The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer by Noel D. Cary (review)

494BOOK REVIEWS spirited study, one that could herald a new examination of CathoUc Uterature in an Ireland that is steadily, these days, sUpping its CathoUc moorings. Robert Mahony The Catholic University ofAmerica The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer. By Noel D. Cary. (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press. 1996. Pp. xl, 355. $49.95.) Soon after the victorious alUes permitted Germans in 1945 to exercise a limited amount of poUtical freedom, prominent CathoUcs began discussions and debates about the type of poUtical party they should try to establish. Some wished to restore the old Center Party of historic and emotional memory in its confessional character and with its emphasis on cultural issues. Others also favored the revival of the old CathoUc party but insisted that its focus should be on political and social issues and that it should aUy itself with the Social Democrats who had shared power with the Prussian Center in the governance of Prussia from 1919 to 1932. A third group, eventuaUy led by the redoubtable Konrad Adenauer from 1919 to 1933 the Lord Mayor of Cologne, the Catholic capital ofWest Germany, insisted that only a broadly based interdenominational party could be an adequate counterbalance to the strong Social Democratic Party and cope with Germany's serious governmental and economic problems. Some years later the new Christian Democratic Union would replace the Center Party Ln the hearts and minds of most Catholic Germans inWest Germany. The book under review is a work of highly competent scholarship and is written in a style which is usuaUy graceful and sometimes sharply incisive.The author shows unusual skiU in describing the debates between the leading spokesmen of the CDU and Center parties and in tracking the maneuvers which they used in their efforts to win CathoUc support for their sides. However , the knowledgeable reader wUl be surprised that he does not deal more substantiaUy with the relations between the CDU and the higher CathoUc clergy whose active backing was necessary for the new party's triumph over the Center.There is no reference in his work to Cardinal Josef Frings, the Archbishop of Cologne and the leader oftheWest German episcopate,who had, like Konrad Adenauer, a strong personaUty.Whüe the Cardinal and the party leader were probably in basic agreement with each other on most church and state issues, they sometimes tUted with each other as well, presumably over school affairs. In his early chapters on the pre-1933 Center the author also devoted minimal attention to the relations between the party's leadership and the heads of the Prussian Church's hierarchy, and he only took up the school issue when it loomed up before him in the Weimar Republic years. He claimed that Ludwig Windthorst, the Center's brUliant leader from 1874 to 1891, used the school BOOK REVIEWS495 issue as a device to raUy Catholics behind his party. In the early Weimar years Peter Spahn, a onetime aide to Windthorst and sometime successor to him in their party's leadership, would say to a Reichstag Investigative committee that he and his coUeagues had never made an important poUtical decision untU they had first considered how it might affect the weUbeing of their church. Down to the last year ofWorldWar I they had steadUy opposed the introduction ofworkingclass suffrage in Prussian elections because they feared that it would lead to a Social Democratic majority in the Prussian Landtag and the secularization of that state's school system. In doing so, they deeply offended the leaders of the interconfessional trade union movement whose cause they had promoted before the war with the sanction of most bishops. The Weimar constitution would deprive the confessional school system of the privüeged position which it had previously enjoyed in most of Germany's states since it stipulated that the interdenominational school form would be the constitutional norm. However, the author correctly implies that the denominational schools reaUy did not suffer in practice from the change in their legal position . Most state governments left them intact after 1919 with the result that over eighty percent of German youth was in their system when Hitler...