"A lucid, innovative work of top-flight scholarship. Gross shows us
the depths of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany; he
explains why the German Kulturkampf had such force and why
prominent liberals imagined it as a turning point not only in
Germany but in world history."
---Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University
"A marvelously original account of how the Kulturkampf emerged from
the cultural, social, and gendered worlds of German liberalism.
While not neglecting the 1870s, Gross's analysis directs
historians' attention to the under-researched 1850s and
1860s-decades in which liberals' anti-Catholic arguments were
formulated against a backdrop of religious revival, democratic
innovation, national ambition, and the articulation of new roles
for women in society, politics, and the church. The drama of these
decades resonates in every chapter of Gross's fine study."
---James Retallack, University of Toronto
"Michael Gross has put the culture back into the Kulturkampf!
Integrating social and political analysis with illuminating
interpretations of visual and linguistic evidence, Gross explores
the work of religious cleavage in defining German national
identity. An emerging women's movement, liberal virtues, and
Catholic difference come together to explain why, in a century of
secularization, Germany's Catholics experienced a religious
revival, and why its liberals responded with enmity and
frustration. Vividly written and a pleasure to read, this
groundbreaking study offers real surprises."
---Margaret Lavinia Anderson, University of California, Berkeley
An innovative study of the relationship between the two most
significant, equally powerful, andirreconcilable movements in
Germany, Catholicism and liberalism, in the decades following the
1848 Revolution.
After the defeat of liberalism in the Revolution of 1848, and in
the face of the dramatic revival of popular Catholicism, German
middle-class liberals used anti-Catholicism to orient themselves
culturally in a new age. Michael B. Gross's study shows how
anti-Catholicism and specifically the Kulturkampf, the campaign to
break the power of the Catholic Church, were not simply attacks
against the church nor were they merely an attempt to secure state
autonomy. Gross shows that the liberal attack on Catholicism was
actually a complex attempt to preserve moral, social, political,
and sexual order during a period of dramatic pressures for
change.
Gross argues that a culture of anti-Catholicism shaped the modern
development of Germany including capitalist economics, industrial
expansion, national unification, and gender roles. He demonstrates
that images of priests, monks, nuns, and Catholics as medieval,
backward, and sexually deviant asserted the liberal middle-class
claim to social authority after the Revolution of 1848. He pays
particular attention to the ways anti-Catholicism, Jesuitphobia,
and antimonastic hysteria were laced with misogyny and expressed
deeper fears of mass culture and democracy in the liberal
imagination. In doing so, he identifies the moral, social, and
cultural imperatives behind the Kulturkampf in the 1870s.
By offering a provocative reinterpretation of liberalism and its
relationship to the German anti-Catholic movement, this work
ultimately demonstrates that in Germany, liberalism itself
contributed to a culture of intolerance that would proveto be a
serious liability in the twentieth century. It will be of
particular interest to students and scholars of culture, ideology,
religion, and politics.
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