Volksfrömmigkeit und Katholisches Milieu: Marienerscheinungen in Heede 1937-1940 im Spannungsfeld von Volksfrömmigkeit, nationalsozialistischem Regime und kirchlicher Hierarchie (review)

In this interesting study, a slightly revised dissertation, Maria Anna Zumholz analyzes a series of Marian apparitions which occurred in Heede, a small village in the remote northwestern German Emsland region. She uses her analysis to offer a nuanced picture of the interplay between popular piety, Catholic milieu, ecclesiastical authority, and National Socialist repression.

In a 200-page introduction, Zumholz provides a detailed history of the Emsland and its predominantly Catholic population. The Emsland changed hands repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, always between states with Protestant rulers. Repression of their faith, combined with government neglect of this poor rural region, led the Emsländer to form a high level of suspicion of any state authority.

Zumholz argues that this population was particularly prone to beliefs in supernatural occurrences and in special gifts of certain individuals. The author also provides a thorough review of Marian apparitions in Germany and elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She points out that, in contrast to circumstances in other countries, no Marian apparition in Germany received ecclesiastical approbation. Zumholz believes that German bishops were not only "Germanically thorough" and strict in their review of these events, but they also feared the condescension of the Protestant majority, which considered Marian devotion in general and apparitions in particular to be proof of Catholic backwardness. In this context, Zumholz points to David Blackbourn's study of the supposed apparitions at Marpingen, events which German bishops remembered only all too well.

The Marian apparition in Heede occurred over the course of three years in a village cemetery. Four adolescent girls claimed to have seen the Mother of God appearing between two trees. They continued seeing the image, although not on a regular basis. The girls claimed to have spoken with the image, whose presence nobody else, even those present, could perceive. While the local priest soon supported the young women in their claims, the Bishop of Osnabrück as well as state authorities of the Third Reich were alarmed by the claims and even collaborated in banning pilgrimages to the cemetery. The bishop's decrees and the draconian measures taken by the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (the intelligence branch of the SS), however, failed to stop people, even those traveling considerable distances, from coming to Heede.

Zumholz uses these events to engage current debates about the formation and strength of both popular piety and the Catholic milieu. She argues convincingly that, at least in the Emsland, the milieu was deeply rooted in the community and that it had originated among the laity. She thus rejects the arguments of Olaf Blaschke and others who argue that the church hierarchy created the milieu as an instrument of social control or even a way of resisting modernity. Similarly, Zumholz shows that while the Church encouraged Marian devotions specifically and expressions of popular piety generally, this particular expression grew in defiance of the bishop's explicit instructions. Thus, popular piety, too, was not something engineered from above. Zumholz shows how the laity were and are quite powerful in insisting on forms of devotion acceptable to them and how this challenged and challenges bishops to find compromises between their own authority and the demands of the laity.

Zumholz also shows that the laity's adherence to the milieu strengthened during times of crisis, such as during the repression of the National Socialist regime and the trauma of World War II. She has marshaled a large body of evidence to demonstrate the failure of the National Socialist regime to penetrate the Catholic milieu. Quite the contrary, the milieu appears to have strengthened under pressure from the outside. Zumholz believes resistance to external pressures to be one of the most important contributors to milieu formation, more important than socioeconomic change—largely absent...