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REVIEWS
| The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Michael B. Gross (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. xiii plus 354 pp. $70.00).
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| The main topic is the evolution and character of liberalism in Germany from 1848 to the passage of Kulturkampf legislation in 1873. Why did German liberals say and feel that nothing less than an all-out "war" against Catholicism was necessary? They feared that the victory over the French in 1870 would prove nugatory; another foreign power would ruin the opportunity to establish the German Empire as a progressive nation of rational, scientifically educated, free citizens. Some ingredients of this conviction are well known. Others, hitherto more obscure, played a significant role, as the author shows. |
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Gross counters the impression that the involvement of liberal notables in Bismarck's anti-Catholic legislative program was a lapse from liberal principles as they understood them. On the contrary, he shows that liberals in Prussia and in the Reichstag signed on to the anti-Jesuit exceptional law out of conviction. For them, ultramontane Catholicism was not just backward and anti-liberal, but positively subversive, despite all its protestations of honoring legalities. This had not been the case in 1848: liberals did not then consider Catholicism as such to be a political threat of the highest order. In the 1850s and 1860s a new and complex context took shape for liberal-minded Bildungsbürger. The bulk of the book assembles the elements of this development with the means of cultural and social history. |
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