The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany by Maria D. Mitchell (review)

Of all the political movements in contemporary Europe, Christian Democracy remains something of a curiosity. Both a transnational movement and the product of distinct national developments, it has enjoyed decades of political success even as societal changes have eroded the social and religious principles that encouraged its initial creation. In postwar Germany in particular, Christian Democratic advocacy for managed capitalism in the form of a “social market economy,” an alliance with the USA-led West (Westbindung), and European integration established political priorities that have endured into reunified Germany. Expanding secularization, consumerism, and social and physical mobility have undermined traditional Christian milieus, but those structural transformations are themselves in large part a result of policies pursued by Christian Democratic-led governments in the first postwar decades. This paradox adds an element of irony to a remarkable political success story.

Until recently, the development of Christian Democracy in postwar Europe has been an underappreciated scholarly subject. Thanks to Maria Mitchell, however, students and scholars now have a concise, sophisticated, and thorough English-language history of the origins of German Christian Democracy as well as the forces and individuals who created it. Focusing on the period between 1945 and the formation of the first government of the Federal Republic in 1949, Mitchell’s detailed analysis—based on primary sources from party archives, the personal papers of key actors, and her broad reading in the scholarly literature—explains how Christian Democracy both shaped and was shaped by the reconstruction of German politics after 1945. Mitchell details how the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), along with its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union (CSU), developed out of movements scattered across occupied Germany into a political force that governed the Federal Republic of Germany for the first two decades of its existence—and has remained significant thereafter.

The CDU’s roots lay in the prewar traditions of German political Catholicism, whose leadership was dominated by Catholics from the Rhineland and Westphalia. If it hoped to become a national force, however, the CDU had to grow beyond the Catholic “tower.” As Mitchell recounts, the greatest accomplishment of postwar German Christian Democracy was finding a way to overcome the deep confessional split between Protestants and Catholics, while also developing a party platform that could attract voters from all social classes. They managed to do both by juxtaposing their image of free persons embedded in a larger society—with both rights and responsibilities—to the alleged materialism and secularism they attributed to Marxism and National Socialism. Though based on Catholic social teaching, this form of liberal individualism was also designed to appeal to less devout Christians who sought to rebuild German society. “Mutual opposition to materialism,” Mitchell argues, “and a corresponding embrace of an organic, patriarchal social order united Catholics and Protestants when much else divided them” (4). Working out the practical meaning of this ideological affinity, however, required constant negotiation in response to practical questions, especially of educational and family policy; and the confessional divide never completely disappeared. West Germany’s economic development and its alliance with western liberal democracies unleashed a wave of secularization that undermined traditional religious milieus. In this context, devout Catholics and Protestants began to see themselves as united behind the same cause as Christian Democrats. By then, the CDU was well established as a political force—even if its leaders were having an increasingly difficult time explaining just what the “C” in CDU or CSU was supposed to mean.

In a book so deeply rooted in German history, there is little space for extended transnational comparisons that would situate the CDU in its broader European context. Mitchell also touches only lightly on the similar but nevertheless separate development of the CSU. Its strong base in Bavaria has given it an oversize influence on German politics, but its story is so complicated that it is usually treated in a separate literature...