From the time of Bismarck's great rival Ludwig Windthorst to
that of the first post-World War II Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer,
the Catholic community in Germany took a distinctive historical
path. Although it was by no means free of authoritarian components,
it was at times the most democratic pathway taken by organized
political Catholicism anywhere in Europe.
Challenging those who seek continuity in German history
primarily in terms of its long march toward Nazism, this book
crosses all the usual historical turning points from
mid-nineteenth- to late-twentieth-century German history in search
of the indigenous origins of postwar German democracy.
Complementing recent studies of German Social Democracy, it links
the postwar party system to the partisan traditions this new system
transcended by documenting the attempts by reform-minded members of
the old Catholic Center party to break out of the constraints of
minority-group politics and form a democratic political party. The
failure of those efforts before 1933 helped clear the way for
Nazism, but their success after 1945 in founding the
interdenominational Christian Democratic Union (CDU) helped tame
political conservatism and allowed the emergence of the most stable
democracy in contemporary Europe. Integrating those who needed to
be integrated--the cultural and political conservatives--into a
durable liberal order, this conservative yet democratic and
interdenominational "catch-all" party broadened democratic
sensibilities and softened the effect of religious tensions on the
German polity and party system.
By crossing traditional chronological divides and exploring the
links between earlier abortive Catholic initiatives and the range
of competing postwar visions of the new party system, this book
moves Catholic Germany from the periphery to the heart of the issue
of continuity in modern German history.
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