Germany And The Confessional Divide

From German unification in 1871 through the early 1960s, confessional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were a source of deep division in German society. Engaging this period of historic strife, Germany and the Confessional Divide focuses on three traumatic episodes: the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and state-supported Protestantism after World War I, and the Nazi persecution of the churches. It argues that memories of these traumatic experiences regularly reignited confessional tensions. Only as German society became increasingly secular did these memories fade and tensions ease.

This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. In it, Todd H. Weir argues that although secularists challenged church establishment and conservative orthodoxy, they were subjected to the forces of religious competition.

"Derek Hastings illuminates an important and largely overlooked aspect of Nazi history, revealing National Socialism's close, early ties with Catholicism in the years immediately after World War I, when the movement first emerged."--Jacket.

The early nineteenth century was a period in which the German confessional divide increasingly became a national-political problem. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and the Wars of Liberation (1813-1815), Germans became consumed with how to build a nation. Religion was still a salient manifestation of German identity and difference in the nineteenth century, and the confessional divide between Catholics and Protestants remained the most significant impediment to German national unity. Bridging the confessional divide was essential to realizing national unity, but one could only address the separation of the confessions by directly confronting, or at least thinking around, memories of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. This dissertation examines how proponents of church unity used and abused memories of Luther and the Reformation to imagine German confessional and national unity from 1817 through 1883. It employs the insights and methods of collective memory research to read the sermons and speeches, pamphlets and poems, histories and hagiographies produced by ecumenical clergy and laity to commemorate Luther and the Reformation, and to understand how efforts toward church unity informed contemporary ideas of German confessional and national identity and unity. Histories of nineteenth-century German society, culture, and politics have been predicated on the ostensible strength of the confessional divide. This dissertation, however, looks at nineteenth-century German history, and the history of nineteenth-century German nationalism in particular, from an interconfessional perspective--one that acknowledges the interaction and overlapping histories of German Catholics and Protestants rather than treating each group separately. Recent histories of the relationship between German religion and nationalism have considered how confessional alterity was used to construct confessionally and racially-exclusive ideas of the German nation. This dissertation complements those histories by revealing how notions of confessional unity, rather than difference, were employed in the construction of the German nation. As such, the history of ecumenism in nineteenth-century Germany represents an alternative history of German nationalism; one that imagined a German nation through a reunion of the separated confessions, rather than on the basis of iron and blood.

Modern religious identities are rooted in collective memories that are constantly made and remade across generations. How do these mutations of memory distort our picture of historical change and the ways that historical actors perceive it? Can one give voice to those whom history has forgotten? The essays collected here examine the formation of religious identities during the Reformation in Germany through case studies of remembering and forgetting—instances in which patterns and practices of religious plurality were excised from historical memory. By tracing their ramifications through the centuries, Archeologies of Confession carefully reconstructs the often surprising histories of plurality that have otherwise been lost or obscured.

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Explores the relationship among the German confessional divide, collective memories of religion, and the construction of German national identity and difference. It argues that nineteenth-century proponents of church unity used and abused memories of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation to espouse German religious unity, which would then serve as a catalyst for German national unification.

The German Empire of 1871, although unified politically, remained deeply divided along religious lines. In German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Helmut Walser Smith offers the first social, cultural, and political history of this division. He argues that Protestants and Catholics lived in different worlds, separated by an "invisible boundary" of culture, defined as a community of meaning. As these worlds came into contact, they also came into conflict. Smith explores the local as well as the national dimensions of this conflict, illuminating for the first time the history of the Protestant League as well as the dilemmas involved in Catholic integration into a national culture defined primarily by Protestantism. The author places religious conflict within the wider context of nation-building and nationalism. The ongoing conflict, conditioned by a long history of mutual intolerance, was an integral part of the jagged and complex process by which Germany became a modern, secular, increasingly integrated nation. Consequently, religious conflict also influenced the construction of German national identity and the expression of German nationalism. Smith contends that in this religiously divided society, German nationalism did not simply smooth over tensions between two religious groups, but rather provided them with a new vocabulary for articulating their differences. Nationalism, therefore, served as much to divide as to unite German society. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.