Stephan Fuchs. "Vom Segen des Krieges": Katholische Gebildete im Ersten Weltkrieg. Eine Studie zur Kriegsdeutung im akademischen Katholozismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. XI + 372 S. + 18 s/w Abb. EUR 60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08316-4.
Reviewed by Roisin Healy (Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway)
Published on H-German (January, 2006)
Catholic Intellectuals for God and Fatherland
Catholics had an uneasy relationship with nationalism in Imperial Germany. The exclusion of their Austrian co-religionists in the process of unification and the attacks on their clergy in the Kulturkampf of the 1870s made Catholics wary of the new empire. So, too, did their ideology. Committed to regional and supra-national communities as well as traditional corporative rights, Catholics rejected the dominant Protestant culture of the empire, with its glorification of Luther and state imperatives, and created in its place a distinct historiography and literature that celebrated the Catholic contribution to Germany. Catholic intellectuals, often priests, were at the center of this cultural production. Their position in German society was particularly fragile. As Theodor Mommsen's invocation of "voraussetzungslose Wissenschaft" in opposition to the appointment of a Catholic, Martin Spahn, to a chair of History in 1900 demonstrated, the term "Catholic intellectual" was an oxymoron in the eyes of Protestant academics. Students in Catholic corporations were vulnerable to attack, too. In the academic Kulturkampf that began in 1904, their opposition to the duel led to accusations by Protestant students that they were unready to defend their country.
Yet, as Stephan Fuchs shows in this book, Catholic academics and students were barely distinguishable from their Protestant counterparts in their overwhelming enthusiasm for the German cause in World War One. His study, a Tübingen dissertation, is based on the periodicals published by the seven student organizations to which 90 percent of Catholic students belonged. The contributors to the various periodicals were corporation members, both current and former students, some of whom had attained high academic rank or holy orders. In the first part of the book, Fuchs introduces each corporation in turn, outlining their origins and outlook, geographical scope (several had a presence in Austria), membership numbers, and publications, including their format and circulation figures. This information is followed by a thematic examination of these publications. After exploring the intellectuals' initial response to the war in August, 1914, Fuchs considers their perceptions of the war in an imaginative framework based on three different orientations: inwards, their own part in the war; outwards, the impact of the war on state and society; and upwards, the role of God in their war experience. The final chapter addresses the more critical view of the war found among a minority of Catholic intellectuals.
Readers of this book are left in no doubt as to the sincerity and strength of Catholic nationalist feeling in wartime. Fuchs provides lengthy quotations from contemporary reports, commentaries, poems, death and even birth announcements (ones that welcomed newborn boys as future soldiers), as well as illustrations, to underline his thesis. Just like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic intellectuals defended Germany's role in the outbreak of the war, celebrated the religious renewal and social unity that came with it, especially at the front, and assumed that God would bring them victory. Fuchs shows clearly, however, that the embrace of the national cause by Catholic intellectuals was not without its problems. These had to work hard to reconcile apparent contradictions between faith and nationalism. Faced by the strong Catholic representation on the Entente side, German Catholics justified the attack on Belgium as a military necessity and cast doubt on the religiosity of Catholics there and in France. Unburdened by self-reflection, they condemned their Catholic foes for having succumbed to nationalism. Interestingly, charges from French Catholics that their German co-religionists had betrayed the common faith led the latter to place France ahead of England as the main enemy. The fact that the patron saint of Germany, St. Boniface, was an Englishman was problematic, especially for the Academic Boniface Union. Its members solved the problem by recasting German identity as a personality type. Characterized by loyalty, courage, idealism, efficiency and good scholarship, Boniface was, from this perspective, a model German.
Like Annette Becker's work on France, Fuchs's examination of religiosity in wartime suggests that Catholics made the most of their religious beliefs and rituals to cope with the experiences of wartime.[1] One Catholic priest, for instance, composed a poem comparing religious and military materials, most evocatively "the smoke from a grenade with the clouds of incense" (p. 263). Fuchs's evidence suggests, moreover, that, in the case of Germany, the acclamation of Catholicism as the ideal idiom for war was itself a weapon in the confessional struggles of Imperial Germany. Fuchs acknowledges that Catholic intellectuals were driven in part by a desire to prove their loyalty, but fails to make this point where it seems most obvious, such as in the discussion of relative levels of participation in the war by different confessions. He quotes from an article in the Bonifatius-Korrespondenz which declared that Catholic participation in the war effort ran at 10 percent above the average, that Catholic soldiers spent longer at the front and that they suffered and died in greater numbers than others. Contrary to appearances, Catholics were not asserting their superiority over the Jews, whose contribution was (wrongly) in doubt. The source was, in fact, a Jewish economist, R. E. May (p. 75). It is left up to the reader to speculate that the Jewish and Catholic minorities were combining to challenge Protestant levels of participation in the war.
While arguing for general enthusiasm for war on the part of Catholic intellectuals, Fuchs scrupulously identifies the differences in perspective on a host of issues, from the memory of Bismarck to plans for the postwar order, across the seven groups that he considers. The Cartel of German Catholic Student Corporations, was most supportive of the war effort, even to the point of endorsing the annexationist war aims of the Pan-Germans. At the other end of the spectrum were two relatively small organizations, the League of Catholic Female Student Clubs and the Hochland League of New Catholic Student Corporations, which, despite the name, had no official links to the Hochland journal. Both refrained from employing the popular Feindbilder of the English and the Russians and resisted the impulse to view war deaths as forms of martyrdom.
Fuchs's analysis is less satisfactory when accounting for these differences. While he shows that the Cartel's position was fully in line with its pre-war conduct--it had responded to charges of deficient loyalty in the academic Kulturkampf with the adoption of the principle of "patria" alongside those of "religio, scientia and amicitia"--he points to little more than the distance of women from the war and Hochland's objection to alcohol abuse as explanations for their reticence. We get little sense from the book of the influence of movements such as feminism and moral reform on the student associations or indeed of how these associations fit into the Catholic milieu generally. The author tells us that there was some overlap between these associations and other Catholic strongholds--Karl Hoeber, for instance, was editor of both the Akademische Monatsblätter and the hugely influential Kölnische Volkszeitung--but not how such connections shaped the attitudes of the associations under discussion. Indeed the book cannot claim to be a comprehensive history of Catholic intellectuals, because of its exclusive focus on student associations. Even prominent university-based Catholic intellectuals are missing from the story. For instance, only one of the five professors of Catholic theology who signed the "Manifesto of the Intellectuals" in October, 1914, Josef Mausbach, merits a mention here, and the ferocious nationalist and fellow-signatory, Heinrich Finke, a historian at Freiburg, none at all.[2]
The precise role of the war in forging cross-confessional nationalism also remains unclear. The effusive expressions of support for the war cited here, together with the all-too-brief account of pre-war Catholicism offered in the introduction, give the impression of a dramatic change of course by German Catholics. But, as Helmut Smith has shown, Weltpolitik, Polenpolitik, and even Bismarck had their Catholic champions well before World War One.[3] If the reader has to fill in much of this context for him/herself, the book is nonetheless valuable for documenting the enthusiasm for the war among many Catholic students and academics and, one might add, as a source for lively wartime poetry and prose.
Notes
[1]. Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914-1930 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998).
[2]. For a list of the signatories, see Jürgen Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf an die Kulturwelt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996); on Finke, see Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
[3]. Helmut Walser Smith,German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
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Citation:
Roisin Healy. Review of Fuchs, Stephan, "Vom Segen des Krieges": Katholische Gebildete im Ersten Weltkrieg. Eine Studie zur Kriegsdeutung im akademischen Katholozismus.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11334
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