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A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

George S. Williamson
Affiliation:
University of Alabama

Abstract

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Type
Modern European Historiography Forum
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

1. Blackbourn, David, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993)Google Scholar; for Marpingen's significance, see also Albert Howard, Thomas, “A ‘Religious Turn’ in Modern European Historiography?,” Historically Speaking 4:5 (2003): 2426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Given the inherently synthetic nature of religious movements (combining institutions, doctrines, rituals, narratives, and ethical codes in a manner that is seldom coherent or revealing of an “essence”), it behooves the historian to avoid treating “religion” as an autonomous force or universal category and to focus instead on theological, ecclesiastical, and liturgical phenomena in their historical specificity. On these matters, see esp. Lincoln, Bruce, “Theses on Method,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8:3 (1996): 225–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “To practice history of religions in a fashion consistent with the discipline's claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine.”

3. Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire, 1871–1918, trans. Kim, Traynor (Leamington Spa, U.K.: Berg, 1985)Google Scholar. Wehler described religion as an “ideology of legitimation,” 113–18, while downplaying the significance of the confessional conflict.

5. Nipperdey, Thomas, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (Munich: Beck, 1988).Google Scholar

6. Religion played a key role in many of the earlier, cultural-historical versions of the Sonderweg thesis. See, for example, Plessner, Helmut, Die verspätete Nation: Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes [1959] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 5280.Google Scholar

7. These were the percentages in 1900. See Blaschke, Olaf, “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 3875Google Scholar, here 42; Joel F. Harrmgton and Helmut Walser Smith note that there were several instances of “confessional cleansing” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which members of one confession were forced to migrate from one state to another; see “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77101Google Scholar, here 86.

8. Hölscher, Lucian, “The Religious Divide: Piety in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914, ed. Helmut Walser, Smith (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 3348Google Scholar, here 42 (my italics). Hölscher's article contains a number of penetrating insights concerning the problems addressed in this paper (see below).

9. On this point, see esp. Hess, Jonathan M., Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; also Librett, Jeffrey S., The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; also Heschel, Susannah, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Jensen, Uffa, Gebildete Doppelgänger: Bürgerliche Juden und Protestanten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Exceptions included Catholics living in Prussian Silesia and in Protestant-dominated free cities like Hamburg; see Harrington and Smith, 87–88.

11. Sperber, Jonathan, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, suggests that the Catholic milieu was decidedly conservative by 1850; by contrast, Margaret Lavinia Anderson sees the Kulturkampf as the turning point, “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” Central European History 19:1 (1986): 82115Google Scholar; Anderson, , “Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 681716CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, , Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. In a similar vein, Thomas Mergel highlights the resistance of the Catholic middle classes to joining the Ultramontanist milieu or to aligning with the Center Party. In his view, this occurred after the Kulturkizmpf (and then only partially) and led, by the 1890s, to the transformation of the Zentrum into a party dominated by conservative Catholic middle-class interests. See “Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German Catholic Bürgertum, 1848–1914,” Central European History 29 (1996): 151–74Google Scholar; and Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland 1794–1914 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994).Google Scholar

12. On this point, see esp. Blaschke, 61–63.

13. On this, see esp. the work of Hölscher, Lucian, “Die Religion des Bürgers: Bürgerliche Frömmigkeit und Protestantische Kirche im 19. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 250 (1990): 595630CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hölscher, , “Säkularisierungsprozesse im deutschen Protestantismus des 19. Jabrhunderts,” in Burger in der Gesellschaft der Neuzeit: Wirtschaft—Politik—Kultur, ed. Hans-Jürgen, Puhle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), 238–58Google Scholar; Hoölscher, , “Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century: An Interpretative Model,” in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930, ed. Hugh, McLeod (London: Routledge, 1995), 263–88Google Scholar; and Hölscher, , with Tillman, Bendikowski, Claudia, Enders, and Markus, Hoppe, ed., Datenatlas zur religiösen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland: Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, 4 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which tracks the frequency of baptism, Eucharist, religious marriage, religious burials, and confessional change among German Protestants from 1848 to 1940.

14. On the gender divide, see Hölscher, , “Religion des Bürgers,” 610Google Scholar; also McLeod, Hugh, “Weibliche Frömmigkeit–männlicher Unglaube? Religion und Kirchen im bürgerlichen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute, Frevert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988), 134–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Habermas, Rebekka, “Weibliche Religiosität—oder: Von der Fragilität bürgerlichen Identitäten,” in Wege zur Geschichte des Bürgertums, ed. Klaus, Tenfelde and Hans-Ulrich, Wehler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994), 125–48Google Scholar. On differing rates of church attendance among Protestants and Catholics, see the statistics in Hölscher, Datenatlas, and the discussion in McLeod, Hugh, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (London: St. Martin's, 2000), 171215.Google Scholar

15. Mosse, George L., The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).Google Scholar

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17. Altgeld, , “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 5458.Google Scholar

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19. See Tal, Uriel, Christian and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914, trans. Jonathan Jacobs, Noah (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Jensen, , Gebildete Doppelgänger, 147268.Google Scholar

20. The classic statement of the “milieu” theory can be found in Rainer Lepsius, M., “Parteiensystem and Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Deutsche Parteien vor 1918, ed. Ritter, Gerhard A. (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1973), 5680Google Scholar; on the continued relevance of milieu theory for research on Catholicism, see Heilbronner, Oded, “From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 453–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Its relevance for Protestantism is far more contested (see below).

21. Blaschke, Olaf, “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 3875.Google Scholar

22. On this point, see Steinhoff's, Anthony J. trenchant critique of Blaschke, “Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter? Nachdenken über die Religion im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 30 (2004): 549–70.Google Scholar

23. Walser Smith, Helmut and Clark, Chris, “The Fate of Nathan,” in Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, ed. Smith, 329Google Scholar, are particularly critical of the “milieu” thesis insofar as it implies a series of homogenous, impenetrable, and mutually exclusive cultural systems whose beliefs and political behavior were dictated from the top down.

24. Baumann, Ulrich, “The Development and Destruction of a Social Institution: How Jews, Catholics and Protestants Lived Together in Rural Baden, 1862–1940,” in Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, ed. Smith, , 297315Google Scholar; and van Rahden, Till, “Unity, Diversity, and Difference: Jews, Protestants, and Catholics in Breslau Schools During the Kulturkampf,” in Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, ed. Smith, , 217–42.Google Scholar

25. As Anthony J. Steinhoff notes, after the repeal of the Kulturkampf legislation in 1887 Catholics became increasingly willing to identify with Germany as a “Christian state.” On this, see “Christianity and the Creation of Germany,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities c. 1815–1914, ed. Sheridan, Gilley and Brian, Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 282300Google Scholar. I am indebted to Professor Steinhoff, as well as to Professor Brian Vick, for their insightful suggestions and criticisms regarding an earlier draft of this paper.

26. Dietzgen, Joseph, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie, Pt. 3 (1871)Google Scholar, cited in Prüfer, Sebastian, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage 1863–1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002), 335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. See esp. Lasater Ellis, David, “Piety, Politics, and Paradox: The Protestant Awakening in Brandenburg and Pomerania, 1816–1848” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar; also Bigler, Robert M., The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Wilhelm Graf, Friedrich, “‘Restaurationstheologie’ oder neulutherische Modernisierung des Protestantismus? Erste Erwägungen zur Frühgeschichte des neulutherischen Konservatismus,” in Das deutsche Luthertum und die Unionsproblematik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolf-Dieter, Hauschild (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1991), 64109Google Scholar. For the cultural and artistic dimensions of Friedrich Wilhelm IV's “Christian state,” see Edward Toews, John, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

28. On Feuerbach's political views, see Breckman, Warren, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; on the broader context of religious dissent in this period, see Herzog, Dagmar, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. McLeod, , Secularisation, 8694Google Scholar. The free-thinking communities (freireligiöse Gemeinde) offered another alternative to the established churches, but they tended to attract left liberals from the middle classes rather than members of the working classes. On these groups, see Simon-Ritz, Frank, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1997).Google Scholar

30. On this milieu, see esp. Lidtke, Vernon, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Blaschke, 67, notes that by 1907 only 11 percent of the vote for the SPD came from Catholics (he does not cite a figure for the 1912 election).

31. Hölscher, Lucian, Weltgericht oder Revolution: Protestantische und sozialistische Zukunftsvorstellungen im deutschen Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989).Google Scholar

32. It is useful when analyzing the influence and cohesion of Germany's Catholic, socialist, and (traditional) Protestant milieus to distinguish between reality and perception, since both influenced religious and political behaviors in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic. Even if an individual felt relatively autonomous in his or her social milieu, the perception that other Germans were following the dictates of the trade unions or the clergy could easily limit the range of acceptable political affiliations and social behaviors. This sense of constraint only increased in periods of instability or crisis.

33. The key work is Hübinger, Gangolf, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994).Google Scholar

34. On the Naumarin circle, see Krey, Ursula, “Von der Religion zur Politik: Der Naumann-Kreis zwischen Protestantismus und Liberalismus,” in Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus-Mentalitäten-Krisen, ed. Olaf, Blaschke and Frank Michael, Kuhlemann (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1996), 350–81Google Scholar; also Rüdiger, vom Bruch, ed., Friedrich Naumann in seiner Zeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000).Google Scholar

35. On this, see esp. Janz, Oliver, Bürger besonderer Art: Evangelische Pfarrer in Preuβen 1850–1914 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Janz, , “Zwischen Bürgerlichkeit und kirchlichem Milieu: Zum Selbstverständnis und sozialen Verhalten der evangelischen Pfarrer in Preußen in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Religion im Kaiserreich, 382406.Google Scholar

36. Hübinger, , Kulturprotestantismus, 291313.Google Scholar

37. von Reeken, Dietmar, Kirchen jut Umbruch zur Moderne: Milieubildungsprozesse im nordwestdeutschen Protestantismus 1849–1914 (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1999)Google Scholar; von Reeken, , “Protestantisches Milieu und ‘liberale’ Landeskirche? Milieubildungsprozesse in Oldenburg 1849–1914,” in Religion im Kaiserreich, 290315Google Scholar; Frank-Michael Kuhlemann makes an even stronger case for Protestant consensus based on his research on Baden, but his findings may also reflect the minority status of Protestants in a state that was two-thirds Catholic. See Kuhlemann, , “Protestantisches Milieu in Baden: Konfessionelle Vergesellschaftung und Mentalität im Umbruch zur Moderne,” in Religion im Kaiserreich, 316–49.Google Scholar

38. On this, see Smith, , German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 5161, 117–65.Google Scholar

39. On this point, Hölscher, , “The Religious Divide,” 46Google Scholar: “We can say without exaggeration that no European country has produced a comparable multitude of revisionist groups and movements.”

40. Treitel, Corinna, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Puschner, Uwe, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich: Sprache—Rasse—Religion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001)Google Scholar; for relevant background, see also Williamson, George S., The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).Google Scholar

41. Despite certain structural similarities between National Socialist ideology and the views of the occultists and the völkisch movements (as well as the proclivity of individuals like Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler for certain of their doctrines), the dominant response of the NSDAP to these groups was one of hostility and, in the case of occult organizations, an attempt to eradicate them once Hitler came to power in 1933. On this, see Puschner, , Völkische Bewegung, 925Google Scholar, and Treitel, , Science for the Soul, 210–42Google Scholar. From the perspective of religious history, National Socialism is perhaps best seen as an offshoot of the völkische Bewegung, but one that rejected the earlier movement's elitism, aestheticism, and intellectualism (even in its “irrationalist” forms) in favor of a program that combined populism, “traditional values,” and violence with a specific vision of racial and technological modernity.

42. “Religious Divide,” 45, 47.

43. See, for example, Michael, Ley and Schoeps, Julius H., ed., Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Bodenheim bei Mainz: Philo, 1997).Google Scholar

44. As Derek Hastings notes, the early NSDAP found considerable support among Munich's Catholics, particularly those disaffected from the traditional Catholic milieu. This support broke down in 1923–24 when the Nazis formed an alliance with several völkisch organizations and leaders, including the rabidly anti-Catholic Erich Ludendorff. See Hastings, , “How ‘Catholic’ Was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919–1924,” Central European History 36 (2003): 383433CrossRefGoogle Scholar. After 1925, Hitler distanced himself from Ludendorff and strenuously avoided confessional polemics. Nonetheless, the party's base of support would shift permanently from the Catholic south of Bavaria to the Protestant north.

45. For an analysis of this evidence, see esp. Steigmann Gall, Richard, “Apostasy or Religiosity? The Cultural Meanings of the Protestant Vote for Hitler,” Social History 25 (2000): 267–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Steigmanri-Gall, Richard, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also, Bergen, Doris L., Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar

47. See Gailus, Manfred, “1933 als protestantische Erlebnis: Emphatische Selbstransformation and Spaltung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003): 481511, esp. 483Google Scholar: “[T]he experience of 1933 appears in Protestant self-perception as a euphoric phase of the fulfillment of long-held expectations and hopes, as well as active participation and cooperation in a spiritual-political upheaval, as a largely miraculous turn of events that reminded many contemporaries of analogous Protestant exultations in 1914.”

48. Fritzsche, Peter, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3:1 (1996): 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 3, 12, and 16.

49. See the theological rhetoric cited by Steigmann-Gall, Richard in “Apostasy or religiosity?,” 279–84.Google Scholar

50. Lehmarm, Hartmut, Säkularisierung: Der europäische Sonderweg in Sachen Religion (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004).Google Scholar

51. In charting the violent religious history of the West, Rodney Stark has emphasized the peculiar characteristics of monotheistic religions, suggesting an even broader level of analysis. See One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

52. On the religious ideology of the early CDU, see esp. Mitchell, Maria, “Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 278308CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The historical standpoint developed at this early jancture would have an important influence on conservative Catholic thought, including that of Joseph Ratzinger.