Germany and the Confessional Divide:Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 ed. by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Germany and the Confessional Divide:Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 ed. by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting Jeremy Stephen Roethler Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989. Edited by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. viii + 364. Hardback $149.00. ISBN 9781800730878. This collection surveys confessional relations from the inauguration of the Kaiserreich to the fall of the Berlin Wall, during which Germany transitioned from arguably Europe's most hyper-confessionalized polity, when hostility between Protestant and Catholic not only determined national political outcomes but also shaped intimate life, to the other end of the spectrum, when confessional identity hardly mattered, except, as narrated by Großbölting, in the realm of self-deprecating humor (326). The purpose of this collection is to explain why. While the book's title suggests a comprehensive survey, the distribution of chapters is uneven. After an Introduction by editors Ruff and Großbölting, Jeffrey Zalar singularly carries the burden of the Kaiserreich on his able shoulders. In his contribution about "The Kulturkampf and Catholic Identity," Zalar explains how Catholics sought to prove to their hostile liberal and Protestant countrymen that they were just as German as they were. Internal Catholic discourse admitted that Catholic parity required improved Catholic material conditions and culture, thus self-affirming a Protestant and liberal trope about inferior Catholics. Zalar also documents that Catholics used their deep organizational network (then known as the Catholic "milieu") to make their case as dependable Germans, attending national events, for instance, and participating more broadly in the "nationalization of the masses" (borrowing from George Mosse) (31). Compared to the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich receive more extensive coverage. Klaus Große Kracht's piece "The Catholic Kulturfront during the Weimar Republic" demonstrates that even when confronted with a perceived common enemy (Bolshevism), instead of moving closer to their Protestant co-religionists, right-wing Catholics such as Karl Adam, Carl Schmitt, and Franz von Papen pivoted towards fascist authoritarianism instead, with ominous consequences (62–63). It is well-documented that conservative Catholic influencers (for instance, Archbishop Faulhaber of Munich-Freising) railed against the Revolution of 1918/19 and supported Weimar only tepidly; Benedikt Brunner tells the less appreciated story about why the Revolution and Weimar also unhinged conservative Protestants, even if, reflecting the still confessionally charged times, they would not make common cause against Weimar with Catholics. The redoubtable Jürgen Falter makes an appearance in this volume, adding updated detail to account for Catholic voting patterns during the final years of Weimar. He repeats his well-known thesis that Catholics were less likely than others to vote for Hitler. He reiterates his argument that Catholic organizational loyalty to the Center Party and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) explains why. But following his earlier work, he continues to use language like "comparatively immune" (120) [End Page 496] to explain Catholic hesitance to vote for Hitler or his party, as if voting for Nazism were a disease rather than a conscious decision, a perspective that has fallen from favor in more recent scholarship. (To be fair, this article was translated into English from the original German.) Tellingly, in the very next chapter "The Fascist Origins of German Ecumenism," James Chappel retorts that "it can no longer be maintained that Catholicism provided some sort of immunity against Nazism" (129). If Catholics voted against Nazis, it was not inevitably because they were Catholics. As a point of clarification, Chappel's argument is not that interconfessional cooperation after 1945 in the Federal Republic had its genesis in interconfessional cooperation with fascism before 1945 (as the title might suggest); rather, he debunks the myth that the CDU represented Germany's first breakthrough interconfessional party; that "honor" (my words) unfortunately belongs to the NSDAP (126). This collection saves its best work for last in its coverage of the post-1945 period, and not merely because it fills a gap. Maria Mitchell documents the influence of CDU female activists on Christian-informed priorities (such as rebuilding the family) in the early years of the Federal Republic; unfortunately...