Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817-1917

4 Tragedy and Triumph

79 4 Tragedy and Triumph German Unification, the Kulturkampf, and Christian Ecumenism, 1866–1883 from 1864 through 1871, Otto von Bismarck engineered a series of wars that pitted Prussia against the Kingdom of Denmark, the Austrian Empire, and France. These conflicts, collectively known as the German Wars of Unification, ultimately resulted in the establishment of a unified German Empire. The establishment of the empire seemingly ended debate over the German National Question by unifying Germany under Prussian-Protestant hegemony and excluding Catholic Austria from the new Reich. But while Bismarck had made Germany, the task remained to make Germans—there was still no universal agreement about what, exactly, constituted German national identity. How the nation would be unified had been answered—but what it meant to be German remained ambiguous. While the kleindeutsch solution to the German Question effected a political unification of the German lands, it left intact the longstanding confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants —a divide that nineteenth-century ecumenists had persistently warned must be addressed before the German nation could be properly unified. An abridged version of this chapter appeared in the journal Church History as Stan M. Landry, “That All May be One? Church Unity and the German National Idea, 1866–1883,” Church History 80, no. 2 (June 2011): 281– 301. It is reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press Journals. 80 Ecumenism, Memory, Ger m an Nationalism Because confessional identity and difference were pivotal to how contemporary Germans imagined themselves and their nation, the meaning of German national identity remained contested even after unification. But the formation of German national identity during this period was never neutral—nationalists used confessional alterity and antagonism to imagine confessionally exclusive notions of German national identity. Indeed, the establishment of a “small” German Empire under Prussian auspices, the anti-Catholic policies of the Kulturkampf, and the 1883 Luther anniversaries were all stages in a process that conflated Protestantism with German national identity and marginalized German Catholics from the society, culture, and politics of the new Reich. Suggesting that previous generations of ecumenists had been right about the need to heal the confessional divide for the sake of national unity, this process of imposing and enforcing religious and cultural homogeneity was but one solution to the persistence of the confessional divide in a unified German Empire. Many German Catholics responded to their marginalization by withdrawing into confessionally segregated milieus such as social organizations, devotional societies, and the political Catholicism of the Center Party. To be sure, German Catholics had accepted the new Reich from the beginning. Catholics recognized the legitimate authority of the emperor and acknowledged their national and patriotic obligations. They did not rebel against the kleindeutsch organization of the Reich, nor did they question their own identity as constituents of the new empire or the German nation. But neither Bismarck’s unification of the German Empire nor his support for the Kulturkampf legislation and its conflation of Protestantism with German national identity enjoyed universal support from Protestants. Nor did German Catholics withdraw into confessionally and socially isolated spheres en masse. Like those previous instances in German history when the national and confessional questions were tightly interwoven, irenical and ecumenical Germans emerged to propose interconfessional notions of German national identity. And during the early Kaiserreich, an ecumenical group of German Catholics and Protestants called Ut Omnes Unum proposed Tr agedy and Triumph 81 a means of overcoming Germany’s persistent internal divide by reuniting the separated confessions. At the forefront of Catholic and Protestant opposition to the Kulturkampf and the conflation of German identity with Protestantism, Ut Omnes Unum proposed an interconfessional notion of German national identity that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. This chapter recounts the history of the Ut Omnes Unum group and its responses to the confessional consequences of German unification, the exclusion of Catholics from German society and culture through the Kulturkampf, and the Protestant triumphalism of the 1883 anniversaries of Martin Luther’s birth. Their efforts on behalf of interconfessional peace belie the idea that the post-unification confessional divide was total and insurmountable or that contemporary Catholic and Protestants were destined to exist in hermetically sealed spheres of existence. Indeed, in its struggle to end the marginalization of German Catholics from the German nation, Ut Omnes Unum worked to counteract the legacy...