Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817-1917

2 The Ecumenical Vanguard

27 2 The Ecumenical Vanguard Ecumenism, Nationalism, and Luther-Worship in the German Revolutions of 1848 dormant for most of the 1820s and 1830s, nationalism made a dramatic return to the center of German civic life during the Revolutions of 1848. Beginning in Paris and spreading throughout Europe, the revolutions would provide the quiescent German nationalist movement with its most concrete hopes of establishing a unified German nation-state. During the height of the revolutions in the German lands, riots and bloody street fighting between German nationalists and Prussian loyalists had engulfed Berlin, compelling the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV to promise a constitution, a popular assembly, and greater integration of the Prussian kingdom into a uni- fied German state. To these ends, nationalists from across the German lands assembled during the spring of 1848 in Frankfurt, with the purpose of drafting a constitution that would serve as the basis for a unified German nation-state. One of the most contested questions among the delegates was that of a kleindeutsch or grossdeutsch German nation—that is, would Austria be excluded or included in a unified German nation? On March 28, 1849, the German National Assembly finalized the German constitution in favor of the kleindeutsch solution and elected the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV (r. 1840–1860) emperor of Germany. In public, Friedrich graciously declined the imperial title, explaining that the Frankfurt Parliament had not the right to bestow it, although he reassured the delegates of his commitment to German national unification. Privately, however, 28 Ecumenism, Memory, Ger m an Nationalism the king remarked that he could never accept “a crown from the gutter ” that had been so tainted by revolution. Not only was Friedrich’s rejection of the imperial title a death knell for the National Assembly, but it also seemed as the German nationalist movement as a whole would grind to a halt until some other opportune time. Indeed, the failures of the Frankfurt Parliament and the German revolutionaries are often pointed to as evidence of Germany’s distaste for liberalism and its flawed path toward modernization, and as an episode that was ostensibly redeemed by Bismarck’s realpolitker unification of the German Empire.1 But this reading of 1848 tends to obscure contemporary forms of German nationalism that were as popular, and arguably as effective, at uniting the German people as the 48ers. Two groups in particular—the dissident religious congregations known as the Protestant Friends and German-Catholic Movement—were ecumenical cum nationalist movements at the vanguard of Vormärz (i.e., pre-revolutionary) and revolutionary German nationalism. The Protestant Friends and the German-Catholic Movement were Vormärz religious communities that severed ties with the mainstream German Evangelical and Catholic churches in order to realize confessional, national, and gender harmony by promoting religious freedom, interconfessional cooperation, and confessionally mixed marriages. Both groups invoked memories of Luther as a spiritual liberator and the Reformation as an instance of religious revolution in order to justify their subversion of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities that denied their constituents freedom of religion and hindered confessional and national unity. Their “modern secession from Popery” was informed by memories of Martin Luther as a revolutionary who had liberated Germany from the spiritual bondage of the papacy. Their nineteenth-century Reformation, led by the Protestant pastor Leberecht Uhlich and the defrocked Catholic chaplain Johannes Ronge, was directed against the governing hierarchy of the Evangelical Church and the ultramontane faction within the Roman Catholic Church. Although persecuted by the The Ecumenical Vanguard 29 authorities, these dissident religious communities found extraordinary resonance across Vormärz Germany, attracting more than one hundred thousand men and women to their religious services, rallies , and social organizations. Because they shared the same goals of religious freedom and confessional unity, the Protestant Friends and German-Catholic Movement maintained close ties and informally cooperated beginning in 1845. In 1850, both as a practical measure and a reaction to the failure of the 1848 Revolutions to unify the German nation, the Protestant Friends and German Catholics united to form the Free Congregations. Well before the confessional politics of the Catholic-dominated Center Party and before Bismarck’s Kulturkampf had proposed notions of German unity that excluded the confessional Other,2 the dissenting congregations introduced a notion of German unity that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. If theology was ersatz politics in Vormärz...