The German Genius

this Kulturkampf , as it came to be called, had been building for some time. Catholicism in the land of Luther, Reformation, Protestantism, and Pietism came to stand as the enemy of liberalism, of belief in reform, above all of opposition to the cultivation of the human intellect and spirit in civic society through Bildung .
    After the failed revolutions of 1848, liberalism had come under sustained threat in the reactionary 1850s, and the Catholic Church threw its weight in with the state to rub in the liberal defeat. From 1848 on, waves of missionaries swept across Germany, visiting thousands of towns and small villages from the Rhineland to the Baltic, and for more than twenty years initiated a counterrevolutionary, anti-Liberal, anti-Enlightenment onslaught. The missions—usually consisting of three Jesuit, Franciscan, or Redemptorist missionaries, though there could be as many as eight—concentrated on the smaller localities and between them, according to one account, mounted at least 4,000 interventions between 1848 and 1872. 13
    They were strikingly successful. Typically lasting for two weeks, the towns where they were located often swelled in size to double or even three times their normal population as pilgrims descended on the missions. The pilgrims would either be put up with locals or sleep in churches and even churchyards. Work in the fields was suspended, shops, theaters, and schools were closed. Congregations would be in their places from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. At Cologne, in 1850, when the mission arrived, as many as 16,000 people crowded into the cathedral. 14
    For two weeks, the missionaries held masses, heard confessions, and carried out exorcisms at an intense pace, though the chief attraction was invariably the sermon. These were held three times a day—at dawn, in the afternoon, and in the evening—and each lasted a full two hours. Two subjects appear to have been pre-eminent. One concerned the veneration of the Virgin Mother of Christ, whose Immaculate Conception had become dogma only in 1854. In adoring the exemplary nature of Mary’s life, the missionaries railed against the sins of the contemporary world—alcohol consumption in the taverns, dancing, cards, gambling, sexual license, and the reading of political literature. Some sermons proved so popular that the police commissioner in Düsseldorf in 1851 had them printed as a pamphlet to encourage order in the city. The other theme—the more popular one—was on the fiery reality of hell. The Jesuits in particular specialized in bloodcurdling hell-sermons. 15 At Aachen, people were so keen to confess that brawls broke out as they fought to get to the confessional. Theaters were denuded of their patrons, inns stood empty. In one case the priest reported to his bishop that girls were even wearing their hats more modestly, “without bands and flowers.” 16 Although the missions made a lot of noise, there is, says Michael Gross, no evidence that such “sins” as illegitimacy or alcoholism declined.
    There was also a dramatic rise in the number of new monastic orders and religious congregations. In Cologne there were 272 monks and nuns in 1850; by 1872 that number had grown to 3,131. Four monasteries were built there before 1848; thirty-seven were built in the two decades afterward, and the figures were much the same in Paderborn, five before 1848, twenty-one between then and 1872. 17
    Although the authorities were sometimes concerned that the missions might provoke civil trouble, by and large they welcomed them because their conservative, antiradical aims suited the powers that be and, again for the most part, the sermons steered clear of blatantly political arguments. In May 1852 sixty-two deputies in the lower house of the Prussian Parliament formed the “Catholic Fraktion ,” the first sign of a Catholic Center Party that would come to full fruition with the founding of the empire in 1870. At the same time, worries did begin to be aired about the Jesuits, that they were a rogue “state-within-a-state” pushing anti-Prussian “ultramontanism” and reasserting Austrian influence. 18 These fears grew in the late 1850s as Protestant pastors found they had to work harder to educate their flocks about the differences between Protestant and Catholic. As a result, a Protestant revival took place in Germany toward the end of the 1850s and throughout the 1860s, an indirect and unintended consequence of the Catholic missions.