Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification

by Rebecca Ayako Bennette

Overview

Historians have long believed that Catholics were late and ambivalent supporters of the German nation. Rebecca Ayako Bennette’s bold new interpretation demonstrates definitively that from the beginning in 1871, when Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser of a unified Germany, Catholics were actively promoting a German national identity for the new Reich.

In the years following unification, Germany was embroiled in a struggle to define the new nation. Otto von Bismarck and his allies looked to establish Germany as a modern nation through emphasis on Protestantism and military prowess. Many Catholics feared for their future when he launched the Kulturkampf, a program to break the political and social power of German Catholicism. But these anti-Catholic policies did not destroy Catholic hopes for the new Germany. Rather, they encouraged Catholics to develop an alternative to the Protestant and liberal visions that dominated the political culture. Bennette’s reconstruction of Catholic thought and politics sheds light on several aspects of German life. From her discovery of Catholics who favored a more “feminine” alternative to Bismarckian militarism to her claim that anti-socialism, not anti-Semitism, energized Catholic politics, Bennette’s work forces us to rethink much of what we know about religion and national identity in late nineteenth-century Germany.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674065635
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/20/2012
Series:	Harvard Historical Studies , #178
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Ayako Bennette is Assistant Professor of History at Middlebury College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Map: The German Empire, 1871-1918 xi

Introduction 1

Part I Antecedents and the Four Phases of the Kulturkampf

1 The German Question and Religion 15

2 The Beginning of the German Epoch 22

3 The Limits of Loyalty Tested 42

4 The Real Threat Emerges 53

5 The Search for Continued Relevance 66

Part II The Formation of Catholic National Identity

6 Mapping Germany from the Borders to Berlin 76

7 Femininity and the Debate over the Guiding Principle of the Nation 96

8 The Battle over Schools and Scholarship 122

9 The Moral Geography of Europe and Beyond 157

Conclusion 187

Notes 195

Bibliography 313

Index 351

Editorial Reviews

A first-rate work that significantly revises our understanding of a key issue in modern German history. Bennette shows for the first time that the Kulturkampf dented German Catholic loyalties to the new nation-state far less seriously than historians have hitherto assumed. Instead, it was precisely during the period of repression that Catholics developed an alternative national culture, one which opposed not the nation-state itself, but Protestant and liberal visions of it. This very fine book is a crucial contribution to the history of German Catholicism before World War I. No other work brings us as deeply into the mindset of German Catholics as they negotiated their way into the culture of German nationalism.

Helmut Walser Smith

Bennette joins a growing number of recent historians who are shedding fresh light on the dynamics of religious conflict under the Kaiserreich. Fighting for the Soul of Germany guides us reliably and insightfully through Catholic understandings of German nationhood in the era of Bismarck.

Geoff Eley

Bennette has written a lucid, scholarly analysis that furthers past research that has studied Catholics no longer in the ghetto, and who can now be treated as modern historical subjects.

Choice - D. J. Dietrich