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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.

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Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Usage and Translation
• Introduction(p. 5)
• 1 The Kulturkampf and German National Identity(p. 19)
• Protestantism and Kultur: Constructing a National Canon(p. 20)
• Force, Freedom, and Cultural Disunity: The Role of the State(p. 37)
• The Kulturkampf and the Catholic Community(p. 42)
• 2 Visions of the Nation: The Ideology of Religious Conflict(p. 50)
• The Ideology of the Protestant League(p. 51)
• Catholics, the Nation, and the Roots of Antagonism(p. 61)
• 3 Religious Conflict and Social Life(p. 79)
• "The Invisible Boundary"(p. 80)
• Secularization(p. 85)
• Confessional Integration and Confessional Conflict(p. 94)
• The Social Bases of Confessional Conflict(p. 102)
• 4 The Politics of Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1897-1906(p. 117)
• Sammlungspolitik, Salutations, and the Jesuit Law: Symbolic Politics(p. 118)
• The Underground Politics of the Protestant League(p. 127)
• The Reaction of the Catholic Center(p. 138)
• 5 The Politics of Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1907-14(p. 141)
• German Nationalism and the Catholic Center in the Bulow Bloc(p. 142)
• The Organization of the Nation: Religious Conflict inside the Nationalist Pressure Groups(p. 146)
• The Collapse of the Bulow Bloc and the Eclipse of Integral Nationalist Politics(p. 154)
• 6 Protestants, Catholics, and Poles: Religious and Nationality Conflicts in the Empire's Ethnically Mixed Areas, 1897-1914(p. 169)
• The Geography of National and Religious Conflict in the Ethnic Borderlands of the Prussian East(p. 170)
• German Protestants and Catholic Poles(p. 173)
• The Protestant League and the Limits of Protestant Organization in the Ethnic Borderlands(p. 178)
• German Catholics and Polish Catholics: The Making of an Antagonism(p. 185)
• The Catholic Center and the Nationality Conflict(p. 191)
• 7 Los von Rom: Religious Conflict and the Quest for a Spiritual Pan-Germany(p. 206)
• The Allure of Nationalism: The Appeal of Los von Rom(p. 211)
• Throne, Altar, and National Religion(p. 219)
• Pan-German Politics and the Demise of Los von Rom(p. 225)
• Conclusion(p. 233)
• Sources(p. 241)
• Index(p. 267)

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CHOICE Review

Smith describes a familiar narrative in a provocative and novel way: namely, how the different cultural, political, and religious Weltanschauungs of Protestants and Catholics affected both groups in constructing a national vision in Imperial Germany. Fruitfully using works in cultural studies, as well as the recent historiography of the politics of religion, Smith presents a finely textured account of Catholic-Protestant difference. Political life and party affiliation, cultural and social life tended to revolve around confessional lines, which appeared as strong as class and regional loyalties. Thus Smith sees the Kulturkampf not simply as the Bismarkian attempt to create a Prussian-dominated German state, but as inextricably linked to liberals' conceptions of modernity and "freedom." Rather than unifying a fragile and artificially constructed state however, the Kulturkampf sharpened Catholic resistance to the new Germany. Smith also points out how narratives of wounding, bleeding, and martyrdom served as sources of political Catholicism and confessional cohesion throughout Germany during the 1870s. The second half of Smith's work details the continuing political fragmentation along religious lines at the turn of the century, describing the efforts of the Protestant League, the Center Party, and pressure groups such as the Los Von Rom movement, the Pan-German League, and the Navy League. In part three, Smith discusses the even more complex relationships of mixed nationalities in the border areas: Alsace-Lorraine, Silesia, East Prussia. The author wisely concludes that the fluctuating and uneasy relationships between German Protestantism and Catholicism may not reflect the peculiarities of a 19th-century Sonderweg but rather an anticipation of 20th-century regional and confessional differences writ large when states become nations. All levels. M. Deshmukh; George Mason University