The War Against Catholicism. Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (review)

Did sexual anxiety cause the Kulturkampf? So one might conclude after reading Michael B. Gross's provocative study of the anti-Catholic imagination in nineteenth-century Germany. German liberals coded the Church as female. When a women's movement in the late 1860's produced "dramatic pressures for change" (p. 239), liberals responded with a virulent anti-Catholic campaign. Within a decade they had succeeded in expelling the religious orders, depriving parish clergy of their role in schools, giving the state control over the education and appointment of pastors, and jailing bishops and banishing priests who refused to comply.

The picture invites skepticism. Could three new vocational associations, with "assiduously" unpolitical agendas and a modest, overwhelmingly non-Catholic membership (the latter unmentioned by Gross), really trigger such liberal panic as to precipitate an earthquake in church-state relations? If the political, social, and sexual order were so deeply unsettled by this "resurgence of the women's movement," would not conservatives—and Catholics—have been even more alarmed? If sexism was "typical of the liberal middle class" (p. 186), were the upper and lower classes more enlightened? Yet it was middle-class liberals whose imaginations were "tortured" (p. 206) by fantasies of Catholicism.

Gross argues that the incessant invocation of their own masculinity and repeated representation of the Church as female served to defend German liberals' monopoly on public space against the invasion of women. One could also argue the reverse: antagonistic masculine/feminine tropes aimed at barricading the public space against the Church. Was woman the target and religious invective the weapon, or was Catholicism the target and misogynist invective the weapon? Different passages of The War Against Catholicism suggest different answers.

But such queries are beside the point. The New Cultural History has never set its sites on anything so positivistic as causation, on distinguishing dependent from independent variables. It seeks, rather, to unravel tangled skeins of meaning. In this task Gross excels. In exploring what the Catholicism meant to liberals, Gross is at his most innovative and most persuasive. When he argues that "at the center of liberal anti-Catholicism was ... not merely religious intolerance but a more fundamental sexism" (p. 203), that the Kulturkampf reflected a "more fundamental contest between men and women" (p. 205), one might question his judgment as to which element is really "more fundamental," but not his nose for new and interesting historical evidence. Gross has grounded his case for the gendering of anti-Catholicism on a much fuller empirical base than I (having also searched for such connections, mostly in vain) would ever have thought possible. His resourceful investigation of images, recurring metaphors, and verbal tics lays bare the filiations of liberal identity in ideas of independence, rationality, and masculinity, demonstrating powerful connections (although perhaps not causal ones) between liberal anti-Catholicism and what academics call "misogyny." Language that likened piety to nymphomania and offered prophecies of metaphoric castration if the Church remained unchecked betrays, Gross tellingly observes, a "deep-seated fury" (p. 239). Surely this was (forgive the misogynist term) hysteria.

The phobic dimension of liberal identity is Gross's most memorable contribution, as convincing as it is astonishing; but it by no means exhausts the riches of this stimulating book. Guarding against reductionism in accounting for the Kulturkampf, Gross pays his dues to "hard" empirical social and political history, shedding light on the legislative fallout of the anti-Catholic campaign as well as on the sources of Catholicism's conspicuous vitality. A particularly fine chapter explores the movement to invigorate Catholic piety through missions, arguing in passing that Catholic missionary successes spurred a competitive Protestant revival. His evidence is anecdotal and fragmentary, but if confirmed by further research his suggestion would significantly revise our picture of German Protestantism in decline. Unpersuasive, however, is...