After a pious but otherwise unexceptional childhood and early adulthood in rural Bavaria, Therese Neumann (1898–1962) began receiving visions. Like other stigmatics honored in the Catholic tradition, she bled from her hands and eyes. Pilgrims could witness her religious ecstasy and her reenactment of the crucifixion in her bedroom. She spent much of the rest of her life strictly fasting. Yet in her periods of good health, she could be found assisting her family out in the fields or traveling to console believers. In the difficult postwar period, her prominence in the region meant that many visited her for advice and support.
According to one estimate, over the years, five hundred thousand pilgrims flocked to Neumann's bedroom, where they could behold and witness her ecstasies (53). Surprisingly, Neumann managed to maintain her prominence in the shifting terrain of Weimar, National Socialist Germany, and even postwar West Germany. Despite her humble origins, she achieved a position of power among Catholic believers. For her supporters, belief in Neumann's special connection to the divine allowed for forms of “agency, identity, and dignity for otherwise disenfranchised rural and small-town populations left behind in the march towards ‘progress,’ urbanization, industrialization, and centralization” (75).
Michael E. O'Sullivan describes Therese Neumann's life in the context of other women connected to miraculous events, such as Louise Lateau, Bernadette Sourbirous, Ursula Hibbeln, Anna Maria Goebel, Barbara Weigand, and Bärbel Reuß. The first chapter describes the terrain of miraculous happenings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters 2 introduces Therese Neumann and key associates, chapter 3 takes up the dynamics of Neumann's supporters within political Catholicism, and chapter 4 focuses on themes of gender and sex in Neumann's life. Chapter 5 brings Therese Neumann's story into the National Socialist period. For additional context about popular religion in the postwar era, chapter 6 considers Marian apparitions between 1940 and 1954, and chapter 7 returns to Neumann and her success in postwar West Germany.
O'Sullivan pays particular attention to the power dynamics at work around Neumann and other women who claimed to deliver divine messages. He carefully and persuasively investigates their impact of their claims of direct access to God outside of the institutional Church. Neumann, the only major twentieth-century German seer who was not condemned by the Catholic Church, also worked effectively with local male leaders. Her father became her strongest defender, and he shielded her from Catholic leaders’ demands that she undergo tests to learn about her bleeding or how she could subsist without food. She also gained supporters among Catholics elites and intellectuals who wrote newspaper articles and even published books about her, further expanding her reach to Catholics across Europe and the world.
O'Sullivan deftly analyzes the role of gender in Neumann's public and private life. Although she herself offered many kinds of advice during her periods of ecstasy, Neumann claimed to support traditional gender roles and women's deference to men, and presented herself as a childlike and simple person. O'Sullivan persuasively argues that while “balancing a desire to fulfill the role of obedient and humble seer with a willful assertiveness, Neumann embraced normative gender roles in an exaggerated way and gained immense power in the process” (247). A deeper understanding of the way that Neumann saw herself as a woman may well come in the future when the Catholic Church allows scholars to read currently restricted primary source documents related to her life. Because Therese Neumann's beatification process is underway, the church has barred access to Neumann's correspondence. This material, especially her letters to prominent Catholic women, will allow future investigators to provide further insight into diverse aspects of her life.
The book presents thoughtful analysis about the impact of Neumann's ecstasies on attitudes among faithful Catholics and the ways that the institutional church tried to channel and control the expression of miraculous faith events. In the short term, the chance to witness Neumann's faith could strengthen an individual's religious commitment. In the long term, however, the church's struggle to come to terms with Neumann's popularity weakened the church as an institution and made it more difficult for Catholic leaders to face the challenges of the twentieth century with a unified church behind them. Some faithful Catholics resorted instead to a personalized, unmediated form of devotion separate from the Catholic hierarchy.
O'Sullivan takes a sensitive approach to his subject. Did Neumann truly bleed from her eyes, hands, and feet? Was she able to continue her spiritual life without eating? O'Sullivan simply tells the reader, as for example in the second paragraph of the book: “She became a religious visionary from 1926 until her death, hearing heavenly voices and bleeding from her eyes, feet, and hands before devoted followers for thirty-five years” (3). Another historian might be tempted to write “witnesses describe Neumann hearing voices and bleeding.…” On the other hand, O'Sullivan's narrative choices make the story of Neumann intimate, poignant, and may well help readers to feel the personal impact of Neumann on her supporters.
The book shows how miraculous faith events can shed light on diverse aspects of twentieth-century Germany: the factions within the Catholic hierarchy, political weakness of the Catholic Center Party, the tumultuous cultural debates of the Weimar period, the criticism of postwar West German consumerist culture, popular memory of the Nazi period, debates within the postwar CDU/CSU, and the post–World War II period as the “most fervent phase” (173) of Marian veneration in the modern era.
The disruptive power of O'Sullivan's title has a double meaning. The phrase points to the influence Therese Neumann and other women seers wielded over Catholic traditional authority on the one hand, and the ways that the stories of women like Neumann could disrupt the larger narratives of German history on the other hand. Through his evaluation of important aspects of popular religion in Catholic Germany, the author makes a striking claim for a “massive revival of miraculous faith from the aftermath of the First World War to the onset of the Cold War that most of the academic world has disregarded” (4). Winner of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Prize, this powerful, well-written book makes a significant contribution to the history of modern Germany and is highly recommended to scholars and students of religion, everyday life, and gender in modern Europe.
