Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (98 page)

Bismarck was the driving force behind this unprecedented campaign. Why did he undertake it? The answer lies partly in his highly confessionalized understanding of the German national question. In the 1850s, during his posting to the German Confederal authority in Frankfurt, he had come to believe that political Catholicism was the chief ‘enemy of Prussia’ in southern Germany. The spectacle of Catholic revivalist piety, with its demonstrative pilgrimages and public festivities, filled him with disgust, as did the increasingly Roman orientation of mid-century Catholicism. At times, indeed, he doubted whether this ‘hypocritical idolatrous papism full of hate and cunning’, whose ‘presumptuous dogma falsified God’s revelation and nurtured idolatry as a basis for worldly domination’ was a religion at all.
²³
A variety of themes were bundled together here: a fastidious Protestant contempt (accentuated by Bismarck’s Pietist spirituality) for the outward display so characteristic of the Catholic revival blended with a strain of half-submerged German idealism and political apprehensions (shading into paranoia) about the church’s capacity to manipulate minds and mobilize masses.

These antipathies deepened during the conflicts that brought about the unification of Germany. The German Catholics had traditionally looked to Austria for leadership in German affairs and they were unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Prussian-dominated ‘small Germany’ excluding the 6 million (mainly Catholic) Austrian Germans. In 1866, the news of Prussian victory triggered Catholic riots in the south, while the Catholic caucus in the Prussian Landtag opposed the government on a number of key symbolic initiatives, including the indemnity bill, the Prussian annexation programme and the proposal to reward Bismarck and the Prussian generals financially for the recent victory. In 1867–8, the Prussian minister-president – now chancellor of the North German Confederation – was infuriated by the strength of Catholic resistance in the south to a closer union with the north. Particularly alarming was the Bavarian campaign of 1869 against the pro-Prussian policies of the liberal government in Munich. The clergy played a crucial role in mobilizing support for the Catholic-particularist programme of the opposition, agitating from pulpits and collecting petitions bearing hundreds of thousands of signatures.
²⁴
After 1871, doubts about the political reliability of the Catholics were further reinforced by the fact that, of the three main ethnic minorities (Poles, Alsatians and Danes), whose representatives formed opposition parties in the Reichstag, two
were emphatically Catholic. Bismarck was utterly persuaded of the political ‘disloyalty’ of the 2.5 million Catholic Poles in the Prussian East, and he suspected that the church and its networks were deeply implicated in the Polish nationalist movement.

These concerns resonated more destructively within the new nation-state than they had before. The new Bismarckian Reich was not in any sense an ‘organic’ or historically evolved entity – it was the highly artificial product of four years of diplomacy and war.
²⁵
In the 1870s, as so often in the history of the Prussian state, the successes of the monarchy seemed as fragile as they were impressive. There was an unsettling sense that what had so swiftly been put together could also be undone, that the Empire might never acquire the political or cultural cohesion to safeguard itself against fragmentation from within. These anxieties may appear absurd to us, but they felt real to many contemporaries. In this climate of uncertainty, it seemed plausible to view the Catholics as the most formidable domestic hindrance to national consolidation.

In lashing out against the Catholics, Bismarck knew that he could count on the enthusiastic support of the National Liberals, whose powerful positions in the new Reichstag and the Prussian Chamber of Deputies made them indispensable political allies. In Prussia, as in much of Germany (and Europe), anti-Catholicism was one of the defining strands of late-nineteenth-century liberalism. Liberals held up Catholicism as the diametrical negation of their own world-view. They denounced the ‘absolutism’ and ‘slavery’ of the doctrine of papal infallibility adopted by the Vatican Council in 1870(according to which the authority of the pope is unchallengeable when he speaks
ex cathedra
on matters of faith or morals). Liberal journalism depicted the Catholic faithful as a servile and manipulated mass (by implied contrast with a liberal social universe centred on male tax-paying worthies with unbound consciences). A bestiary of anti-clerical stereotypes emerged: the satires in liberal journals thronged with wily, thin Jesuits and lecherous, fat priests – amenable subjects because the cartoonist’s pen could make such artful play with the solid black of their garb. By vilifying the parish priest in his confessorial role or impugning the sexual propriety of nuns, they articulated through a double negative the liberal faith in the sanctity of the patriarchal nuclear family. Through their nervousness about the prominent place of women within many of the new Catholic orders and their prurient fascination with the celibacy (or not) of the priest, liberals
revealed a deep-seated preoccupation with ‘manliness’ that was crucial (though not always explicitly) to the self-understanding of the movement.
²⁶
For the liberals, therefore, the campaign against the church was nothing less than a ‘struggle of cultures’ – the term was coined by the liberal Protestant pathologist Rudolf Virchow in a speech of February 1872 to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.
²⁷

Bismarck’s campaign against the Prussian Catholics was a failure. He had hoped that an anti-Catholic crusade would help to create a broad, Protestant liberal-conservative lobby that would help him to pass legislation consolidating the new Empire. But the integrating effect of the campaign was more fleeting and fragile than he had anticipated. Anti-Catholicism could not sustain a durable platform for government action, either in Prussia or in the Empire. There were many facets to this problem. Bismarck himself was less of an extremist than many of those whose passions were aroused by his policy. He was a religious man who sought the guidance of God in his administration of state affairs (and usually, as the left liberal Ludwig Bamberger sardonically noted, found the deity agreeing with him).
²⁸
His religion was – in the Pietist tradition – non-sectarian and ecumenical. He was opposed to the complete separation of church and state sought by the liberals, and he did not believe that religion was a purely private affair. Bismarck did not share the left-liberal hope that religion would ultimately wither away as a social force. He was thus unnerved by the anti-clerical and secularizing energies released by the
Kulturkampf
.

The anti-Catholic campaign also failed because the confessional divide was cross-cut by the other fault-lines in the Prussian political landscape. As the
Kulturkampf
wore on, the rift between left liberals and right liberals proved in some respects even deeper than that between the liberals and the Catholics. By the mid-1870s, the left liberals had begun to oppose the campaign on the grounds that it infringed fundamental rights. The increasing radicalism of anti-church measures also prompted misgivings in many Protestants on the ‘clerical’ wing of German conservatism. The view gained ground that the real victim of the
Kulturkampf
was not the Catholic church or Catholic politics as such, but religion itself. The most prominent examples of such conservative scruples were Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach and Hans von Kleist, both men formed by the Pietist milieu of old Prussia.

Even if the support for Bismarck’s policy had been more secure, it is

50. Anti-clerical stereotypes. Cartoon by Ludwig Stutz from the satirical journal
Kladderadatsch,
Berlin, December 1900.

highly doubtful that he could ever have succeeded in neutralizing Catholic dissent by any of the means available to a constitutional and law-abiding state. Bismarck himself had been in his twenties when the fight over mixed marriages broke out in the Prussian Rhineland in 1837, a struggle that mobilized the Catholic population in the province and enhanced the moral authority of the episcopate. He must also have remembered the vain efforts of the Prussian government to impose the Prussian Union on the ‘Old Lutherans’ of Silesia – here again was a clear illustration of the futility of applying legal coercion to a confessional minority. And yet Bismarck and his partisans made the old mistake of overrating the power of the state and underestimating the determination of their opponents. In many areas, Catholic clerical personnel simply failed to respond in any way at all to the new laws.
²⁹
The new state ‘cultural examinations’ for young priests approaching ordination were not attended; the state endorsements required for new ecclesiastical appointments were not sought.

The Prussian authorities, who had rushed these laws through and had not thought very deeply about how to ensure compliance, responded to this civil disobedience (as had their predecessors in the 1830s) by imposing improvised sanctions ranging from fines of varying severity to terms of imprisonment and exile. But these measures had virtually no detectable effect. The church continued to make ‘illegal’ appointments and the fines levied by the government authorities continued to accumulate. By early 1874, the archbishop of Gnesen-Posen alone had incurred fines totalling 29,700 thalers, more than twice his annual stipend; the figure for his colleague in Cologne was 29,500. When fines remained unpaid, the local authorities confiscated the property of bishops and offered it up at public auction. But this too was counter-productive, because loyal Catholics would rally to manage the auction in such a way as to ensure that the goods were sold at the lowest possible prices and returned to the expropriated clergyman.

Imprisonment was equally futile. As senior ecclesiastical dignitaries, bishops and archbishops were treated with such leniency during their incarceration that they might as well have been in their homes. They were allowed to occupy suites of rooms furnished from the episcopal palace and they dined on food prepared by the palace kitchens. In the case of Johannes von der Marwitz, the elderly bishop of Kulm (West Prussia), the option of imprisonment was even vetoed by the local
judiciary on the grounds that the stairs of the local penitentiary were too steep for him to ascend. The authorities treated common parish priests far more harshly, but this too was ineffective, since it merely intensified the solidarity of the faithful with their beleaguered priests and hardened the determination of the latter to resist. After even brief jail terms, priests returned as heroes to their parishes.

The government attempted to resolve this problem in May 1874 by introducing a new batch of regulations known collectively as the Expulsion Law and providing for the exile of insurgent bishops and clergy to remote locations – a favourite was the Baltic island of Rügen. Several hundred priests were rounded up and exiled under these regulations in the four years between 1875 and 1879. But this measure created more problems than it solved. Who was to police the enforcement of the expulsion orders? In theory, this responsibility fell to the district commissioners (
Landräte
), but an official overseeing a population of 50,000 scattered over 200 square kilometres could hardly be expected to keep abreast of developments in every parish. It was not unknown for priests simply to return unnoticed after their expulsions and resume their clerical duties. In one such case an expelled priest worked in his parish for two years before the authorities became aware of his existence; by this time, the expulsion order against him had elapsed.
³⁰
It also proved extremely difficult to replace the displaced priests with politically reliable successors. The individuals appointed by the state to replace dismissed clergymen were an abject failure, since they were despised and vilified by the Catholic populace. In a number of cases, the local authorities found that the only way to ensure compliance was to organize compulsory church parades in army encampments.

Far from neutralizing Catholicism as a political and social force, then, Bismarck’s campaign enhanced it. Bismarck had reckoned that the Catholic camp would split under the pressure of the new laws, marginalizing the ultramontanes (exponents of papal authority) and transforming the remainder of the church into a compliant partner of the state. But in fact the opposite happened: the effect of state action was to drive back and marginalize liberal and statist elements within Catholicism. The controversies provoked in many Catholic communities by the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 were put aside as critics of the doctrine acknowledged that papal absolutism was a lesser evil than the secularizing state. A small contingent of liberal anti-infallibilists,
most of them academics, did split from Rome to form ‘Old Catholic’ congregations – a distant echo of the radical ‘German-Catholics’ who had congregated under the motto ‘away from Rome’ in the 1840s – but they never acquired a significant social base.