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  • The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany
  • Jonathan Sperber
The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Michael B. Gross (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2004) 354 pp. $70.00

The Kulturkampf, the anti-Catholic campaign undertaken by Otto von Bismarck's government in the 1870s, with the enthusiastic support of the liberal movement, remains a mysterious episode in modern German history. One of its most prominent mysteries is why Germany's liberals, ostensibly committed to civil liberties and to opposing authoritarian state practices, would have been so enthusiastic about a public policy of religious [End Page 117] persecution. In The War against Catholicism, Gross resolves the secret of liberal attitudes by reading these attitudes as cultural texts, which he deciphers and deconstructs. Investigating a wide variety of primary sources, ranging from public and parliamentary speeches to private correspondence, to pamphlets and popular periodicals, he uncovers a persistent cultural pattern of liberal anti-Catholicism. His work thus illuminates an entire little-studied dimension of the Kuturkampf, although its sometimes exaggerated interpretations demonstrate some of problems with the cultural deconstruction of historical sources.

Gross argues that German liberals developed anti-Catholic attitudes in an intellectual reorientation following the revolution of 1848. Having failed in their efforts to overturn Germany's authoritarian regimes, post-1850 liberals increasingly perceived the Catholic Church as the great obstacle to the creation of a modern, progressive, scientific central Europe. Their ire was particularly concentrated on the Jesuits, who, in the two decades after mid-century, carried out a vigorous and successful campaign of reviving and renewing Catholic devotion. Gross also suggests that liberal attitudes toward Catholicism were gendered, involving a contrast between a manly, liberal Protestant world on the one hand, and a feminine, Catholic one, with its Marian devotion, rapidly growing numbers of nuns, and strong female piety, on the other. The Kulturkampf appears in his account as a gender struggle, and he asserts that liberal hostility to Catholicism was a form of displaced opposition to feminism.

These are all intriguing insights. Gross' work is an important contribution to the history of the political imaginary in modern Germany as well as to the (often neglected) history of nineteenth-century anti-clericalism. His book, however, also shows that reading texts as a cultural code requires a full grasp of contemporary culture, and careful attention to the chronology of its expression.

Gross' account of liberal anti-Catholicism as a post-1848 phenomenon ignores the strong liberal hostility to the Catholic Church and the Jesuits before and during the revolution of 1848. Indeed, many of the liberal, anti-Catholic tropes that he investigates could be traced back to Martin Luther. On the other hand, one of his key pieces of evidence for a contrast between liberal modernity and Catholic backwardness, a number of articles in the popular weekly Die Gartenlaube, date from the years after 1866, that is, after the war between Prussia and Austria, widely perceived in Germany as a religious conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. By interpreting a few pre-1866 articles, with pictures of ruins of old monasteries, as evidence of liberal relegation of Catholicism to medieval backwardness, Gross neglects the extent to which these images were a stock theme of a generally pro-Catholic Romantic art, exemplified, for instance, in the works of the celebrated German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich.

Gross' discussion of the Kulturkamkpf as liberal anti-feminism is particularly problematical. His assertion that the activities of female [End Page 118] Catholic religious were an example of feminism, to which liberals responded with hostility, involves an interpretation of nuns as feminists, devised by today's historians, but hardly current to nineteenth-century contemporaries. Gross exaggerates the importance of a few letters by German liberals denouncing John Stuart Mill's advocacy of woman suffrage; this issue was not even on the political radar screen in Bismarck's Germany. German feminists of the time—themselves largely Protestants and Jews, and no friends of the Catholic Church—did not call for it. Although Gross, following a number of other historians, points to the frequent use of the rhetoric...

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