Zeitgeschichtliche Katholizismusforschung: Tatsachen, Deutungen, Fragen: Eine Zwischenbilanz (review)

This commemorative volume appropriately serves as the hundredth addition in a well-known series from the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, a German and Catholic historical association founded in 1962 with the express goal of researching the recent Catholic past. To scholars of German Catholicism, this association will be instantly familiar as the home of the so-called "Blaue Reihe," a standard and invaluable series on German and Catholic history, not just for the twentieth century but for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well.

This particular volume emerged out of a conference held at the Katholische Akademie in Bavaria in May, 2003, in part, to commemorate the seventy-fifth birthday of Rudolf Morsey and the eightieth birthday of Konrad Repgen, two of the most prominent and founding members of this renowned historical association. Like a similar conference held in 1987, this conference was intended to take stock of the existing state of research on Catholicism. This state of the field, so to speak, thus features more than one dozen contributions from leading researchers, junior and senior, in the areas of German Catholicism, European Catholicism, and in one case, German Protestantism. This distinguished list includes Urs Altermatt, Wolfgang Altgeld, Magnus Brechtken, Wilhelm Damberg, Michael Ebertz, Martin Greschat, Michael Hochgeschwender, Hans Günter Hockerts, Ulrich von Hehl, Karl-Joseph Hummel, Christoph Kösters, Antonius Liedhegener, and Wolfgang Tischner. The close of the volume provides a highly useful compendium of scholars in the field, including their institutional affiliations and year of birth.

True to the aim of the conference, some chapters dish out commentaries on recent historical controversies. Michael Hochgeschwender's somewhat abstruse chapter on Catholicism and anti-Semitism nonetheless provides a compelling overview of the recent debates that prominently featured Olaf Blaschke and Urs Altermatt. Thomas Brechenmacher's plea for a broader perspective on the question of Pius XII and World War II summarizes the state of the source material, secondary literature, and avenues for future research, and concludes by denouncing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's recent work as libelous. Wilhelm Damberg discusses the research examining the relationship between Catholicism and the pluralized society and politics of the Federal Republic.

Other contributions provide a brief historical sketch of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Although it was most concerned in its early years with sketching the relationship between Roman Catholicism and the fate of the Weimar republic, the impulses for this historical association actually predated Rolf Hochhuth's incendiary play, "The Deputy," and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde's provocative article about German Catholicism in 1933 from the liberal Catholic journal Hochland in 1960/61. Instead, even in the 1950's, some voices were calling for a scholarly examination of the recent past, including most notably, the young Rudolf Morsey. Though the Kommission dealt almost exclusively with the years of National Socialism in the 1960's and 1970's, by the 1980's and 1990's scholars of German Catholicism began to turn their attention to approaches pioneered in social history and to analyze the so-called "Catholic milieu" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The field of inquiry has since broadened to examine the history of the Federal Republic, and after 1989/90, the role of Catholicism in the former DDR.

Not all of the contributors and panelists in the conference were in complete agreement on the state of the profession. For Wolfgang Tischner, Catholic research stood in danger of being limited by insularity, by the relatively small number of mostly Catholic practitioners. For Urs Altermatt, in contrast, Catholic research, especially in other nations such as France, found easy connections to "profane" history, in part because Catholic religiosity itself was transformed in an increasingly pluralistic world. Still, one receives the impression that the Kommission has maintained a certain distance and reserve toward the newer approaches that have gained favor in the secular historical world—cultural history, gender history, the history of memory, to name but...