Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 ed. by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting (review)

Reviewed by: Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 ed. by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting Jonathan Mumme Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989. Edited by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting. New York: Berghahn, 2022. 364 pp. Editors Ruff (Saint Louis University) and Großbölting (University of Hamburg) have assembled engaging essays that examine the movement from conflict between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the Bismarck era to secularization and deconfessionalization in Germany today. Attempting to analyze German religious identities and confessional relations in the twentieth century, the work scrutinizes how confessional tensions of the previous century persisted, reigniting at points of political turmoil and uncertainty. The essays investigate how the seemingly unbridgeable gap between confessional identities has all but closed today, thus challenging the thesis of Olaf Blaschke, which presented 1815 to 1960 as a second era of confessionalization. This work suggests that moments of political upheaval sparked tensions by threatening the balance of power between the confessions during End Page 116 a period that was nevertheless setting the stage for subsequent deconfessionalization. Erudite and illustrative, Jeffrey Zalar's chapter traces how Germany's Roman Catholic minority responded to the Kulturkampf by presenting themselves as good, patriotic, scientifically-minded, educated citizens, whose desire to avoid subsequent confrontation contributed to secularization in the twentieth century. Klaus Kracht examines the Roman Catholic Kulturfront in the Weimar Republic as an anti-modern and anti-communist form of Siegkatholizismus interested in a return to a Christian empire, while Benedikt Brunner presents the revolution of 1918–1919 as a traumatic experience that led Protestants to advocate for various types of Volkskirche in the absence of a Staatskirche. Using statistical analysis of voting behavior from 1925 to 1945, Jürgen Falter demonstrates how Roman Catholics, consolidated by their Center Party and the Bavarian People's Party in a form of political confessionalism, were less susceptible to National Socialist "contagion" (122) than Protestants. James Chappel explores the ties of early German ecumenism, which coincided with renewed Roman Catholic interest in Luther (for example, Joseph Lortz), to Germany's first sizeable interconfessional party: the National Socialists. Focusing on the example of the Confessing Church's Martin Niemöller, Benjamin Ziemann presents conversion between the confessions as a poignant irritant during the wartime period. Although Maria Mitchell assesses the early Christian Democratic Union as an incomplete and regrettably tactical union by measuring its origins against the anachronistic benchmark of "gender … equality" (174), her chapter illustrates how Christian women of both confessions contributed to their party's "unprecedented success" (180) by bringing a maternal "humanization" (175) to bear in German politics. Ruff offers an entertaining and focused case study of conflict surrounding the release of the 1953 film Martin Luther. Focusing on the German Democratic Republic, Claudia Lepp's and Christoph Kösters's contributions show that the Roman Catholic Church better resisted the East German government, but its stance of political abstinence sidelined it as the Protestant churches housed meetings leading to the 1989 revolution. End Page 117 Brandon Bloch and Florian Bock show the confessions coming to terms with their past, the former examining the "fraternally belated achievement" of Christian-Jewish dialogue and the latter discussing their reorientation of mission work toward developmental aid. In addition to a birds-eye analysis of waning confessional tension paired with secularization since the Second World War, Großbölting's chapter offers a reanalysis of concepts of confessionalization based on insights about deconfessionalization. One weakness in this collection is the strictly bi-confessional perspective. Inter-Protestant differences, which persisted well beyond the 1871 founding of the German Empire in organizations such as the Allgemeine Evangelisch-lutherische Konferenz (AELK), the Lutherisches Einigungswerk, and the Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands (VELKD), pass unobserved. This may owe to the editors' focus on the deconfessionalization of modern Germany, where today they play minor roles. But in the period under consideration this was not always the case. This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in German church history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as to researchers of the...