The German Genius

Priests and pastors now saw themselves as being involved in a Kriegszustand , or state of war. Pastors argued that the Catholic campaign to improve morality was a sham, a Trojan Horse, and that they were just as keen to assault the virtues of the Enlightenment, “against Bildung and the humanity of our time.” 19 Others argued that Catholicism was backward, whereas Protestantism was progressive and, yes, liberal. Treitschke, after Pius IX had issued the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, confessed, “what good luck it is to be Protestant. Protestantism has the capacity for endless, continuing Bildung.” 20
    Feelings were just as strong against nuns and monks because the Kulturkampf was overlaid with a Geschlechterkampf , or a conflict between men and women. Rudolf Virchow, leader of the Progressive Party in the Prussian Parliament, and the man who actually coined the term “Kulturkampf,” attacked the emergence of the women’s movement and was joined by Sybel. The growth of female religious orders was singled out—these nunneries “were draining the marriage pool.” 21 In the convent schools the girls were made to promise not to read Goethe or Schiller.
    If there was a tipping point, it occurred in the early 1860s. Throughout the late 1850s, state after state had initiated policies that helped them join the Zollverein (the German Customs Union). In 1866 Prussia’s decisive victory over Austria put an end to any idea of a Grossdeutsch solution to the German national question, a German state unified under the Hapsburgs. Moreover, Catholics—who had been in the majority in the German Confederation that had existed since 1815—now found themselves in a minority in the North German Confederation: 20 million Protestants to 8 million Catholics. The Protestants thought the victory a proof of their virility, Droysen characterizing it as “the triumph of the true German spirit over the false.” 22 The “problem of Catholicism” became a major topic of debate, not helped by the Syllabus of Errors, which made it plain that the pope considered liberalism and Catholicism incompatible. Anti-Catholic literature, and anti-Catholic feeling in general, would soon reach hysterical proportions. 23
    By the early 1870s, then, several things came together—militant Catholicism (including better organization, politically), the women’s movement, the demand for democratization, plus nascent socialism and even the fear of French revanchism, after the victories of 1870–71, to produce what Gross again has called a “meta-enemy.” 24 All these factors were enemies allied against what was, after all, a new empire. And when, in October 1873, the pope claimed that everyone who had been baptized Christian “belonged” to him, all liberal fears were confirmed, and the campaign against the Catholics became urgent. According to the Catholic Badische Beobachter , a war was in the offing: “We have made peace with France; with Rome, we will never make peace.” 25 That campaign was launched “in the name of German unity, the modern state, science, progress, Bildung and freedom.” For many, nonetheless, this was the abandonment of liberal principles by the liberals.
    The famous “pulpit paragraph” was passed in December 1871 and made public discussion of matters of state by clerics “in a manner endangering public peace” a criminal offense. In 1873 the first of the so-called May Laws was passed, stipulating that the appointment of all clerics be approved by the state. 26 A second law, passed the following July, banned the Society of Jesus and the Redemptorist and Lazarist orders from German soil. The following year a Court of Ecclesiastical Affairs abolished the authority of the pope over the Catholic Church in Prussia and a year after that abolished the state’s subsidy to Catholic dioceses until their bishops agreed in writing to abide by all Kulturkampf laws. In all, 189 monasteries were closed and several thousand clerics banned. Twenty newspapers were closed down, 136 newspaper editors arrested, and 12 dioceses left without bishops. By 1876 1,400 Prussian parishes did not have priests. 27 Jews looked on nervously.
    In cultural terms, the educated liberals of Germany had seen—or professed to see—in the rise of Catholicism the return of an ignorant, backward age, “indifferent or hostile to Bildung” and all that had helped raise Germany from what she had been in the mid-eighteenth century, to where she was in the