Read an Excerpt
The Wayward Flock
Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965
By Mark Edward Ruff The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2004 University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
Introduction
Germany, it has been said, is a pagan nation with a Christian past. By any measure, the picture that emerges of Roman Catholicism in Germany is one of widespread alienation from the mother church-of empty pews, aging priests, fractious laity, and unheeded pronouncements. In recent years it has been estimated that a mere 18 percent of German Catholics, who comprise less than 25 percent of the overall German population, attend mass. In light of these attitudes, it is no accident that words such as "secularization" and "de-Christianization" are never far from the lips of political pundits, despairing clergy, and sociologists of religion alike. Some, especially conservative clerics, see the erosion of traditional religious authority as a legacy of the 1960s. Others ascribe it to long-standing historical processes dating back to the Enlightenment and even the Reformation.
Yet this picture of a church in free fall must be juxtaposed with the reality that from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, German Catholics nurtured a vibrant and robust subculture with an often surprising degree of success. From the cradle to the grave, daily life in many of the southern and western regions of Germany was steeped in religion-in prayers, blessings, pilgrimages, festivals, and processions. In the west, dozens oforganizations from youth groups and mothers' clubs to Christian trade unions were as much a part of the landscape as the small farms, coal mines, and cities of this region. This subculture-what many historians have termed the Catholic milieu-proved so formidable that the church and its institutions exerted a decisive influence on German politics, culture, and society, especially in the immediate post-1945 era, when the Catholic leadership in the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and CSU (Christian Social Union) were at the helm of the Federal Republic for more than fifteen years.
This book attempts to resolve this apparent paradox. Why did the Catholic milieu disintegrate at the very point at which the Catholic lay leadership achieved substantial and enduring political success? In other words, why did the techniques and forms of organizations that German Catholics had used for nearly a century to sustain their subculture falter, especially in the postwar era? These questions, however, lead inexorably to the core of this book. Why, above all, did Catholic institutions ultimately fail to win the hearts and minds of young men and women, who in earlier decades had participated with ardor and zeal in religious youth organizations? Or more pointedly, how do we account for the fact that the Catholic milieu "lost" its youth?
There is no way to answer these questions without first turning back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Catholic milieu took root. At first glance these decades appear to have been extremely inauspicious for the whole of European Catholicism. In 1870, Italian troops marched on Rome, seizing the last portions of the papal states, the pope's last significant temporal holdings. Elsewhere in Europe, in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland-three nations in which insular Catholic subcultures emerged-governments took forcible measures against church property and individual priests. Swiss Protestants waged warfare with their fellow Catholics in the 1840s. To the north, Bismarck launched the Kulturkampf with the blessing of liberals, sending thousands of clergy and laity to prison. The onset of industrialization, moreover, threatened to tear apart once-unified Catholic communities; churchmen were now confronted with the prospect of a secular working class open to atheistic Marxist influences.
Yet Catholicism in many regions of Europe actually underwent a renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century, even as Protestant membership on the same terrain stagnated. Catholicism, in fact, owed much of its vitality to its dogged antimodernism that had emerged in response to the attacks by secular nation-states and liberal intellectuals. Whereas many Protestant theologians displayed a much greater openness to the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and even modified their theological understanding to coincide more closely with contemporary science (and arguably declined because of this), the papacy rebuffed all such attempts at compromise. It issued blanket condemnations of liberalism in the "Syllabus of Errors" and infuriated liberals by proclaiming such doctrines as papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Significant religious revivals only intensified this antimodern spirit. Thousands of the Catholic faithful flocked to pilgrimage sites, and enraptured young women reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary, events that to liberals seemed to be the embodiment of superstition and reaction.
Galvanized by the pressures of state persecution and industrialization and succored through religious revivals, Catholicism in Germany took on its distinctive character as a discrete, tightly unified subculture. One of the chief features of this Catholic milieu was defense: it strove to protect Catholics from what was perceived to be a hostile outside world. To a certain extent, the oppositional identity of this subculture has been a feature of many institutions, sacred and secular. It seems to be a universal trait to define oneself by what one is not as much as by what one is. Certainly, many religious institutions, Christianity included in its early years, gave themselves a clearer identity through such an oppositional identity.
Although its critics naturally took delight in deriding it as a ghetto, the Catholic milieu was anything but a simple relic of antimodernism. To protect their own flock more effectively, Catholic leaders deliberately adopted the strategy of using modern weapons to fight the modern world. Almost from the outset, they appropriated the most current forms of organization-political parties, clubs, and the ubiquitous Verein, the prevailing organizational model in nineteenth-century bourgeois society. They then sought to fill these forms of organization with an antimodern message.
It might seem that using "modern means to fight modernity" would have ensured the survival of the Catholic milieu for many decades. But this strategy proved insufficient to sustain the Catholic milieu in the postwar era, a period when society was undergoing rapid cultural and social change. To account for the erosion of the Catholic milieu after 1945, one has to pose a somewhat different question: why was this strategy amiss in the changing culture of the Federal Republic?
The 1950s and early 1960s were an era in which economic prosperity and the spread of technology were changing the face of German society, less so in the early 1950s than from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. Prior to the 1950s, industrialization had largely been a phenomenon affecting persons in or adjacent to cities. In contrast, economic growth in the postwar years spilled over to the countryside and led to a significant increase in the number of daily commuters between urban and rural areas. Although the daily lives and social status of all Germans were not immediately transformed by the increased use of dishwashers, washing machines, and motor vehicles, technology began to change expectations and mentalities. Televisions, the cinema, and motorcycles ensured that even inhabitants of remote agrarian regions were exposed to new "modern" trends. An ethic of consumption was beginning to take root.
Perhaps no portion of society was affected by these changes in culture more than youth. For as observers noted, young persons were, in general, far more receptive to changes in culture and society-new technologies, new employment possibilities, new ways of thinking, and opportunities outside the church worlds-than their elders. Indeed, a new youth culture was taking shape during the 1950s, a world of jazz aficionados, rock 'n' roll revelers, motorcycle riders, and hobby clubs. Although this new youth culture was largely apolitical, it was centered around a new ethos of individualism and consumption-the right of individual young persons to choose to take part in those activities that were of the greatest appeal and interest.
For church leaders, on the other hand, the new youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s was a source of trepidation. Youth leaders feared that the glamour and appeal of this new culture would lead to a mass exodus from traditional youth groups of the teenagers and young adults who alone could sustain this Catholic milieu for another generation. Others recognized that this new ethic of individualism was corrosive to traditional youth work, which was centered around principles of leadership and hierarchy. Although some youth leaders took pains to protect their young flock from this new, modern culture, others recognized the futility of this strategy. Because society was changing so rapidly, they argued, it was essential to integrate the new youth culture-mass entertainment, hobby clubs, and jazz festivals-into activities for their teenagers.
Yet in spite of their best efforts, Catholic youth leaders never genuinely succeeded in appropriating the new youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s for their own ends. Why were they unable to take advantage of this new, modern culture and use it to fight modern society? After all, this strategy of making use of the prevailing forms of youth culture had reaped a substantial harvest even as late as the 1920s and 1930s, when Catholic youth leaders appropriated the forms of the bourgeois German youth movement and bündisch youth groups and, in turn, brought more than 1.5 million young men and women into the ranks of the church. Why were they able to hold together their ranks in the face of ruthless persecution from the National Socialist state and yet be unable to withstand an onslaught of Harley Davidsons, Elvis Presley records, and makeup twenty years later? Why did Catholic youth leaders find it difficult to come to terms with a youth culture that was increasingly predicated upon individualism and consumption?
The answers to this question will form the core of this book. It will focus on several factors that contributed to the erosion of youth work in the 1950s and, in turn, to the erosion of the Catholic milieu: generation gaps between the leadership and the young persons during the late 1940s and 1950s, the difficulties in upholding the antimodern ideological heritage from the nineteenth century, and the often deadly effects of internecine struggle between conservative integralists, who sought to keep the flock cut off from the outside world and its temptations, and moderate reformers, who attempted to adapt themselves to newer cultural norms, at least halfway.
Examining the erosion of the Catholic milieu during the 1950s and 1960s allows one to modify three existing sets of historical and sociological narratives: interpretations of the 1950s, larger accounts of twentieth-century German history, and finally, recent debates on theories of secularization.
Many interpretations of the 1950s depict this era as static. For conservative historians, the 1950s and early 1960s represented a golden age in German history, a decade of full employment and cultural and political stability after years of totalitarian rule and social upheaval. More recently, a number of English-language historians have attached to this picture of stability a more negative value judgment and emphasized the conservative, quasi-authoritarian patriarchal and restorationist features of the era. They assert that the peculiar circumstances of postwar Germany-the black market, military occupation, the return of veterans and prisoners of war, prostitution, and the shortage of men-gave rise to this unique discourse on power, sexuality, gender, and politics. Yet while these works continuously refer to the enormous power of social conservatives in shaping this discourse, they rarely examine more than fleetingly the many nuances and, above all, significant changes within the religious world of West German social conservatives of the 1950s. In some cases, religion is left out altogether.
In this book, in contrast, I attempt to turn both of these interpretations on their heads. By showing that even the conservative heart of West Germany was subject to rapid and unprecedented changes, I argue that the larger society of the 1950s was marked by subtle but unmistakable change beneath the placid surface. The erosion of the Catholic milieu, and especially its waning influence among the young, is evidence enough that the larger structures of authority came under question during this time, even where the rhetoric of some Catholic politicians and church leaders might leave the impression that they had, indeed, succeeded in their program of a conservative cultural restoration. Antecedents for the challenges to authority in the late 1960s existed already in the 1950s. In this book I will also argue that German Catholicism was less monolithic than is portrayed in the recent literature. There were many competing voices and discourses within the church.
This work can thus fit into an expanding body of recent literature on the 1950s that emphasizes the significant impact of the growing culture of consumption on German society. It was the power of this new culture that, perhaps more than any other factor, led a number of younger Catholics to posit alternative visions for youth work. I agree with current arguments put forward, especially by Uta Poiger, that leading voices in Germany abandoned their once-scathing indictments of mass culture and even embraced consumerism, but I will argue that leading Catholics did so for reasons quite different from those of Cold War liberals.
The erosion of the Catholic milieu, secondly, has a much greater significance for the larger trajectory of German history. Any history of twentieth-century Germany has to confront two fundamental challenges: how to explain how Germany moved first toward and then away from National Socialism. On the level of politics, culture, and society, it has to account for both upheaval and stabilization, for the convulsions and tumult of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic as well as for the path to stability that characterized the Federal Republic, particularly by the 1960s.
German society was bitterly divided along the lines of class, region, and confessions from the second half of the nineteenth century through the 1950s. These rifts were so gaping that a number of historians and sociologists created a new terminology to account for this fragmentation. This new lexicon postulated the existence of independent subcultures, or milieus. It appropriated the phrase "Catholic milieu" from a Catholic publicist in the 1960s, Carl Amery, who used it pejoratively to call attention to the insularity and backwardness of Catholic communities. Sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius first brought it into widespread currency in the historical profession. While analyzing election results and German political cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lepsius used the word "milieu" to denote four major groupings within German society as they emerged in the late nineteenth century: Catholics, Socialists, liberals, and East Elbian conservatives. For Lepsius these milieus were "unified social entities, which were formed by a coming together of many structural dimensions such as religion, regional tradition, economic conditions, cultural orientation and social structure of its elites. The milieu is a socio-cultural construction, which is determined by the specific relation of such dimensions within a particular segment of the population." The use of the term "Catholic milieu" has since aroused many controversies, and a number of historians have modified Lepsius's original conceptions or provided alternative formulations.
The trajectory-the formation and erosion-of the Catholic and Socialist milieus, in particular, decisively influenced the larger contours of German history and the decisions made at key junctures, such as 1918, 1933, and 1945. Making larger interpretations more difficult is the reality that both the Catholic and the Socialist subcultures eroded in fits and starts in the course of the twentieth century because of the discontinuous nature of the challenges they had to face. Already in the first two decades of the twentieth century, men from some Catholic working-class communities were beginning to desert church institutions for those of Socialist rivals. This process was accelerated in the 1920s as the forces of mass culture tore away at the Catholic milieu.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Wayward Flock by Mark Edward Ruff Copyright © 2004 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
