The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany
343
The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany
343eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This book is a pioneering contribution to the history of the founding of the West German political system after the Second World War. The political cooperation between Catholics and Protestants that resulted in the formation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in occupied and early West Germany represented a significant change from a long history of hostility in confessional relations. Given that the CDU went on to dominate politics in West Germany well into the 1960s, Maria D. Mitchell argues that an understanding of what made this interconfessional party possible is crucial to an exploration of German history in the postwar period. She examines the political history of party formation as well as the religious beliefs and motivations that shaped the party's philosophy and positions. She provides an authoritative guide to the complex processes of maneuvering and negotiation that produced the CDU during 1945-46. The full range of political possibilities is discussed, including the suppressed alternatives to the Adenauer/Erhard axis that eventually defined the party's trajectory during the 1950s and the abortive Christian Socialism associated with Jacob Kaiser.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472028542 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2012 |
| Series: | Social History, Popular Culture, And Politics In Germany |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 343 |
| File size: | 714 KB |
About the Author
Maria D. Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College.
Read an Excerpt
The Origins of Christian Democracy
Politics and Confession in Modern Germany
By Maria D. Mitchell
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11841-0
CHAPTER 1
Confessional Conflict in German History
Cast in the extraordinary conditions of occupied Germany, Christian Democracy was nonetheless an outgrowth of complex developments extending into the German and European past. Though a diffuse political movement with profound national variations, Christian Democracy was clearly rooted in the parties that helped reinvent Catholic identity in post–French Revolutionary Europe. As the politicization of Enlightenment ideals rendered traditional Catholicism a leading target of intellectual and governmental critique, devout Catholics' adherence to traditional beliefs during a period of nation building and aggressive modernization set them at odds with almost every scientific, intellectual, and social innovation of the century. The result was the emergence of "two Europes" — the clerical and the anticlerical — and, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, a series of "culture wars" across the continent.
The Kulturkampf
The confrontation between Catholics and their opponents was well under way by the 1840s, as liberals battled political Catholicism on a terrain of nationalism, civil liberties, antisemitism, and sexuality. But for Catholics in Germany, the Kulturkampf realized modernization's greatest threat. Catalyzed by Protestant hostility to the 1864 Syllabus of Errors and the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility, the Kulturkampf sought to impose state control over the Catholic Church through, among other measures, the requirement of civil marriage, the imposition of state control over Catholic education and Prussian clergy appointments, and the expulsion of the Jesuit order. Designed to forge a unified German nationalist culture based on Protestant values, the Kulturkampf fed on long-standing German Protestant stereotypes about and hostility to German Catholics; for many middle-class Germans, it represented an opportunity for societal reform that would stem challenges to liberal hegemony. The ultimate modern European conflict between liberalism and Catholicism, the Kulturkampf had a dramatic impact on Catholic practices and long-lasting effects. While the Kulturkampf sought to forge one nation, it codified two separate German national identities, one Protestant and one Catholic, and according to Olaf Blaschke inaugurated Germany's "second confessional century."
Arguably the most significant immediate legacy of the Kulturkampf was the solidification of a process already under way — the formation of the Catholic Teilkultur. Defined by its cohesive value system and daily rituals, this network of Catholic associations connected church groups, a thriving Catholic press, theater and reading clubs, and organizations for children, mothers, and workers. At the same time, Catholicism continued a popular ultramontane revival in motion since the 1848 revolution, expressing itself in the forms most antipathetic to liberals: processions, new monastic orders, pilgrimages, worship of saints and the Virgin Mary. Perceived as backward by critics, Catholic responses to the Kulturkampf, including mass and female mobilization, the development of voluntary associations, and the use of emergent media, were in many ways in fact definitively modern.
Indeed, by bringing Catholics, especially rural Catholics, into the public sphere and political process, the Kulturkampf ultimately contributed to the expansion of political participation in Germany. With the founding of the Center Party in 1870 in Soest, the Kulturkampf forged a strong and cohesive Catholic party that would serve as a model for other national Catholic movements. Dedication among German Catholics to organizations of the Catholic milieu was so strong that Center leaders felt little need to develop an independent party structure. Leaders of the laity's struggle with the state, especially in the Rhine Province, Westphalia, and Hesse, clergymen now proved essential to maintaining the Teilkultur's infrastructure and symbolic forms. Significantly for the party's future, twenty-one of the original fifty-two signers of the program in Soest identified themselves as clerics.
Propelled by clerical agitation and Catholic insecurity, the Center Party quickly emerged as the Reichstag's largest party. Undermined by Catholic political and social assimilation in the wake of the Kulturkampf, however, the Center Party's support slid gradually and unevenly. In response, beginning early in the twentieth century, Center Party leaders — many of whom would play leading roles in party organization after 1945 — participated in a series of impassioned exchanges about dismantling the Turm, or tower, of German political Catholicism. These debates, challenging the legitimacy of an exclusively Catholic party, constitute important chapters in the history of Catholic political organization. They also provide a valuable perspective on the emergence of Christian Democracy after World War II.
Catholic Battles: The Romantic versus Realist Schools
The question of interconfessionalism stood at the heart of deliberations over the nature of German Catholic organization. Despite the cohesiveness resulting from the Kulturkampf, the Zentrum had been divided internally from its first days on a number of issues, including relations with the Vatican. Largely united during the 1870s and 1880s by the undisputed champion of Catholic parliamentary resistance to the Kulturkampf, Ludwig Windthorst, the party nonetheless split on such questions as Jewish rights and Bismarck's antisocialist law. After the Kulturkampf's resolution in the 1880s and Windthorst's death in 1891 unraveled the party's fragile solidarity, tensions within the Zentrum — especially those between agrarian and urban representatives — soon became so severe that one prominent party member questioned the party's ability to survive.
Windthorst's leadership of the party during its formative years was crucial to the Zentrum's development in a number of ways, among them Windthorst's commitment of the Center Party to what has been labeled the realistic, realist, secular, or liberal tradition of political Catholicism. Liberal Catholics such as Windthorst, while by no means favorably disposed toward secularism, Prussianism, capitalism, or any other form of materialism or modernism they associated with Protestant-dominated Germany, nevertheless acknowledged the social, economic, and political realities of contemporary society. By choosing to accept the modern state structure, the social changes of industrialization, the value of the written constitution (especially as a tool for defending Catholic rights), and the potential merit of select aspects of political liberalism, realist Catholics advocated a synthesis of traditional religious belief and seemingly modern political behavior.
Most important for the future of Catholic organization, liberal Catholics supported a secularized vision of political Catholicism, including freedom from clerical control and the prospect of interconfessionalism. While Catholics on the local level exhibited enormous hostility to Protestants, German Catholics did not, in contrast to German Protestants, adopt a confessionally antagonistic national discourse. Catholics may well have imagined a Germany without Jews or Social Democrats, but they never excluded religious Protestants from their vision, and for its part the Center Party never codified enmity to Protestants.
Liberal Catholics were by no means hegemonic within Catholic Germany, however, and the corporatist, integralist, reactionary, sectarian, ultramontane, or romantic tradition of Catholicism remained influential well into the twentieth century. Often portrayed as fundamentally opposed, these two traditions in fact shared fundamental suspicions of non-Catholic historical developments, yet important differences remained. First codified in 1838 by Joseph Görres, among others, romantic Catholicism equated the spiritual integrity of Catholic dogma with that of German romanticism; it consequently rejected rationalist thought and Protestant- and Prussian-led manifestations, including democracy, liberalism, and the organization of a powerful state. In opposition to the modern social order, romantic Catholics developed a cult of the Abendland modeled on the medieval Reich as a natural, God-given hierarchy founded in a decentralized, Aquinian order, in which guilds and commercial and agrarian agencies directed economic policy and guaranteed societal harmony. Romantic Catholics prioritized Catholic internationalism over German nationalism and argued for an exclusively Catholic party tied closely to the church.
Ultramontane Catholicism was deeply rooted in Silesia, the Rhineland, Westphalia, and Bavaria, although the geographic differences in political Catholicism explain why Bavarian Catholic organization receives little mention here. A bastion of Catholic political activity, Bavaria harbored a different confessional Teilkultur and understanding of political Catholicism than did its provincial counterparts. Bavaria's historic concern for states' rights and its overwhelmingly rural constituency lent all Bavarian politics a distinctive and dogmatically conservative character. With the founding of a separate Catholic party after World War I and the CSU after World War II, Bavarian political Catholicism assumed concrete forms beyond the scope of our consideration.
The contrast between Bavarian and Rhenish-Westphalian political Catholicism became especially pronounced as the Catholic working class of the Rhineland and the Ruhr expanded, and the Catholic Rhineland served as the primary stage for battles between romantic and liberal Catholicism. Indeed, while active throughout Baden and Württemberg, liberal Catholics found their real nucleus in Westphalia and especially in the Rhine Province, two of Germany's leading industrial centers. Centuries of exposure to French intellectual currents and culture, the Napoleonic occupation, and Prussian state modernization after 1815 all influenced the political culture of German territory west of the Rhine. While nineteenth-century Cologne, the "German Rome," represented the heart of Rhenish liberal Catholicism, Westphalia was less affected by the Industrial and French Revolutions. In particular, Westphalian clergy and nobility retained greater sway than did their Rhenish counterparts, a difference that would influence Catholic politics through the Weimar Republic and the founding of the CDU.
Westphalia nonetheless served as an incubator of liberal Catholicism, and the prominence of Rhineland-Westphalia runs as a leitmotif through the history of political Catholicism. The significance of Rhenish-Westphalian liberal Catholicism was clearly evident in the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisification of the party's leadership and the subsequent rise of a predominantly Prussian Catholic workers' movement, which denied Social Democracy the strength it enjoyed in other industrial regions. Ideologically, the Center's Rhenish-dominated leadership categorically rejected romantic Catholicism and accepted, for all practical purposes, the economic and social order of modern capitalism. In the Rhineland and at the behest of liberal Catholics, then, the first battles over interconfessionalism would be waged.
Inventing Interconfessionalism
Encouraged by Leo XIII's 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Workers) and in response to the growing Catholic working class and spread of socialism, liberal Catholics built on the initiatives of Adolf Kolping and the 1848 Katholikentag (Catholic Assembly) to develop a sizable network of labor organizations. The recognition of workers as members of a class as well as of a confession marked a watershed in Catholic political history. First, it presaged one of the strongest tensions within the Center Party, the conflict between the party's labor wing and its more conservative majority and leadership. Second, by presupposing common Catholic and Protestant labor concerns that called for a coordinated Christian response, it represented a major step on the path toward interconfessionalism. Thus, without endorsing the ideologies, such as bourgeois liberalism, that underlay social and economic change, Liberal Catholics nonetheless contributed to the modernization of Catholic life.
For advocates of interconfessionalism, the impetus toward political and trade union cooperation with Protestants was both strategically and ideologically motivated. Proponents saw in Christian cooperation the only apparent means of combating socialism's lure for Catholic and Protestant workers. Dogmatically, antisocialism had deep theological roots in Catholic teachings: Not only did Marxism — like liberalism — envision a world in which specifically Christian values played no part, but Marxism's failure to recognize humanity's God-given freedoms subordinated the individual to the state and violated Christian property rights. At the same time, Marx's utopia of egalitarianism denied the value Catholics invested in the suffering of inequality.
Based in the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial areas and tradition of realist Catholicism, the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, an educational workers' organization founded in 1890, and the Christian Trade Unions, founded in 1901 under Adam Stegerwald, represented Catholics' initial steps toward interconfessionalism. Testifying to the embeddedness of the Center Party in the Catholic Teilkultur, these developments were soon followed by the Zentrum's first major initiative. In his famous 1906 article, "We Must Come out of the Tower! [Wir müssen aus dem Turm heraus!]," Cologne journalist and Center Party leader Julius Bachem drew directly on the example of the Christian Trade Unions to argue for Catholic support of Protestant candidates sympathetic to Catholic religious principles. By invoking the Christian Trade Unions as a model, Bachem's cri de coeur reflected and prefigured the Catholicity of interconfessional proposals: While the Christian Trade Unions organized independently from the clergy, adhered to a strictly interconfessional program, and eschewed the general meetings of Catholic organizations, their origins, membership, and ideological groundings remained overwhelmingly Catholic.
At the same time, Bachem made clear that Catholics had no interest in fully fledged interconfessional cooperation. By restricting his offer to religious Protestants with whom Catholics shared certain precepts — he cited in particular members of the Christian Social Party (Christlich-Soziale Partei [CSP]) and two devout and prominent Lutherans affiliated with the Zentrum — Bachem unmistakably limited his cross-confessional appeal. In this way, too, Bachem's call would predesign interconfessional politics. By defining their potential future colleagues in religious — not political or class — terms, Catholics contradicted their stated goal of appealing to Protestant laborers. In the juxtaposition of Christian and labor politics, Christian values would clearly be determinate.
Spotlighted by Bachem's petition, practicing Protestants had in fact long demonstrated ideological commonalities with Catholics. While the Pietists and their successors opposed secularism, modernism, liberalism, and socialism as passionately as members of the Catholic Teilkultur, bourgeois conservatives had called since the 1870s for an antiliberal, anti-Jewish Christian state. Well into the twentieth century, moreover, many of these religiously devout Protestants rejected capitalism and technology as materialistic while endorsing an organic, family-centered corporative societal order. Such Protestants had even, on occasion, regarded Catholics as natural allies in the ongoing battle against secularism. Baden Catholics and Pietist Protestants forged political alliances in the 1860s, for example, and Protestant conservatives had refused to support several of the Kulturkampf measures.
By the twentieth century, however, the pious represented a distinct minority within Protestant Germany. Throughout the nineteenth century, German Protestants had demonstrated diminishing loyalty to institutional churches and dogmas, resulting in declining rates of participation in church rituals. Inherent in Bachem's emphasis on religious Protestants was the widespread assumption that most Protestants had in fact secularized. Seeking to distinguish between religious Protestants and those who had strayed from the church, Catholics favored devout Protestants who were also politically conservative.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Origins of Christian Democracy by Maria D. Mitchell. Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.