restrictions and controls
catholic resistance
liquidating the kulturkampf
aftermath and legacy
bibliography
The Kulturkampf, or "struggle for civilization," was an episode of firstrate importance in modern German history in which Otto von Bismarck (Germany's chancellor and Prussia's minister-president; 1815–1898) and his political allies attempted to weaken the German Catholic church's ties to the papacy, to bring that church under stricter state control, and to forge a common culture across Germany's confessional divide. Fought chiefly in the Hohenzollern kingdom of Prussia and to a lesser extent in Germany as a whole, the Kulturkampf began in 1871, escalated sharply until 1878, and then gradually wound down until its end in 1887. This dispute took its grandiloquent name following a speech in January 1873 in which Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), a prominent scientist and liberal politician, described the intensifying church–state disagreement as nothing less than a monumental struggle between two competing cultural viewpoints. The term embodied all the confidence, optimism, and belief in progress so characteristic of liberal thinking during the 1860s and 1870s.
The Kulturkampf owed its origins to complex elements and motives, including the existence of a post-Reformation religious, regional, and cultural divide that separated Germany's Catholic and Protestant worlds. Even with national unification in 1870–1871, Germany's confessional division meant that a profound religious rift ran straight through the empire, a rift that shaped and molded the way in which Germans imagined their nation and attempted to construct a national identity. More immediate causes for the Kulturkampf ranged from widespread dismay regarding papal denunciations of progress, liberalism, and modern culture vehemently expressed by the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 to the sweeping claims of papal infallibility promulgated by the Vatican Council in 1870, and from the fears and frustrations among Germany's Liberals regarding a post-1848 Catholic religious revival to the challenge a rejuvenated Catholicism represented to liberal claims of cultural, social, political, and economic superiority. Without the encouragement and aid of these Liberals, other interest groups, and constituencies, which in turn were energized and emboldened by Bismarck's endorsem*nt of their cause, it is difficult to see how the Kulturkampf could have descended to the levels of loathing it did, dividing the country into two mutually uncompromising universes. But the Kulturkampf 's beginnings also owed much to Bismarck's fears regarding Polish political unrest and unfavorable demographic shifts that threatened German control in Prussia's eastern districts, his desire to exploit the schism caused by the new doctrine of infallibility within the Roman church and spearheaded by the so-called Old Catholic sect, and his alarm at the reappearance of a Catholic political movement—the Center Party—in 1870–1871 that stood against Germany's new political arrangements. His principle aims in the Kulturkampf, therefore, were to limit the scope of the damage that might be caused by the infallibility dogma and to consolidate German unity against both Catholics and Poles, who, he repeatedly said, pursued religious objectives and ethnic goals to the detriment of the newly fashioned German Reich.
restrictions and controls
Although Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–1878) and others portrayed the plight of the church and its adherents as a massive persecution not unlike that of ancient Rome, the Kulturkampf 's regulations avoided a direct confrontation with religious belief per se, emphasizing instead specific limitations and controls on its practice. To this end, Bismarck's government in 1871 abolished the "Catholic department" in Prussia's Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and prohibited all expression of political opinion from the pulpit. Additional legislation in 1872 eliminated ecclesiastical influence in curricular matters and the supervision of schools, prohibited members of religious orders from teaching in the public educational system, and expelled the Jesuit order from German territory. To undercut papal authority, the Prussian government in that same year also severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The so-called May Laws, adopted by Parliament in 1873, placed the training and appointment of clergy in Prussia under state supervision or jurisdiction. Still another statute adopted in 1874 permitted the government to intern, strip of citizenship, and/or deport clergy found in noncompliance with the May Laws of the previous year. The Prussian government also introduced compulsory civil marriage in 1874, a step extended to the entire Reich a year later. Legislation accepted in 1875 abolished religious orders and congregations (with the exception of those involved in nursing the sick), terminated state subsidies to the Catholic Church, deleted religious guarantees from the Prussian constitution, and permitted Old Catholics to share church property and endowments with their former coreligionists. In 1874 and 1875, furthermore, Prussian authorities pushed through statutes permitting state agents to take charge of bishoprics where the incumbent was in prison or exile and allowed laymen to assume administrative responsibilities at the parish level. Each of these statutes represented not the next item in a preconceived or comprehensive repressive agenda, but a necessary step to cope with developments that were neither coherently planned nor accurately foreseen.
As a consequence of the Kulturkampf 's legislation, the Roman Church paid a heavy price in terms of decimated clergy, alienated revenues, and widespread hardship for the laity. Bishops, the parochial clergy, and the members of monastic houses paid the heaviest toll. More than half of Prussia's episcopate went into exile or prison, nearly a quarter of all parish priests lost their pastoral appointments, and a third or more of all religious orders suffered the loss of home and function. Before the Kulturkampf came to an end, the church as an institution lost fifteen to sixteen million marks in state subsidies.
Ordinary Catholics also suffered grievously. Thousands found themselves without spiritual ministration, and for that reason regularity of sacramental observance became increasingly difficult. Others were jailed or fined for participating in demonstrations in support of their church leaders. Still others were the casualties of slander and malice or simply felt the strain of isolation. A purge of the state bureaucracy cost dozens of Catholic civil servants their careers and livelihoods. The Kulturkampf also subjected the confessional press and its representatives to stricter controls. Police officials harassed, intimidated, censored, or even fined and imprisoned Catholic editors and journalists to silence the news they reported and the opinions they expressed.
catholic resistance
Despite the ordeal to which they were subjected, Catholics continued to resist the Kulturkampf 's new church regulations and to disobey the measures designed to intimidate them. The most important forums for the expression of that resistance were the Reichstag and the Prussian Parliament, in which the Center Party dramatically increased its representation between 1870–1871 and 1874. No Catholic political leader better personified that opposition than Ludwig Windthorst (1812–1891), a superb orator and gifted tactician widely acknowledged by friend and foe alike as Bismarck's most abrasive and formidable parliamentary critic. He organized the Centrist deputies into an obstructionist bloc that kept attention focused on the grievances of their coreligionists.
In addition to the trouble caused by the Center Party and its leader, the government and its supporters also had to contend with widespread and open resistance. This extra parliamentary opposition was expressed through the organization of mass meetings, boycotts, civil disobedience, and petitions, even open defiance and public disturbance on a massive, chaotic scale. Bismarck himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in July 1874, and many of his associates received death threats. Imperial Germany, it is said, did not again witness collective action on such a scale until the revolutions that engulfed the country at the end of World War I.
liquidating the kulturkampf
This expanding opposition with its promise of interminable conflict, together with his own inability to find a formula for victory within the boundaries of accepted political action and without changing the size and shape of his government, prompted Bismarck by the late 1870s to normalize relations with the Roman Church. He also found himself increasingly distracted from the Kulturkampf by the rapid growth of the Social Democratic Party and the threat he believed this movement represented to Germany's internal political and social arrangements. But Bismarck's desire to find a modus vivendi with the Roman Church and its German adherents was also prompted by the accession of a more moderate pontiff following the death of the intransigent Pius IX in 1878. Although the Prussian government initiated contacts between Berlin and Rome, early negotiations proved disappointing. Unable to reach an acceptable compromise with Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903), the new pope, Bismarck chose instead unilaterally to ease the Kulturkampf by legislative and administrative action. Major steps in this direction included the Relief Law of 1880, which relaxed key features of the May Laws, permitted parishes with pastors to aid those without, and paved the way for the return of deposed clergy to vacant parishes and episcopal sees. In addition, Berlin restored diplomatic ties with the Holy See in 1882. These steps, however, including a visit of the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William (1831–1888) in 1883 to the Roman pontiff, did little to assuage the misgivings of the Center Party and the Roman Curia. What did make the pope more tractable, on the other hand, was Bismarck's request to Leo in 1885 to arbitrate a colonial dispute between Germany and Spain over competing claims to the Caroline Islands and the Palua Island group in Micronesia. This request produced a more favorable climate for direct church–state negotiations, outflanked Windthorst and the obstreperous Center Party, and led to acceptance of the Peace Law of 1886. This accord required the Prussian government to repeal, reduce in severity, or simply allow to fall into disuse much of the Kulturkampf legislation. To this end, Prussian authorities abolished the special examinations in philosophy, history, and German literature demanded of ordinands by the May Laws, recognized the pope's disciplinary power over the clergy, did away with the special tribunal that had acted on appeals against episcopal decisions, and reopened diocesan seminaries. The agreement also called for Prussia to resume financial aid to the church and to permit religious orders and congregations—at the discretion of the government—to reestablish chapter houses and to resume their previous activities.
Although both sides acknowledged the end of the Kulturkampf by mid-1887, not all restrictions and controls disappeared or even fell into disuse. The guarantees of religious freedom, abolished from the Prussian constitution at the height of the Kulturkampf, were not reinstated. Civil marriage was retained, as was state supervision of schools, the right of Prussian subjects to disassociate themselves from formal church affiliation, and the state's power to veto ecclesiastical appointments. The separate department for Catholic affairs in the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs was not revived. Prussia's authority to deprive recalcitrant clergy of their citizenship and to deport them physically was not lifted until 1890. The Jesuit Law, despite a partial repeal in 1904, was not abandoned until 1917. And restrictions against political use of the pulpit remained in force until 1953. While the final settlement brought a close to the Kulturkampf as a formal conflict, it did little or nothing at all to end less-overt forms of discrimination or what Catholics derisively called a "silent" Kulturkampf.
aftermath and legacy
The Kulturkampf left permanent scars, both for the Catholic populace and for Prussian and German society as a whole. Although Catholics suffered grievously during the Kulturkampf, when assessed in terms of its larger purpose—as a means to eradicate Catholicism as a major factor in Germany's political life, to break Catholic opposition to governmental policy, or to consolidate national unity—the Kulturkampf was a conspicuous failure and a disappointment to its proponents. Despite Bismarck's best efforts, the Center Party remained unbroken and even established itself as a potent political force that he could not ignore. Catholic morale did not disintegrate, and Catholics remained a coherent bloc within German society. The Polish-speaking inhabitants of Prussia's eastern provinces also continued to resist demands for conformity. Even the intention to forge national unity across Germany's religious divide only served to create more dissension because the Kulturkampf left Germany more divided than ever, divided by suspicion, fear, and mutual misunderstanding. As the defining experience of their lives, the Kulturkampf entered deeply into the collective memory of countless Catholics and influenced the attitudes and behavior of their community well into the twentieth century.
It is good to remember, of course, that the Prussian Kulturkampf as a "culture war" did not stand alone. Similar conflicts, less well known and on a smaller scale, occurred elsewhere in Europe and even in Germany itself. Following Europe's mid-century revolutions, Catholic areas witnessed a vigorous religious renewal. Fashioned and dominated by the clergy and sustained within an institutional framework of new associations and organizations, this revival introduced a new, popular morality encouraged by missions, revival meetings, pilgrimages, and other forms of religious expression and practice. This reshaped Catholicism, like the secular, liberal, and anticlerical political culture with which it often collided, was a transnational phenomenon. It is not surprising, therefore, that from the mid- to later nineteenth century lesser German states such as Baden or Hesse-Darmstadt, or Switzerland, France, Belgium, and countries elsewhere in Europe experienced cultural clashes similar to Prussia's Kulturkampf.
See alsoBismarck, Otto von; Catholicism; Catholicism, Political; Center Party; Germany; Liberalism; Pius IX; Prussia; Windthorst, Ludwig.
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Ronald J. Ross
Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire
