Populists and Patricians (Routledge Revivals) by David Blackbourn

Author:David Blackbourn [Blackbourn, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Modern, 19th Century, 20th Century, Social History, Essays, General
ISBN: 9781317696216
Google: l0zXAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-17T16:05:12+00:00

PART III

Catholics and Politics

7

Progress and Piety: Liberals, Catholics and the State in Bismarck’s Germany

In 1804 Schiller wrote to a friend that Berlin was destined to become ‘the capital of Protestantism’. He may have been thinking of theological scholarship in particular, but the nineteenth century was to confirm his judgment in a broader sense. The universities, the bureaucracy, the army and of course the Hohenzollern dynasty of the expanding Prussian state all bore a powerful Protestant imprint. This was an important element in the Prussian historical mission celebrated by historians like Treitschke, and it was carried over into the unified German state of 1871. The architect of Imperial Germany was the Protestant Bismarck. ‘Lesser Germany’, with Austria excluded, had a two-thirds Protestant majority and was ruled by self-consciously Protestant emperors.

Catholics constituted a pariah community within the new Germany. They had long been discriminated against, in Prussia and elsewhere, across a wide range of public appointments. They now found themselves branded by Bismarck as ‘enemies of the Reich’, a kind of fifth column within a state that had been created following the defeat of two Catholic foreign powers on the battlefield. That provides part of the background to the anti-clerical Kulturkampf of the 1870s in Prussia. But there was also a Kulturkampf in very un-Prussian German states like Baden; and the anti-clerical cause was by no means supported only (or even mainly) by conservatives like Bismarck. The term Kulturkampf (meaning literally ‘struggle of civilizations’) was coined by a left liberal, and it reflected liberal hopes for ‘progress’ in the optimistic 1860s and 70s. For liberals, Catholics stood for ‘backwardness’ in all its forms: economic, social and intellectual. This belief was reinforced by the revival of Catholic piety in the decades after 1848, in Germany as elsewhere, along lines that seemed to be symbolized by Pope Pius ix and his rejection of ‘modernity’ in the Syllabus of Errors. The following article is concerned with the clash between liberals and Catholics in the Kulturkampf, and tries to show that this was something more than an episode in church-state relations or Bismarckian political calculation. At the same time, I have tried to examine the complex triangular relationship between Catholics, liberals and the state during the 1870s. I hope that the result casts some light on Bismarck’s Germany from a less familiar angle.

The first research and writing I did was on Catholics in Imperial Germany. They provided the subject of my earliest articles and my first book. The subject remains a central interest, but the focus of that interest has shifted in the last few years, both chronologically and thematically. Whereas my research centred for many years on the period from about 1890 to 1914, I have been more concerned recently with the Kulturkampf, which remains remarkably under-researched. I have also become increasingly interested in the changing nature of Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany – the relations between clergy and laity, changing devotional forms, the emergence of more ‘organized’ (and more commercialized) forms of piety. I am

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