Book Review: A distant mirror - Liberals versus Catholics in 19th Century Germany
The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)
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I read The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)as part of my project to explore the relationship of Adolf Hitler and Nazism to Catholicism and Christianity. The project has resulted in me going deeper into German religious history.
My reading started with The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigman-Gall, which discussed the Nazis attempt to draw German Protestantism into the Nazi system. The Nazis originally had a great deal of hope that this effort would work in that Protestantism and German Nationalism were not inherently at odds with each other. It was the Nazi view that to be a good German meant being a good Protestant, and vice versa. In order to accomplish this, the Nazis made efforts to remake Protestant Christianity in the image of Nazi anti-semitism by removing the Old Testament and reconstructing the image of Jesus as the original anti-semite. In their efforts, the Nazis were amazingly successful in that a majority of Protestant German churches joined the German Christian movement and agreed to Nazi theological concepts such as removing the Old Testament from the Christian canon and segregating Christians of Jewish ancestry from Christians of non-Jewish ancestry. [See also The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.] On the other hand, a minority of Christians were motivated by this fundamental betrayal of Christian tradition into opposing the Nazi's German Christian movement by forming the Confessing Church. At this time - in the mid-to-late 1930s - Hitler's religious attitudes were not Christian in any sense of the word in that his theology ripped the Jewish context out of Christianity. Further, as it became apparent that a large number of Christians were opposing the Nazi reconstruction of Christianity, Hitler soured on his belief that Protestantism and German Nationalism were complementary elements of the German identity. Steigman-Gall leaves no doubt that during this period, when the Nazis were in power, National Socialism was antithetical to Catholicism and that Nazi leaders and members who had come from a Catholic background were apostates and often bitterly opposed to Catholicism. By the time that the Nazis were in power, it was clear to them that institutional Catholicism was opposed to the National Socialism and that being a loyal Catholic meant being loyal to a power that was not German. This attitude contrasted with Nazis from a Protestant background who often remained members in good standing of their church.
Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism by Derek Hastings was the next in order. Hastings covered an earlier period of Nazi history, the brief moment before National Socialism became a truly national moment. During that short period of time - approximately 1919 to 1923 - National Socialism was a Catholic political party that had its origin in Catholic Bavaria. However, although it was a Catholic political party, it was not the Catholic political party. Bavarian Catholicism divided between Catholics who were "ultramontane," or whose self-identity involved an allegiance to the papacy, and non-ultramontane, or anti-ultramontane, Catholics, whose self-identity involved emphasizing their loyalty to Germany at the expense of the papacy. The source of National Socialism in its earl stage was not with the ultramontanes, but with those Catholics who were looking for a way to accommodate their Catholic identity with their German identity. National Socialism promised such an accommodation until Hitler decided to take his movement nation-wide in an alliance with the virulent Anti-Catholic former general Ludendorff.
The problem that bedeviled German politics for Hitler was how to negotiate around the fact that Germany was split between a majority Protestant population and a minority Catholic population that had a long history of antagonism. Hitler's attempted answer to that was the establishment of "Positive Christianity" - an initially vague notion that promised a way that Catholics and Protestants could cooperate in the reconstruction of German identity.
To anyone acquainted with the current moment, it seems pretty apparent that the Christian opponents of National Socialism would be what we today call "conservative," in their institutional allegiance to the papacy, in the case of Catholics, or to the traditional understanding of Jesus and the canon of the Bible, in the case of Protestants. On the other hand, the Christian supporters of Hitler were those who were willing to resist the papacy in favor of `local control' or radically reconstruct Christian theology in favor of a currently popular academic theory. In short, one can't help but notice that the Protestant and Catholic supporters of Hitler were those who came out of a liberal tradition of Christianity, which will surely come a surprise to those who take Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, with its fable that it was the "conservative" Pius XII who was responsible for Hitler's rise to power, as gospel truth.
Gross' The War against Catholicism is the next installment in this archeological approach to the issues presented by the history of the 1920s and 1930s. Gross' book is an analysis of the Kulturkampf, a period immediately after the formation of the German Empire in 1870 when the German state attempted to liquidate Catholicism. Gross' thesis is that the Kulturkampf was a project of German liberalism and represented a principled application of liberal principles as understood by mid-Nineteenth Century German liberals, rather than, as often asserted, a betrayal of those principles.
The Kulturkampf is a period that is often unjustly neglected by people who approach the issues of German religious identity under the Nazis. One might speculate that this fact is evidence of Gross' thesis concerning the antipathy of liberalism for religion in general and Catholicism in particular, in that most scholars view themselves as liberals, and don't seem to have much sympathy for Catholicism, and, therefore, haven't much interest in a period when Catholics were persecuted by liberals. The persecution was very real and included a number of moves that were typical of anti-clerical efforts before and after the Kulturkampf, including prohibiting Catholic religious orders from teaching, depriving the Catholic Church of title to its property, exiling foreign Catholic priests and brothers, and requiring the Catholic church to submit to state control with respect to the appointment of priests and bishops. By the end of the Kulturkampf vast sections of Germany had been deprived of Catholic priests, large numbers of Catholics had been arrested and virtually every bishop in Protestant areas of Germany had been forced into exile. Given that the Kulturkampf was something experienced by the parents and grandparents of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s, one might think that the Catholic reaction to National Socialism, which raised the specter of a new Kulturkampf, might be of some interest to historians.
Gross points out that the Kulturkampf resulted from a coming together of a variety of cultural development during the Nineteenth Century. One of the important influences was the revival of Catholic culture and its re-orientation in an ultramontane direction by an energetic campaign of preaching and revivals, which began after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, and which were led by various religious orders including the Jesuits. The revival of Catholicism, particularly a papally oriented Catholicism, stirred a Protestant anti-Catholic backlash, which traded in conventional tropes about Catholic superstition and ignorance. The backlash also promoted the idea of the Jesuits as a conspiring threat to Germany. Often times in reading liberal descriptions of the Jesuits, I was put in mind of Hitler's descriptions of the Jews. [Gross points out that while the Nineteenth Century represented a zenith of anti-Catholic agitation and persecution in Germany, Jews were being freed from the traditional restrictions on their civil rights.] Interestingly, this anti-Jesuit attitude was rampant in America during essentially the same period. This was not entirely an accident when one considers that the famous Anti-Catholic picture of the "American Ganges" was drawn by the Protestant German-immigrant, Thomas Nast, who used tropes and images that would have been familiar to readers of German liberal magazines and newspapers.
Gross also argues that another cultural phenomenon that inspired the Kulturkampf was the involvement of Catholic women in public affairs. Gross spends a chapter discussing the issue of the "Women's Question." In Nineteenth Century Germany, the women's question was answered by liberals with the response that "a woman's place was in the home." Women - and men - were expected to respect the distinction between the public and the private. However, Catholic religious orders and lay movement gave women a prominent place in public, which upset liberal Germans. Further, liberal Germans identified Catholicism, and Catholic priests in particular, with "womanly traits," which further played into liberal Anti-Catholic propaganda.
As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)
The result of the Kulturkampf was to energize ultramontane Catholics to support the Catholic political party, which became the Catholic Center Party. For the next 50 years, until it disbanded itself under pressure from Hitler, the Catholic Center Party would invariably be one of the larger parties in the German parliament. It would outlast the liberal parties who had persecuted the Catholic Church. The existence of the Center Party confronted Catholics with a fundamental question as to whether they were primarily Catholic or primarily German. As Hastings points out, Hitler would run an effective campaign against "political Catholicism" and argue for the retirement of the Catholic Church from German politics. This was a theme that appealed to many Catholics who felt torn between their Catholic and German identities. Ultimately, the Concordat between Germany and the Vatican, so condemned by John Cornwell, was an effort to achieve this "liberal" goal.
I am glad that I came at Gross' book in the order I did. As with many academic books of this sort, including the books by Steigman-Gall and Hastings, there are a lot of unfamiliar names to keep track of. Gross' writing is clear and his thesis is engaging and well-supported. One of the interesting take-aways for me was the origin of the "Old Catholic Church." I knew that it had formed in opposition to Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility, but I did not understand why such an apparently "conservative" church should be so liberal in its modern form. The answer is that it was formed as a "liberal" reaction to the conservative or ultramontane direction that Catholicism took in the 19th Century.
This book is well worth the price and time spent in reading it for that kind of insight. Too often, we read the past through our modern lenses. This is the reason that people like John Cornwell and his readers can so misunderstand the history of National Socialism and the Catholic Church and draw the wrong lesson from their misunderstanding. John Cornwell would have been well served if he had had - and attempted to understand - the history set forth in this very worthwhile book.
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