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Marpingen - Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Hardcover)
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Marpingen - Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Hardcover)
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An absorbing, challenging work of "bottom-up" history that gives a
voice to the unlettered and the disempowered. Blackbourn
(History/Harvard) transforms an apparently minor historical
curiosity, an instance at best of religious pathology, into a
fascinating, surprising, and moving picture of cultural turmoil in
the new German nation-state. The event in question is the alleged
visitation of the Virgin Mary to three schoolchildren in the remote
Rhineland village of Marpingen in 1876, and the response thereto.
With sure control of his material and an archaeologist's
reconstructive gift, Blackbourn deftly reveals the Marpingen events
as a tangled but telling intersection of multiple cultural
currents: religious strife, both interdenominational and between
competing tendencies in the Catholic hierarchy itself; local
communal rivalry; class tensions; grassroots populist activism;
Bismarck's ongoing Kulturkampf ("cultural war") against the
Catholic Church; and the upheavals in work and family life provoked
by the confrontation of a traditional rural culture with the very
different rhythms of a 19th-century industrial state. Blackbourn
brushes against the grain of readers' expectations: He encourages
us to regard the widespread popular support of the visionaries not
as superstitious medieval credulity but as a sophisticated
mobilization of deep-rooted cultural resources by a community beset
by social dislocation. Conversely, the "progressive" modernizing
forces of state authority, whose response to the apparitions varied
from patrician condescension to outright contempt or suspicion,
stand revealed as at least as self-righteous and hlinkered (by a
faith in secular rationality often as unyielding as religious
dogma) as the peasants they undertook to control. The Church itself
is riven and ambivalent, its sponsorship of the cult of the Madonna
at odds with the increasingly authoritarian bent of the
19th-century Vatican. This dense, authoritative book demands and
deserves an attentive reading and offers rewards few recent
historical narratives can match. (Kirkus Reviews)
In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village
in the west German border region of Saarland, claimed to have seen
an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of
thousands of pilgrims and prompted numerous claims of miraculous
cures. They also led to military intervention, the dispatching of
an undercover detective, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic
trial. This book examines an episode that contemporaries dubbed the
'German Lourdes', its background and its repercussions. David
Blackbourn sets out to recreate the Catholic world of Bismarckian
Germany through a detailed analysis of the changing social,
economic, and community structures in which it was embedded, and a
sensitive account of popular religious beliefs. He powerfully
evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers a
subtle interpretation of the interplay between politics and
religion in newly unified Germany. The book ranges boldly across
the fields of social, cultural and political history, in an
engrossing story with many contemporary resonances.
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