(originally published by H-German, 21 October 1995)
The rise of the CDU filled a potentially dangerous void in postwar German politics. Allied planners hoped to encourage the development of democratic structures through their plans for denazification and re-education, but even if such programs succeeded in creating a democratic consensus among the population, it was up to the Germans themselves to create the parties which would represent that consensus. Twelve years of National Socialist rule had, however, left much of the German political spectrum in disarray. While the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had suffered terribly under the Nazi regime, it could claim a relatively long and spotless democratic pedigree as it rebuilt its organization and rallied voters on the center/left. To the left of the SPD, the communists as well could claim an anti-fascist past. The traditional "bourgeois" parties of the center/right, however, carried the stigma of collaboration with the Nazis. To compete with the SPD at the local and eventually the national level, and to create the sort of balanced party system which the Allies hoped to see, the bourgeois parties had to reinvent themselves, to find for themselves a useful past which would help them to rally their traditional voters.
As Maria Mitchell shows in her excellent article, the CDU accomplished this reconstruction of bourgeois politics through a distinct reading of German history. Building on the traditions and leadership of the Center, and the participation of some CDU founders in the resistance against Hitler, the CDU tried to mark off its own space within the democratic consensus, sealed off from both conservative nationalism of the Right and socialism on the Left. CDU leaders marked this space by drawing a distinction between Christian Democracy and the "materialist" traditions of socialism, communism, and especially National Socialism. This "anti-materialist" ideology allowed them to move beyond Catholic particularism to attract moderate and conservative Protestants as well.
Drawing on a wide array of speeches, pamphlets, and correspondence among the founders of the CDU, Mitchell shows how the party developed its critique of materialism, and how the terms of this critique held the party together in spite of the potential for disharmony. When, for example, Catholic CDU politicians blamed Protestant Prussia for Germany's terrible history, they hastened to add that "devout" Protestants, who rejected the materialist sins of nationalism and militarism, had been opposed to these developments, and were worthy allies in the struggle to recreate democracy. As the CDU prepared for the national electoral struggle with the SPD, antimaterialism shifted from a historical justification to a political strategy, providing ammunition for campaign attacks on socialism.
Mitchell's article presents several insights which will help anyone trying to understand the development of postwar German politics. By focusing on the years 1945-1949, Mitchell separates the formative years of the CDU from its post-1949 governing role, which also helps the CDU emerge from the shadow of the man who would dominate the first decades of West German politics, Konrad Adenauer. While admitting Adenauer's importance as leader of the CDU in the British occupation zone, Mitchell's more decentralized focus highlights the variety of leaders who built the CDU -- such as former Communist and Catholic convert Maria Sevenich -- and shows that the party was more than the "Kanzlerwahlverein" of Adenauer-era caricature. Her emphasis on the intellectual and religious rhetoric which shaped the CDU's self-image also reveals the complexity of the party and the practical importance of that rhetoric. More than an abstract intellectual concept, anti-materialism served the practical purpose of creating a common political orientation for the diverse coalition of Catholics and Protestants, Christian Socialists and free-market advocates, industrialists, workers and farmers which made up the CDU. The rhetoric of antimaterialism provided much of the glue for this sometimes unstable coalition.
Mitchell's analysis of the importance of such religious and ideological forces in forging the CDU's internal coalition suggests some potentially fruitful avenues of future discussion. One is how the CDU's reading of history, with its emphasis on Christian victimhood under the Nazis, affected the CDU's attitude toward the other victims of Nazi persecution, especially Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Adenauer's government did push for monetary restitution and cultivated relations with Israel, but only after intense intraparty disputes, and neither Adenauer nor other CDU leaders could give a clear answer about how an avowedly Christian party was to deal with non-Christians.
Another interesting question which Mitchell suggests is how the rhetoric of anti-materialism squared with the policies of Westbindung advocated by CDU-led governments in the Federal Republic. Mitchell discusses briefly the problem of how a party based on a critique of materialism could rationalize an alliance with the indisputably materialist United States of America, but much remains to be done here, especially considering the controversies between "Atlanticists" and "Gaullists" over relations with the USA which threatened to split the CDU in the later 1960s.
A third question, which Mitchell, in the interests of organizing her material, admits to ignoring, is the relationship between the West German CDU and, its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). This relationship has always been difficult to describe to American audiences. While sharing much of the same ideological roots, and joined as one Parliamentary Group at the national level, the CDU and CSU maintained their organizational independence from one another. The history of relations between the CDU and CSU contains many challenges to that arrangement and a continuing tension in both foreign and domestic policies between the more conservative Bavarians and the relatively moderate CDU. The present controversy over the CSU's reaction to the Federal Constitutional Court's "crucifix judgment" is but the latest example. Whether one chalks these differences up to the personalities of CSU leaders such as Franz Josef Strauss, or to the different cultural milieus of Catholic Bavaria and the rest of the Federal Republic, much more work needs to be done here as well.
Another question which will bear further examination in light of newly available documents is the relationship between the development of the CDU in the West and the CDU in the Soviet zone. After its original leadership, including Jakob Kaiser, was forced out by the Soviet military authorities in 1947, the East German CDU was eventually cut off from the Western zones, and became one of the pseudo-independent bloc parties which governed in the DDR. It would be interesting to see how the different confessional makeup of the Soviet Zone, with its small Catholic minority, along with the pressure to cooperate with the SED and the Soviet occupation authority, affected the Eastern CDU's self-definition. As the contemporary CDU tries to deal with the absorption of the Eastern party into its national structure, this question will only become more interesting.
These are all large topics, and Mitchell can certainly be forgiven for not being able to address them all in one article. What she has done is present a potentially very fruitful perspective from which to examine West German Christian Democracy and its impact on German politics, and for that we can only be grateful.