In this extremely impressive study of unification-era anti-Catholicism in Germany and Italy, Manuel Borutta resituates the Bismarckian Kulturkampf in a deeper context reaching back to the 1840s. Rightly insisting on the broader European or transnational dimensions of his subject, he builds on the foundations of Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser's benchmark volume Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) to draw together the elements of an Enlightenment-derived European liberal cultural imaginary during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Indeed, though the very term Kulturkampf is invariably attributed to Rudolf Virchow in 1873, Borutta now returns it rightfully to the Swiss radical Ludwig Snell, who coined it in 1840. Long running and extremely impassioned controversies over the power of the Catholic Church in society, which appeared in variations across southern Europe, France, the Low Countries, and Britain, as well as the German-speaking countries, were initially engaged in Switzerland during the 1840s, he argues, with radical effects on the equivalent battles both north and south of the Alps. Holding his two histories (German and Italian) in parallel, on the basis of extensive reading in the printed sources, he presents the strength of the animus against Catholicism as an extrusion from the mid-nineteenth-century liberal drives for national unification, whose momentum was borne simultaneously along by the desires for a progressive remaking of the given social and cultural environment. Far more than a reaction against the contemporary resurgence of Catholic piety, in other words, this anti-Catholicism became the primary medium of an aggressively modernizing outlook, whose advocates declared war on all forms of backwardness and superstition. For liberals, Catholics became “Modernity's Other.” Indeed, the virulence of the attacks launched against Catholicism “by liberals and democrats, Protestants, Jews, and atheists, but also by Catholics [themselves], revealed . . . much of the self-understanding of modernist elites in the Europe of the nineteenth century” (p. 12).

Borutta's account falls into three roughly equal parts. The first presents a history of ideas of a rather classical kind outlining the relationship between “Anti-Catholicism and Modernity” in the visions of social improvement characteristic of the German and Italian Enlightenments. In a master trope of continental liberalism that descended with remarkable resilience through the nineteenth century, the chronic persistence of Catholic backwardness—a symbiosis of popular superstition and clerical power—was deemed the main impediment to progress, rational authority, and a liberal moral order. For Borutta, this amounted to an “orientalism,” whose urtext was the twelve volumes of Friedrich Nicolai's Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781. Nebst Bemerkungen über die Gelehrsamkeit, Industrie, Religion und Sitten (1783–95), an extraordinary plea for the civilizing of a primitive south of Germany by the northern Germans. As Borutta puts this, “Since the Enlightenment Catholicism in Europe became ‘orientalized,’ that is, excluded from history and civilization as backward or incapable of development, as primitive or barbaric.” And “Analagous to colonized peoples overseas,” Catholics were likened to “savages or children, who could neither develop themselves nor act autonomously” (p. 150). This orientalizing syndrome was replicated south of the Alps in Italy, with the difference that backwardness there was ascribed principally to the corruptions of Rome and the Papal State. In contrast with confessionally divided Germany, Italy's near-universal Catholicism drew liberal animus to the institutional power of the clergy rather than to their flock. Either way, disparagement of the Catholic religion became constitutive for the outlook of enlightened liberals.

In the book's second part, Borutta turns to the representational machinery of anti-Catholic polemics, tracking the imagery through a dauntingly extensive array of scandal sheets, periodicals, popular fictions, caricatures, genre paintings, and historical art, as well as the wider diffusion of stereotypes in novels and other forms of writing. This “visual history of the Kulturkampf” (p. 183) is an especially rich and original contribution, in which Borutta moves well beyond the merely illustrative to conduct competent and insightful readings of the images concerned. Here the German and Italian discussions are also woven more integrally together. In the third part, “The Masculine State: Genealogy of the Theory of Secularization in the Age of the European Kulturkämpfe,” he reverts to parallel discussions of his two cases, enframing these with two generalizing chapters that develop an extremely strong argument about the dependence of the secularization thesis on precisely this adversarialism of the Kulturkampf. On the one hand, liberals accused the Catholic Church of perpetuating among the faithful an effete and passive effeminacy, which linked the piety of women to the ineffectuality of their men, while giving free rein to the abuses and sexual licentiousness of priests. Sensationalized attacks on the moral corruption of Catholicism's institutional power (“Sex Crimes” is the title of Borutta's second part) became a key ground for liberalism's demand for separating church from state, so that public authority could become the exercise of an upstanding bourgeois masculinity. On the other hand, this highly gendered understanding of the separateness of the public sphere of politics from the private world of the practice of religion then became subsequently reworked into the early theories of secularization associated with Max Weber. The degree to which later sociologies of the secular have continued to subsist on the terms of this earlier discursive formation of anti-Catholicism is one of the more radical claims raised by Borutta. Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was profoundly shot through with indebtedness to the field of anti-Catholic antagonism struck during the Kulturkampf, he argues, which the apostles of Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Wolfgang Schieder, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and others) have never been able to acknowledge.

The strengths of this book are its Europeanizing of the Kulturkampf, its illuminating comparative framework (finally departing the implicitly Franco-British ground of the Sonderweg), its cultural analysis, and its attentiveness to visuality in particular. At the same time, its reliance virtually exclusively on printed sources imparts a thinness to the grounding that falls far short of the treatment, for example, in David Blackbourn's Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). While Borutta moves perceptions of the Kulturkampf away from the old fixation on Bismarck and his supposed entrapment of the liberals, stressing instead liberalism's full-hearted ideological enthusiasm, he builds on interpretations long advanced by Blackbourn, Jonathan Sperber, the present reviewer, Helmut Walser Smith, above all Michael Gross, and others. He also neglects the independent impetus of a militant Protestantism, especially in regions such as Thuringia, Saxony, and parts of the Rhineland, where greater attention to social history and local sources would have complicated his analysis in exactly that direction. From this point of view, he seems unaware of Kevin Cramer's important The Thirty Years' War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), for example. Evidence from the later Kaiserreich—for example, the role of the Furor Protestanticus in the 1907 elections—would further emphasize this point. While salutary, finally, the use of Edward Said's Orientalism seems overdrawn, less subtly developed than Nelson Moe's treatment in The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), which also goes uncited. But these comments should not detract from the high merits of the book's contribution. Like Ute Planert's superb Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), it builds outward from a particular complex of ideas—“strategies of anti-Catholic othering”—by joining them to a variety of cognate discourses in an argument about the surrounding political formation, exposing what Borutta calls the “discursive interconnections of class and confession, gender and sexuality, nation and race, as well as the relations and reciprocities between discourse and lifeworld, politics and media, private and public” (p. 12).