Mark Edward Ruff. The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii + 284 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2914-1.
Reviewed by Allie Tichenor (Department of History, University of Chicago)
Published on H-German (October, 2005)
Catholic Youth Organizations and the West German Culture of Consumption
In his book, Mark Edward Ruff analyzes the reasons behind the seeming paradox of the erosion of the Catholic milieu at the very point in postwar German history at which the Catholic lay leadership achieved success in mainstream German political and social life. Specifically, he examines the critical role played in this process of erosion by the Church's failure in the 1950s and 1960s "to win the hearts and minds of young men and women, who in earlier decades had participated with ardor and zeal in religious youth organizations" (p. 2). In the late 1920s and early 1930s Catholic youth organizations had an enrollment of approximately 1.5 to 2 million young persons. In the immediate aftermath of the war, church leaders reconstituted these organizations which had been disbanded by the National Socialist State. By the mid-1950s, Catholic leaders seemed to have achieved their goal; more than one million young persons counted themselves as members of Catholic youth organizations. With 30 percent of all Catholic youths involved in church youth groups, the Catholic leadership achieved a higher percentage of young persons among their ranks than either their Socialist or Protestant rivals. Yet, having survived National Socialist persecution, these organizations were unable to sustain their membership in the increasingly consumer-oriented, individualistic culture of postwar West Germany (pp. 10-12). By the late 1950s, the circulation of Catholic youth magazines had dwindled, attendance at religious youth festivals had dropped dramatically, and the future of traditional youth organizations was in jeopardy (p. 84).
Ruff is careful to point out that the disintegration of the Catholic youth organizations cannot be depicted as a linear process; the breakdown occurred first where "the defenses against the modern world could not be maintained" (p. 189). As a result, Ruff structures each chapter so as to address a different variable in this process of decline--the role of historical memory; the generation gap that existed between young members disillusioned by their experiences in the Hitler Youth and postwar youth leaders determined to rebuild the hierarchies, uniforms, and romanticism of the nineteenth-century youth movement; the inability of Catholic youth organizations to compete with increasingly popular forms of recreation and entertainment that de-emphasized the collective experience in favor of creating opportunities for individualistic expression; the exodus of young women from youth organizations due to the Church¹s refusal to make concessions to changing values in relationships, marriage, careers, dress, and dance; the importance of occupational and class differences in determining the success of organizational efforts; and regional factors.
Acknowledging the inherent problems entailed in trying to measure religious belief and behavior quantitatively, Ruff employs a pyramid model to move beyond previous studies of secularization which have focused primarily on church attendance. At the bottom of the pyramid are those forms of religious participation which require a minimal commitment of time and energy by practitioners, with each successive level placing greater spiritual, emotional, and physical demands on the would-be participants. Under this system, at the bottom would be religious observances such as Christian burial and marriage, and at the top level would be entry into the priesthood. Ruff states that the erosion of the Catholic milieu can best be understood as a decline in participation from top to bottom in this pyramid structure (p. 10). For this reason, Ruff concentrates on the decline in participation at the top levels of the pyramid--the drop in enrollment in the vast network of Catholic Verbände and the growing unwillingness of young people to assume leadership roles in these organizations. These youth organization leaders had traditionally gone on to hold leadership positions within other Catholic organizations as adults; thus, the disintegration of youth groups contributed to a larger leadership crisis within the German Catholic milieu. Although Ruff recognizes that this model will not always correspond perfectly to actual changes in spirituality, he demonstrates the usefulness of it for highlighting the erosion of an essential underpinning of the Roman Catholic faith--the belief in the Church's authority to communicate the teachings of Christ and to structure the daily lives of its congregants (p. 10).
In his study, Ruff offers convincing documentation that the Catholic Church was much less monolithic in the 1950s than has been portrayed to date; substantial conflicts existed between liberals and conservative voices within the German Catholic Church about how to confront the problems facing youth organizations. By demonstrating that antecedents for challenges to the authority of the Church of the 1960s already existed in the 1950s, Ruff succeeds in his goal of expanding Uta Poiger's thesis that West Germany in the 1950s cannot be understood as a period of social and political stasis. Catholic youth had already begun to ignore the dictates of the Church; they went to movies, wore make up, and listened to rock 'n' roll. Faced with the threat of losing the support of young members, Catholic leaders abandoned their scathing critique of mass culture in the late 1950s and tried to co-opt these entertainment forms for their own ends. The result was the demystification of Church authority, paving the way for the open rebellion of the 1960s (p. 193).
Undeniably, the postwar culture of consumption played an important role in the changing relationship between young people and Catholic authorities in West Germany. However, Ruff's analysis emphasizes this factor at the expense of any substantial discussion of the complex mix of accommodation and confrontation that characterized Catholic-Nazi relations and its subsequent impact on the secularization of postwar Catholic youth. Consequently, he excludes from his discussion influences such as contemporary socio-political debates that may have altered the ways in which young people experienced Church authority. For example, no mention is made of the wave of anti-Semitic incidents in German schools in the 1950s, which precipitated the introduction of new textbooks and other didactic materials that offered students detailed information about the Nazi period; the broadcasting of the fourteen-part documentary series The Third Reich in 1960-1961; or the media coverage of the Eichmann trial. These events gave young people access to an account of the recent National Socialist past that called into question the narrative of their parents and of the Church.[1] Yet, Ruff does not discuss how Catholic youth leaders faced these challenges to their authority, how did they answer the growing number of questions young members must have had about the activities of their parents and of Church leaders during the war.
Also, Ruff's argument that "the erosion of the Catholic milieu in Germany (and the Netherlands and Switzerland) lay in the manner in which these insular subcultures took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century, grounded in an ideology of anti-modernism and alienated from the mainstream" is weakened by the author¹s failure to offer any substantial analysis of why Protestant and Socialist youth groups also experienced a decline at this time (p. 202). In fact, Ruff does not discuss Protestant youth groups at all and only briefly references the socialist youth group, the Falcons, and the communist youth group, Freie Deutsche Jugend. However, he includes no specific details about the history of these two organizations or their efforts to maintain their membership during this time period. Ruff also fails to address what influence activities sponsored by other West German youth groups in the 1950s may have had on Catholic programs or what reaction Catholic youth leaders had to mass events, sponsored by the East German government and attended by thousands of East and West German youths, such as the 1949 "National Goethe Celebration" and the 1950 "Bach Celebration of German Youth."[2]
These omissions from Ruff's discussion inadvertently create the impression that the struggle of Catholic youth organizations to maintain their membership occurred in a socio-political vacuum, unaffected by West German efforts to create a useable past or by the actions, policies, and programs instituted by other youth groups also struggling to survive in a political and social climate radically changed by National Socialism, the Cold War, and the emergence of consumerism. Yet, despite these shortcomings, Ruff makes a valuable contribution to the literature on postwar German youth culture by introducing a discussion of the role of religious organizations in shaping how young people experienced the cultural changes brought about by the culture of consumption, the Cold War, and the National Socialist past.
Notes
[1]. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 212.
[2]. Alan L. Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 63-73.
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Citation:
Allie Tichenor. Review of Ruff, Mark Edward, The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11206
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