers/artisans, and bourgeois were the
three main social groups in the Zentrum. The heads of the party had to maneuver
between the economic interests of each of these groups, and at the same time they
had to be faithful to the church where religious matters were concerned. This meant
that the party partially shed its clerical image and sought to represent itself as a
Catholic “people’s party.” The necessity of maneuvering between the demands of
the workers, the bourgeoisie, and the farmers somewhat diminished its strength,
because there was always some group that was unsatisfied, whose interests were
opposed to those of other groups that sought protection in political Catholicism.90
Thus, for example, Mergel’s Rhenish bourgeoisie (which went over to political
Catholicism in the 1870s) was at a disadvantage in relation to the lower middle
class, which was numerically more important.91
There were also other important processes that worked against the church’s
interests. The process of secularization, which was a major cultural phenomenon
in all the European societies of the period, contributed to a weakening of the
cultural infrastructure of the Zentrum, and, of course, the church. Social problems,
which were of tremendous importance in Germany because of its swift transformation from an agrarian society to an industrial one, began to affect the Catholic
ghetto as well. Although the Catholic faith with its symbols and institutions was
for many workers a place of refuge from the daily vexations of industrial life, the
drift of Catholic workers into the ranks of the social democrats and the socialist
groups was a problem for the church and its organizations.92 It was not only the
attraction of the modern world outside the walls that caused the workers to leave
the fold: the inadequacy of the ghetto in solving the social problems that arose
during industrialization also contributed to this desertion. Masses of Catholic workers, however, sought protection in the Catholic associations (Vereine), many of
90
Loth, “Integration und Erosion” (n. 10 above), and Katholiken im Kaiserreich and “Soziale
Bewegungen” (both in n. 8 above).
91
Mergel, Zwischen Klasse, pp. 308–19; see also Josef Mooser, “Katholik und Bürger? Rolle
und Bedeutung des Bürgertums auf den Deutschen Katholikentagen, 1871–1913” (Habilitationsschrift, Bielefeld, 1986).
92
Hugh McLeod, ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930 (London,
1995), pp. 1–31.
489
which combined social activities with charity (e.g., the Gesellenvereine and Katholische Arbeitervereine). Many of them were village people who had moved to the
towns in the internal immigration that took place in Europe in the course of the
industrial developments of the second half of the nineteenth century. They became
workers in factories, and the fact that they were rural Catholics raised on ultramontanism, together with their disadvantaged condition, drew them to the church
but via its charitable organizations. The churches (and not only the Catholic one)
sought to expand their activities in the cities in view of the mass immigration from
the countryside, which increased in intensity toward the end of the century. The
Ruhr and the Saar are good examples of areas where a strong bond was formed
between the workers and the Catholic Church.93 There were obstacles, however,
to the church’s capacity to absorb them. The first was its limited material resources,
especially after the Kulturkampf. The church did not succeed in every city in finding enough priests and in materially supporting the network of voluntary Catholic
organizations with whom the workers sought protection.94 Another obstacle was
ideological. The associations were economically dependent on the church, and,
despite the church’s desire to draw the workers into its ranks, it did not succeed
in ridding itself of its hostility to socialism and, hence, to the workers themselves.
An antisocialist ideology was one of the basic foundations of ultramontanism. Any
independent activity on the part of the Volksverein was alarming for the heads of
the church. The Volksverein, like other Catholic social organizations, increasingly
resembled the socialist trade unions, not only in their modes of operation (the
granting of the right to strike, bureaucratic activities, etc.) but also ideologically.
Despite the efforts of the Zentrum to represent the interests of the workers, to
mediate between the social organizations (e.g., the Volksverein) and the heads of
the church, and to portray the workers as the most important group among the
Catholics, the workers and the Catholic professional associations sensed the hostility of the church and were conscious that the leadership of the Zentrum was
composed almost entirely of bourgeois who were primarily concerned with satisfying the interests of the middle and the lower middle classes.95 This fact also
contributed to a desertion of the church and an abandonment of the Zentrum by
the workers.
93
Klaus M.-Mallmann, “Ultramontanismus und Arbeiterbewegung im Kaiserreich: Überlegungen am Beispiel des Saarreviers,” in Loth, ed. (n. 8 above), pp. 76–94; Wolfgang Jager, Bergarbeitermilieus und Parteien im Ruhrgebiet (München, 1996).
94
Lucian Hölscher, “Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century,” in McLeod,
ed. (n. 40 above), pp. 277 ff.; Albert Klonne, “Arbeiterkatholizismus,” Sozial- und Linkskatholizismus: Erinnerungen—Orientierung—Befreiung (Frankfurt, 1990); Mallmann, “Ultramontanismus.”
95
Loth, “Soziale Bewegungen,” pp. 298–305; Mooser, “Volk, Arbeiter und Bürger” (n. 8
above); Raymond Sun, “ ‘Before the Enemy Is within Our Walls’: A Social, Cultural and Political
History of Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University,
1992), pp. 692–729; Jürgen M. Schutz, Kirche im Aufbruch: Das sozialpolitische Engagement
der katholischen Presse Berlins im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Berlin, 1994); Wolfgang Löhr,
“Ein unglücklicher Auftakt: Erzbischof Felix von Hartmann besucht den Volksverein für das
katholische Deutschland,” Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 192/193 (1990):
97–115.
490
Heilbronner
A further difficulty for the church and the Zentrum was the increase in hostile
acts and discrimination toward Catholics even after the various German states had
officially abandoned the Kulturkampf. There were political, sexual, and class/economic conflicts—both open and hidden—in the Second Reich, but the most
prominent of all was the Protestant-Catholic conflict. Nipperdey and especially
Smith have demonstrated that this was the most long lasting of the major conflicts
in the Second Reich, at least in areas where the two groups lived next to each other
(southern, western, and eastern Germany). The hostility between the two religions
was especially intense and sometimes violent on the local level.96 This hostility
helped to convince many Catholics in rural areas that life outside the walls was
extremely dangerous; at the same time, the enmity made many wonder whether
the ultramontane policies of the village priest and the church authorities were wise.
These policies, after all, meant years of uncompromising struggle, of perpetual
confrontation. And, worse still, they perpetuated the Catholic position of inferiority.97 Owing to these conflicts and to the Zentrum’s strong position in the Reichstag, the bourgeois policies of some of its leaders, and the desire of some of the
former supporters of ultramontanism to enter the bourgeois world “beyond the
walls,” a world of a liberal-conservative character, a world that gave first place to
the German nation and that sought to integrate separatist forces within it—owing
to all these factors and, of course, developments outside Catholicism, such as the
increasing power of socialism, from the beginning of the present century a number
of crises took place among the German Catholics about the attitude they should
adopt toward the modern character of Wilhelmine Germany.
The conflict waged by the Zentrum (known as the Zentrumsstreit) concerned
the desire to break away from the church on account of its ultramontane policies
and to integrate the Zentrum and the German Catholics into the imperial status
quo. This led to a demand to drop the Catholic image of the party and to transform
the Zentrum into an interdenominational party that could also include Protestants
and Jews. The slogan of a group within the party centered in the Rhineland and
led by members of the Bachem family was: “We must leave the church fortress.”
They were joined by a large group of Catholic intellectuals who for some years
had asked for reform in the church and who were headed by Hermann Schell and
Felix Porsch. Their opponents from Berlin and Silesia—led by Herman Rören
and, for a number of years, Mattias Erzberger—as well as, of course, most of the
leaders of the Catholic Church, claimed that the imperial status quo that the group
from the Rhineland (Kölner Richtung) wanted to join perpetuated the Catholic
position of inferiority and that the leaders of the Prussian government had not
really done anything to rescind the laws of the Kulturkampf. They therefore concluded that the duty of Catholics was to preserve their traditional values and persist
with the ghetto mentality. One had to strengthen the walls, they said, not abandon
them, for if one took the latter course one would be exposed to the dangers of the
Prussian regime.98
96
Helmut W. Smith, “Religion and Conflict” (n. 25 above), and German Nationalism (n. 2
above); Nipperdey (n. 43 above), p. 155.
97
See n. 16 and Mooser, “ ‘Christlicher Beruf’ und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ ” (n. 8 above).
98
Anderson, “The Zentrumsstreit” (n. 8 above); John Zeender, “German Catholics and the
491
The struggle took place almost entirely within the Catholic fold. Most of the
public and the German elites other than the Catholics took no part in it and were
not even interested. Those that did take part were pleased by the misfortune of the
church and the Zentrum. Not even the Catholic masses were involved in the conflict. The workers already had one foot out of Catholicism, despite the fact that
their representatives, the Catholic workers’ unions, were among the chief protagonists of the controversy. The Rhenish group tried to steer the debate toward a
consideration of the church’s hostile policy toward the Catholic unions. They
claimed that leaving the walls of the ghetto also meant being attentive to their
needs. The young people from bourgeois Catholic families who had not passed
through the experience of the Kulturkampf wanted to be part of the German national order without any interference from the church. The Catholic landed aristocracy, which had supported the church for a time, also wanted to promote their
interests in the Prussian state, which had done so much for the Protestant aristocracy.99 The Catholic bourgeois elites and farmers in the south had already been
beyond the reach of the church for many years. The Zentrum controversy became
the crisis of the German Catholic Church. I believe it was a clear indication of the
boundaries of the Catholic ghetto.
This crisis should not be seen as something separate from the crisis of the
German state and society, of European society, and of the Catholic Church in
Europe on the eve of the First World War. The policies, so typical of the period,
led to a reaction. The cultural pessimism of the fin de siècle, so much a consequence of the ambivalence of modernism, formed part of this. The fear of modernism and the apprehension that its achievements might prove to be a fearful
double-edged weapon also found expression among the German Catholics. What
should the direction of the future be? Continued isolation in a ghetto or a change
of values? An attachment to religious anachronism perpetuating deprivation and
backwardness, or “leaping out beyond the walls”? The whole of Germany was
struggling with these questions in one form or another. The whole society was
undergoing processes of change in which the forces of the past feared for their
position. Some attempted to confront the crisis by fashioning new instruments:
new political organizations, new ideologies, the mobilization of new social groups.
A few tried, by manipulative methods, to preserve their authority: nationalism and
imperialism were some of the manipulative means by which part of the traditional
elites sought to maintain their ascendancy. The German Catholics moved to and
fro between the different forces. As a deprived minority they were in no position
Concept of an Interconfessional Party, 1900–1922,” Journal of Central European Affairs 23
(1964): 424–39; Ronald J. Ross, Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in
Wilhelmine Germany (Notre Dame, Ind., 1976); Karl J. Rivinius, “Integralismus und Reformkatholizismus: Die Kontroverse um Herman Schell,” in Loth, ed., pp. 199–218; Gerhard Besier,
Religion, Nation, Kultur: Die Geschichte der christlichen Kirchen in den gesellschaftlichen Umbrüchen des 19. Jahrhundert (Neukirchen, 1992), pp. 130 ff.; Hürten, Kurze Geschichte (n. 45
above), pp. 178 ff.; R. Brack, Deutsches Episkopat und Gewerkschaftsstreit, 1900–1914 (Köln,
1976); Helmut Heitzer, Kardinal Georg Kopp und der Gewerkschaftsstreit, 1900–1914 (Köln,
1983); O’Meara (n. 21 above), chap. 8.
99
Gründer (n. 79 above); Christoph Weber, Der ‘Fall Spahn’ (1901): Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschafts- und Kulturdiskussion im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert (Rome, 1980).
492
Heilbronner
to decide the national policies. The Hohenzollern establishment still regarded the
Catholic Church as hostile to the German state. The Zentrum was not yet ready to
take part in government (salonfähig), although the “blue” (Prussian) conservative
elites were increasingly prepared to collaborate with the “black” (ultramontane)
ones. The war that broke out in 1914 was to resolve, for Germany and other states,
the crisis in which they were embroiled. It also breached the walls of the ghetto,
which were apparently not strong enough to withstand the forces of modernity.
The war provided the church with the opportunity to prove its loyalty to the forces
of the past (the Hohenzollern elites), thus strengthening its position, and at the
same time provided the Zentrum, with the worsening of Germany’s fortunes at the
front, with the opportunity of demonstrating its loyalty to the forces of the future
(the socialists).100
VIII
The Zentrum’s and the socialists’ peace proposal in 1917, their collaboration in
setting up the Weimar Republic, and their cooperation in Prussia throughout the
Weimar period showed that the Catholics had left the political ghetto in which
they had previously existed. The collaboration between the Catholic right and the
Protestant right in attacking the republic was a demonstration of the same phenomenon. The granting of women’s right to vote contributed to the stability of the
Zentrum’s electoral strength, despite the desertion of parts of its traditional electorate, even before the war, and the loss of areas in which there was a Catholic
majority as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Now the Zentrum’s candidates
served in government (in Baden and Prussia together with the socialists, in Bavaria
in exclusivity), and in certain periods they were even prime ministers of Germany.
And although the church kept its distance from the republic, it benefited from the
strong position of the Zentrum and made some important gains through agreements
(concordats) with various German states concerning the position of the Church. It
must also be pointed out that it was a churchman, Ludwig Kaas, who led the
Zentrum from 1927 onward.
Scholars have not paid sufficient attention to the German Catholic experience
under Weimar. Although the political activities of the German Catholics in that
period have been well investigated, the state of research concerning Weimar
Catholicism resembles the situation a few decades ago with regard to German
Catholicism in the Second Reich.101 Few studies draw attention to the sociocultural
aspects of Weimar Catholicism, but from those that do it appears that the ghetto,
100
Besier, pp. 151–69; Günter Baadte, “Katholischer Universalismus und nationale Katholizismen im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Europa seit 1800, ed.
Albrecht Langer (Paderborn, 1985), pp. 89–110.
101
Loth, “Soziale Bewegungen” (n. 8 above), pp. 308 ff.; Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken,
1918–1945 (Paderborn, 1992); Karsten Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar: Das Zentrum
als regierende Partei in der Weimarer Demokratie (Düsseldorf, 1992).
493
as it existed before the war, was gone.102 A modern mesomilieu was in the process
of formation. Kösters’s study of the activities of the Catholic Vereine, especially
the socioeconomic aspects in Münster, indicates their modern character and objectives during the Weimar period. This phenomenon took many Catholics out of
the mental ghetto in which they had been imprisoned in the nineteenth century.
The economic crisis also impelled many to look for cultural fulfillment outside the
traditional frameworks, which did not always provide adequate protection against
economic difficulties. Here Weichlein’s study of the Catholic mesomilieu in north
Hessen (part of the Fulda diocese) adds an important dimension. His main argument concerning the Catholic milieu (his book also deals with the socialist, conservative, liberal, and radical leftist milieus) is that the forces that splintered the
Catholic milieu into sympathizers of the extreme left and right and the erosion
among the Zentrum’s voters also cast a shadow over the activities of the church
in North Hessen, and of the Catholic Vereine in particular, especially before 1930.
The church remained firmly opposed to the extreme left and at times to the right
and, in contrast to its policy before 1914, now showed open hostility to the Vereine
of socialist orientation (p. 159). This hostility can be traced to one of the most
important characteristics of the Catholic Church, and hence of the Catholic milieu
as a whole (although this is not Weichlein’s main concern): the ferment of religious
activity among individual Catholics and Catholic communities. Through this activity the church hoped to strengthen the religious consciousness of the individual
and to reverse the trend toward secularization (p. 167). Unlike the situation in the
nineteenth century, when politics and society were considered proper spheres for
church activities, the focus now shifted to the domain of life within the church (p.
115). Here the Catholic Vereine played a major though ambivalent role.
At the center of Weichlein’s study are the class-based Catholic Vereine and the
Volksverein (Vv) in particular. Weichlein, like Kösters, argues that they sank into
a crisis from the mid-1920s onward (p. 159). The trade unions, the Katholische
Arbeitervereine (KAV ), and the Vv also suffered from instability. Despite the ambivalence of their attitudes toward democracy, the republic, and the left- and rightwing parties, the class-based Vereine did cooperate with the republic. Their social
activities and sociopolitical outlook brought down the fury of church leaders. Yet
many groups of workers also took a dim view of the relations between their Vereine
and the Zentrum (which—not only in Hessen—leaned toward the right from the
mid-twenties onward: pp. 110 ff.). Even more significant was the decline of church
support for these Vereine, which made it virtually impossible for them to achieve
their objectives (p. 159). Weichlein describes this process mainly as it existed in
the Vv, the KAV, and youth organizations such as the Deutsche Jugendkraft. By
102
Noteworthy are C. Rau-Kühne, Katholisches Milieu und Kleinstadtgesellschaft: Ettlingen,
1918–1939 (Sigmaringen, 1991); Günter Plum, Gesellschaftsstruktur und politisches Bewußtsein
in einer katholischen Region, 1928–1933: Untersuchungen am Beispiel des Regierungsbezirks
Aachen (Stuttgart, 1973); Robert Moeller, German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914–1924:
The Rhineland and Westphalia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986); Oded Heilbronner, “Catholic Plight and
the Rise of the Nazi Party in a Rural Area of Germany,” Social History 20 (1995): 219–34, and
Catholicism, Political Culture and the Countryside (n. 64 above).
494
Heilbronner
1929 many members had left, and it was mainly afterward, as a response to the
rise of the Nazis and the communists, that some signs of slow growth were evident.
More and more people joined these Vereine, but these new members were mostly
middle-aged (pp. 130–31); young people refrained from joining. A different process occurred in the Gesellenverein, which witnessed a relative growth of its membership and branches (p. 126), especially in rural regions. All the Vereine tried
from the end of the 1920s to give their activities a more nationalistic and religious
character and sought a stronger form of government, championing Chancellor Brüning and supporting the policies of the Zentrum and church. From the beginning
of the 1930s, these Vereine, together with the Zentrum, devoted their efforts to
fighting the Nazi Party and the communists (p. 165), which contributed to halting
the erosion of the Catholic milieu (p. 315).
Weichlein’s stress on the structural-organizational aspect of the Catholic milieu
ignores some ideological factors that were very important in rebuilding the Catholic milieu under Weimar. The pull to the right, antisemitism, the growing hostility
toward the left, the ideas of a “folk community” and of a society based on family
descent (rather than economic status, as is usual in class-based societies), and the
fear of Bolshevism: all these reflected both the opportunities and the dilemmas and
upheavals of the Catholic milieus under Weimar. These phenomena should be seen
not only as a reaction to World War I and the economic crises that came in its
wake but also as an expression of the growing Catholic desire to break down the
stifling ghetto walls of the Wilhelmine period. The result was growing polarization
between those who managed to escape from the ghetto and those who remained
inside; between the tendency to break down the walls and that to remain entrenched; between the desire to join mainstream German society (which was also
rightward leaning) and the fundamental nature of the Catholic bourgeois Vereine,
the church, and the Zentrum.
This was confirmed by political developments. Although the socialist direction
the Republic took in the 1920s and the strengthening of the extreme left drove the
church and the Zentrum in a more conservative direction, they did not return to
nineteenth-century ultramontanism. The lesson of the 1870s had been learned:
there must never again be a ghetto. The aim was now to participate in the general
society, to adapt the church to the prevailing tendencies. It was only a short distance
from here to support for National Socialism. The Weimar experience, the support
for the Third Reich and, finally, life under the West German Republic took the
Catholics right out of the ghetto.103 Most of the German chancellors from 1917
until today, including Hitler, have been Catholics. Bismarck and Windthorst, each
for their own reasons, must be turning in their graves! The German Catholics had
left their ghetto.
IX
It has been my claim throughout this article that preconceptions, outmoded methods of research, the fact that German Catholicism has been concentrated in back103
This is the main argument concerning political Catholicism in Cary (n. 49 above).
495
ward, peripheral areas (with the exception of the Rhineland), and, above all, the
Prussian-Protestant hegemony in German culture have placed the Catholic historians and their works in a marginal position in historical scholarship. Most studies
of German Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been made
by Catholic scholars with an antiquated approach to research, and—where the
study of German Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century is concerned—an apologetic attitude. German Catholicism and its historians have thus
been confined to a historiographical ghetto. However, studies by German and Anglo-American scholars from the 1980s onward have adopted new methods, focused
on peripheral Catholic areas in south Germany (as well as on areas in the Rhineland), and have generally been free of the attitudes and preconceptions so evident
among the followers of Max Weber and in the Prussian-centralistic approach to
German Catholicism. From this point of view, the historiography of Catholicism
has emerged from the ghetto it has inhabited for more than one hundred years.
One must also take into account the political changes that took place after 1949
in West Germany, which have highlighted the prominence of political, although
not ultramontane, Catholicism in German political culture. But, at the same time,
this emergence from the ghetto has laid German Catholicism open to a historicalcritical approach that has paradoxically contributed to the creation of an old-new
image of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German Catholicism. In
the new studies, Catholic society is revealed as a ghetto society characterized by
insulation and separateness, most of whose members lived throughout the nineteenth century in a backward cultural environment under the dominance of ultramontanism. Small but highly active liberal-bourgeois groups among the Catholics
in southern and western Germany tried throughout the nineteenth century to encourage a process of breaking down the walls of the Church in order to modernize
the Catholic milieu and to join the surrounding society. These efforts were successful from the first decade of the twentieth century and were assisted by economic changes in Germany and by the experiences of the First World War, the
Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich.

Review Article From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic

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