Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T10:43:27.865Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

That All May Be One? Church Unity and the German National Idea, 1866–1883

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2011

Stan M. Landry
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite the political unification of the German Empire in 1871, the longstanding confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants persisted through the early Wilhelmine era. Because confessional identity and difference were pivotal to how Germans imagined a nation, the meaning of German national identity remained contested. But the formation of German national identity during this period was not neutral—confessional alterity and antagonism was used to imagine confessionally exclusive notions of German national identity. The establishment of a “kleindeutsch” German Empire under Prussian-Protestant hegemony, the anti-Catholic policies of the Kulturkampf, and the 1883 Luther anniversaries all conflated Protestantism with German national identity and facilitated the marginalization of German Catholics from early Wilhelmine society, culture, and politics. While scholars have recognized this “confessionalization of the German national idea” they have so far neglected how proponents of church unity imagined German national unity and identity. This paper examines how Ut Omnes Unum—an ecumenical group of German Catholics and Protestants—challenged the conflation of Protestantism and German national identity and instead proposed an inter-confessional notion of German national identity that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 281 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For the confessionalization of the German national idea during the Wilhelmine era, see Altgeld, Wolfgang, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992)Google Scholar; Harrington, Joel F. and Smith, Helmut Walser, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 1 (March 1997): 77–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Helmut Walser, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Langewiesche, Dieter, eds. Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2001)Google Scholar; and Pickus, Keith H., “Native Born Strangers: Jews, Catholics and the German Nation,” in Religion und Nation, Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte, ed. Geyer, Micheal and Lehmann, Hartmut (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004)Google Scholar. Altgeld explored how German nationalists and especially German nationalist theologians conflated Protestant theology and German nationalism to exclude German Catholics and German Jews as internal foreigners who existed outside of normative German society, politics, and culture. Harrington and Smith considered how German civil society and the German nation were constructed along confessional lines. According to Harrington and Smith, the confessional divide was essential to how Wilhelmine German Catholics and Protestants imagined the German nation and national identities. Haupt and Langewiesche considered the relationship of religion to ideas of the German nation over la longue durée—from the early modern era through World War I—scrutinizing discursive strategies for sacralizing the nation; asking how religious symbols, rituals, and material culture were nationalized; and exploring the role of clerics and laity in giving ideas of the German nation a confessional inflection. Pickus examined the histories of nineteenth-century Germany's “native born strangers,” German Jews and German Catholics, and how German nationalists exploited Germany's confessional divide to use “a range of outsiders, or others” to construct both racially and confessionally exclusive ideas of the German nation and German national identity.

2 Steinhoff, Anthony J., “Christianity and the Creation of Germany,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1815–1914, ed. Gilley, Sheridan and Stanley, Brian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 293; and Nipperdey, Thomas, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998)Google Scholar, 92.

3 Steinhoff, “Christianity and the Creation of Germany,” 293.

4 Lehmann, Hartmut, “The Germans as Chosen People: Old Testament Themes in German Nationalism,” German Studies Review 14, no. 2 (May 1991): 261 and 265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Steinhoff, “Christianity and the Creation of Germany,” 298.

6 Nowak, Kurt, Geschichte des Christentums in Deutschland: Religion, Politik, und Gesellschaft vom Ende der Aufklärung bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995)Google Scholar, 158.

7 Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (January 7, 1871), 1Google Scholar, cited in Brakelmann, Günter, “Der Krieg 1870/1871 und die Reichsgründung im Urteil des Protestantismus,” in Kirche zwischen Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Protestantismus, ed. Huber, Wolfgang and Schwerdtfeger, Johannes (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1976), 303Google Scholar.

8 Chaix, Gérald, “Die Reformation,” in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte vol. 2, trans. Tiffert, Reinhard, ed. François, Etienne and Schluze, Hagen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 9 and 27Google Scholar.

9 Brakelmann, “Der Krieg 1870/1871,” 310–11.

10 For the concept of the Catholic milieu, see Lepsius, M. Rainer, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstrukture: zum Problem der Demokritasierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wirtschaft, Geschichte, und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge, ed. Abel, Wilhelm et al. (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1966), 371–93Google Scholar. For the social, religious, and political reactions of German Catholics to the establishment of the German Empire, see Windell, George G., The Catholics and German Unity, 1866–1871 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Sperber, Jonathan, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Blackbourn, David, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993)Google Scholar; Mergel, Thomas, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Biirgertum im Rheinland 1794–1914 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994)Google Scholar; and Mergel, Thomas, “Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German Catholic Biirgertum, 1848–1914,” Central European History 29 (1996): 151–74Google Scholar.

11 Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstrukture.” For a theoretical reassessment of the Catholic milieu, see Horstmann, Johannes and Liedhegener, Antonius, eds., Konfession, Milieu, Moderne: Konzeptionelle Positionen und Kontroversen zur Geschichte von Katholizismus und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Schwerte: Katholische Akademie Schwerte, 2001)Google Scholar.

12 For a corrective to the social and methodological “ghettoization” of Wilhelmine German Catholics, see Heilbronner, Oded, “From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 72 (June 2000): 453–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Helmut Walser, ed., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar.

13 For the manifesto of the 1860 Erfurt Conference, see Schoeps, Hans Joachim, “Die Erfurter Konferenz von 1860 (Zur Geschichte des katholisch-protestantischen Gesprächs)” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 4 (1953): 135–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Fleischer, Manfred P., Katholische und lutherische Ireniker: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1968)Google Scholar, 198.

15 Historich-Politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland 119 (1883)Google Scholar: 494.

16 For the confessional politics of Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, see Schoeps, Hans Joachim, Das Andere Preussen: Konservative Gestalten und Probleme im Zeitalter Friedrich Wilhelms IV, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1964)Google Scholar.

17 “Ich habe nichts Andres gewollt, als die Einheit der Kirche, welche durch die Sünde der Menschen zerrissen ist!”

18 “Einen Kreis gleichgesinnter und gleichgestimmter Menschen, alle gerichtet auf das einen Ziel: Recht und Gerechtigkeit, Wahrheit und Freiheit für Kirche und Gesellschaft. Alle in bewußter Gegnerschaft gegen die auflösenden Tendenzen der herrschenden und maßgebenden Partei und jener Vergewaltigungen, welche unter dem Namen des ‘Kulturkampfs' für unser geliebtes Vaterland so verhängnisvoll geworden sind.” Heinrich Ahrendts quoted in Bernardina, Maria, Julie von Massow, geborene von Behr: Ein konvertitenbild aus dem 19. Jahrhundert (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1902), 191Google Scholar.

19 Fleischer, Katholische und lutherische Ireniker, 192–94.

20 Ut omnes Unum: Auf daß Alle Eins seien. Correspondenzblatt zur Verständigung und Vereinigung unter den getrennten Christen 1 (December 1879): 34–36Google Scholar.

21 Röttscher, Adolf, Unionsversuche zwischen Katholiken und Protestanten Deutschlands (Frankfurt: Foesser, 1885), 1Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 1.

23 Seltmann, Carl, Zur Wiedervereinigung der getrennten Christen, zunächst in deutschen Landen (Breslau: Aderholz, 1903), 391Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., 391.

25 For the historical use of the term “ecumenism,” see Hooft, Willem Adolf Visser't, “The Word ‘Ecumenical’—Its History and Use,” in A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, 2nd ed., ed. Rouse, Ruth and Neill, Stephen Charles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), 735–37Google Scholar.

26 Seltmann, , Zur Wiedervereinigung, iv–v and 389–90; UOU (December 1, 1900), 3320–21Google Scholar; for the Roman Catholic reception and ecumenical potential of the Augsburg Confession, see Dulles, Avery, “The Catholicity of the Augsburg Confession,” The Journal of Religion 63, no. 4 (October 1983): 337–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kress, Robert, “The Roman Catholic Reception of the Augsburg Confession,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11, no. 3 (June 1980): 115–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spitz, Lewis, “The Augsburg Confession: 450 Years of History,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11, no. 3 (June 1980): 3–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Seltmann, Zur Wiedervereinigung, 96–97.

28 Ibid., 389.

29 Röttscher, Unionsversuche, 2; and Bernardina, Julie von Massow, 274.

30 Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “The Protestant Reformation in German History,” Occasional Paper no. 22 of the German Historical Institute (September 1998): 15.

31 Herntrich, Hans-Volker, “Ein deutsch-nationaler Freiheitsheld: Wie Martin Luther vor hundert Jahren gefeiert wurde” Lutherische Monatshefte no. 21 (1982)Google Scholar: 275.

32 Ibid., 275.

33 In addition to Martin Luther, nineteenth-century Protestant nationalists had also recognized the Swedish solider-king and martyr of the Battle of Lützen, Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632), as a German-Protestant national hero. See Cramer, Kevin, “The Cult of Gustavus Adolphus: Protestant Identity and German Nationalism,” in Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914, ed. Smith, Helmut Walser (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 97–120Google Scholar; and Cramer, Kevin, The Thirty Years War and German Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For other nineteenth-century German national symbols, see Mosse, George L., The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through he Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975)Google Scholar.

34 Neue preußische Zeitung (aka Kreuzzeitung) no. 256 (November 2, 1883).

35 Protestantische Kirchenzeitung für das evangelische Deutschland no. 29 (July 18, 1883), 642Google Scholar.

36 NPZ no. 263 (November 10, 1883).

37 PK no. 21 (May 23, 1883), 471; and no. 26 (June 27, 1883), 582–83.

38 PK no. 47 (November 21, 1883), 1060.

39 von Treitschke, Heinrich, “Luther und die deutsche Nation” Preußische Jahrbücher 52 (1883)Google Scholar: 470.

40 Ibid., 470.

41 Ibid., 475.

42 Maron, Gottfried, “1883—1917—1933—1983: Jubiläen eines Jahrhundert,” in Die ganze Christenheit auf Erden: Martin Luther und seine ökumenische Bedeutung, ed. Müller, Gerhard and Seebaß, Gottfried (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 190Google Scholar.

43 Lehmann, Hartmut, “Das Lutherjubiläum 1883,” in Luthers bleibende Bedeutung, ed. Becker, Jürgen (Husum: Husum Druck- und Verlagsgruppe, 1983), 110Google Scholar.

44 HPB 119 (1883), 488.

45 Allgemeine evangelisch-lutherische Kirchenzeitung (1883), 1090, cited in Düfel, Hans, “Das Lutherjubiläum 1883: Ein Beitrag zum Luther- und Reformationsverständnis des 19. Jahrhunderts, seiner geistesgeschichtlichen, theologischen und politischen Voraussetzungen, unter besonder Berücksichtigung des Nationalismus,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 95, no. 1 (1984): 77–78Google Scholar.

46 The active exclusion of German Catholics from the 1883 Luther anniversaries is remarkable in light of the attendance of Catholics, Reformed, and in some cases even Jews at the 1817 and 1917 anniversaries of the German Reformation, and the 1830 anniversaries of the Augsburg Confession. See Stan M. Landry, “That All May be One? Church Unity, Luther Memory, and Ideas of the German Nation, 1817–1883” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2010).

47 UOU no. 53 (February 1, 1884), 645.

48 UOU no. 53 (February 1, 1884), 646.

49 UOU no. 53 (February, 1, 1884), 645.

50 UOU no. 45 (June 1, 1883), 547.

51 Ibid., 547.

52 Ibid., 547.

53 von Massow, Julie, Dorotheen-Körblein: Beiträge zur Reunionsfrage a. d. Zeitschrift ‘Ut omnes Unum’ mit Erlaubnis der Verfasserin, ed. Beer, Josef (Augsburg: Huttler, 1896), 156–57Google Scholar. On ecumenism as a process of confronting divisive histories, memories, and traditions, see Evans, G. R., “Ecumenical Historical Method,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 31, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1994): 93–110Google Scholar.

54 UOU no. 53 (February 1, 1884), 646.

55 NEK no. 39 (September 29, 1883), 621.

56 Seltmann, Zur Wiedervereingigung, 391.

57 Massow, Dorotheen-Körblein, 160–62.

58 Bernardina, Julie von Massow, 203.

59 Ibid., 203–4.

60 Ibid., 204.

61 Fleischer, Manfred, “Lutheran and Catholic Reunionists in the Age of Bismarck,” Church History 38, no. 1 (March 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 55. In a 1919 encyclical to the archbishops of Germany entitled In Hac Tanta, Pope Benedict XV would also invoke the memory of St. Boniface as “the perfect herald and the model” of German religious unity and peace. For other instances of the German Catholic veneration of St. Boniface in mid nineteenth-century Germany, see Weichlein, Sigfried, “Die Bonifatiustradition und die Rekonfessionalisierung des deutschen Katholizismus zur Mitte des 19. Jahrunderts,” in Religionskrieg in der Moderne? Renaissance und Rückgang des Konfessionalismus von 1800 bis heute, ed., Blaschke, Olaf (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001)Google Scholar.

62 Urban, Hans Jörg and Wagner, Harald, eds., Handbuch der Ökumenik (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifatius Druckerei, 1985), 319Google Scholar.

63 Williamson, George S., “A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany,” Church History 75, no. 1 (March 2006): 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar.