Catholic-Marxist Competition in the Working-Class Parishes of Cologne During the Weimar Republic

CATHOLIC-MARXIST COMPETITION IN THE WORKING-CLASS PARISHES OF COLOGNE DURING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC BY Raymond C. Sun* Catholic-Marxist competition for the political and spiritual loyalties of Catholic workers constitutes one of the central themes of German labor and religious history before 1933- Since 1884, when Franz Hitze charged the Catholic labor movement to "organize our Christian workers before it is too late . . . before the enemy is within out walls"1 church leaders struggled to isolate their working-class followers from socialist and, after 1918, communist influences. To retain workers' loyalties to the Church and the larger confessional community, Catholic labor leaders established clerically led workers' clubs (katholische Arbeitervereine ), which aimed to immerse members into a wholly Catholic cultural milieu through a mixture of religious, social, and material services. Including the nominally interconfessional Christian Trade Unions, the Catholic labor movement represented the single largest alternative to the Marxist movements, and was even able to mount a challenge for primacy in key industrial districts in the Ruhr and the Rhineland.2 *Mr. Sun is an assistant professor of history inWashington State University. This article is a revised version of a paper he presented to the spring meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association at the College ofthe Holy Cross,Worcester, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1994. 'Original emphasis. Hitze's statement is from the speech he made to the 1884 German Catholic Congress (Katholikentag) in Amberg. It was originally printed as "Bedeutung und Aufgabe katholischer Arbeiter-Vereine," Arbeiterwohl, 4 (1884), 125-143. It is reprinted in Texte zur katholischen Soziallehre II,Vol. 1 (Kevelaer, 1976), pp. 375-385. The quotation is on page 379. 2MaJOr works which treat the relative position ofworkers within the German Catholic community include David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany : The Centre Party in Württemberg before 1914 (New Haven, 1980); Eric Dorn Brose, Christian Labor and the Politics ofFrustration in Imperial Germany (Washington , D.C., 1985); William L. Patch, Jr., Christian Trade Unions in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933 (New Haven, 1958);Ronald Ross,Beleaguered Tower:The Dilemma ofPolitical Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1976); and Michael 20 BY RAYMOND C. SUN2 1 Even before World War I, however, the limits of Catholic hegemony were apparent. The walls of religious identity and clerical authority failed to prevent an estimated 800,000 Catholic workers from joining the Social Democratic Party (SPD) or the allied Free Unions by 1914,enabling the SPD to capture the Catholic strongholds of Cologne, Düsseldorf , and Munich by the last prewar elections of 1912.3 Under the Weimar Republic, this trend accelerated and took a still more radical course with the advent of the German Communist Party (KPD). By the mid-1920's,the deterioration of personal and institutional religious loyalty among workers was so pronounced that Catholic labor leaders warned openly of an impending crisis in workers' commitment to the larger confessional community in its religious, political, and cultural dimensions . This article explores Catholic workers' growing ambivalence toward the confessional community in the 1920's, their rising tolerance or active support for Social Democracy and Communism, and the fears and frustrations that troubled the clergy forced to confront this situation. Specifically, the study will focus on conditions in working-class parishes in and around Cologne as described by local pastors in ecclesiastical visitation reports. Previous work on Catholic workers' troubled role in the confessional community under the republic has concentrated on institutional studies of the Center Party and the various elements of the Schneider,Die Christlichen Gewerkschaften (Bonn, 1982). Also important are studies on the Catholic Volksverein, the organization for popular education and mobilization which co-operated closely with the Catholic labor movement, by Emil Ritter, Die katholischsoziale Bewegung Deutschlands im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert und der Volksverein (Cologne, 1954), and more recently, Horstwalter Heitzer, Der Völksverein für das katholische Deutschland im Kaiserreich 1890-1918 (Mainz, 1979). See too the regional studies of the Catholic labor movement byJürgen Aretz, KatholischeArbeiterbewegung und Nationalsozialismus. Der Verband katholischer Arbeiter- und Knappenvereine Westdeutschlands 1923—1945 (Mainz, 1978); Hans Dieter Denk, Die christliche Arbeiterbewegung in Bayern bis zum Erstem Weltkrieg (Mainz, 1980); Dorit-Maria Krenn,Die christliche Arbeiterbewegung in Bayern...