Anna Katharina Emmerick and the Foundations of Her Cult

Fräulein Heidfeld was one of many—from farmers, students, and business owners, to Martha von Papen, the wife of Franz von Papen—who wrote to the Emmerick Haus during the Weimar years.Footnote ⁶ Neither the Emmerick Haus nor the cult of veneration it celebrated was new. The woman at its center, Anna Katharina Emmerick, was an early nineteenth-century daughter of a tenant farmer who later became an Augustinian nun. In December 1811, Napoleonic France annexed the small Westphalian town of Dülmen and secularized the convent where Emmerick lived.Footnote ⁷ A year later, her confessor discovered that Emmerick bore the stigmata: wounds in her hands, feet, side, and forehead similar to those Jesus had received during the Crucifixion. In her waking and sleeping hours, she claimed to experience ecstatic visions of angels and demons, as well as scenes from the lives of Jesus, Mary, and the saints.

Emmerick rapidly became a media sensation. Before her death in 1824, she was already fodder for newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, a topic of debate in Austrian medical journals, the subject of books in France and the Netherlands, and a focal point of discussion in many German-language books, articles, and pamphlets.Footnote ⁸ Pious peasants and skeptical doctors, princes of the Church and Prussian officials, all traveled to Dülmen to see Emmerick for themselves. The most notable of these pilgrims was the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano. Not long after meeting Emmerick in September 1818, Brentano became convinced that he had been charged with a divine mission: recording her life and especially her visions so that they could inspire renewed devotion by Catholics. Selling most of his library and moving permanently to Dülmen, he became a daily fixture at Emmerick's side.Footnote ⁹

In 1833, Brentano published his notes on Emmerick's visions of the Passion narrative as Das bittere Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi, which quickly ran through several German editions, and was reprinted more often in the nineteenth century than many works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.Footnote ¹⁰ Das bittere Leiden, and other subsequent volumes drawn from Brentano's notes, kept Emmerick in the public consciousness.Footnote ¹¹ Equally important, however, the people of Dülmen, the nearby town of Coesfeld, where she was born, and other Westphalian communities all treasured and preserved their own memories of Emmerick, the objects she used, and the places she knew. They made a shrine of her family's Coesfeld farmhouse, and wore a path through Dülmen's cemetery to her grave, which, in time, was upgraded from a simple stone marker to a large cross surrounded by kneelers and an iron fence. They preserved and passed down her belongings as hallowed relics: her deathbed, prayer book, clothing, and crucifix. The print legacy left behind by Brentano, on the one hand, and the local memory of Westphalians, on the other, provided the twin foundations of Anna Katharina Emmerick's lasting cult of veneration.

The institutional process of making Emmerick a saint began in the late nineteenth century. The main champion of her cause was Father Thomas Wegener of Coesfeld, who, like Emmerick, was an Augustinian. Already in the 1850s, Wegener began to interview locals about their memories of Emmerick, the prayers they offered to her, and the relics they had lovingly preserved.Footnote ¹² Collecting evidence of this grassroots veneration over decades, it was clear to him that Westphalian Münsterlanders already revered Emmerick as a saint. Making this sainthood “official” became his life's work.

Modern Roman Catholic saint-making requires far more, however, than a popular reputation of sanctity. Elaborated over centuries, the process involves extensive research and multiple levels of review by various bodies of the institutional Church.Footnote ¹³ Wegener first needed to convince the bishop of the diocese where Emmerick had lived—namely, the bishop of Münster—to open her cause formally. His first request was unsuccessful, but Wegener persisted.Footnote ¹⁴ He wrote articles and pamphlets on various aspects of Emmerick's life and cult, which regularly appeared in local newspapers and journals.Footnote ¹⁵ He also published a reverential, 350-page biography of Emmerick in 1891.Footnote ¹⁶ Bishop Hermann Dingelstad of Münster finally began her formal beatification process the following year. The diocesan commission, which Dingelstad appointed to investigate Emmerick's life and prepare a dossier for the Vatican, concluded its work in 1898. That same year, Father Wegener capped a half-century of work by founding the Emmerick Haus: a memorial center that displayed her reconstructed apartment, as well as her clothing and other relics. In a nearby, recently founded monastery, Augustinian monks continued the work of researching Emmerick's life and cult of veneration after Father Wegener's death in 1918, while lay Augustinian sisters staffed the Emmerick Haus, acting as docents, responding to letters like Fräulein Heidfeld's, and dispatching by post prayer cards, leaflets, and even holy relics.Footnote ¹⁷

In short, Fräulein Heidfeld was following in the footsteps of a century of German Catholics when, in 1923, she brought her prayers to Emmerick. She was also participating in a cult of veneration that was more widespread, more organized, and more enthusiastic than ever before. At the same time, however, Emmerick's cult faced an uncertain future in 1923. There were certainly many indications that devotion to her was flourishing. The number of visitors at the Emmerick Haus remained high.Footnote ¹⁸ Letters like Fräulein Heidfeld's continued to arrive. Clemens Brentano's accounts of Emmerick's visions were now available in nine languages, with new editions appearing regularly.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet, the progress of Emmerick's formal beatification had stalled for decades. Upon the conclusion of the diocesan investigation, Emmerick's cause went before the Congregation of the Holy Rite in Rome and yet another extensive vetting process began. As postulator, or chief investigator, German Augustinian Winfried Hümpfner was tasked with examining every available primary source for evidence of Emmerick's virtue (and orthodoxy). This naturally included her famous visions, as recorded by Brentano; but, as Hümpfner delved into these books, as well as into the poet's original papers, it became increasingly unclear where Emmerick's “authentic” visionary experiences ended—and Brentano's own elaborations began.

In 1923, the same year Fräulein Heidfeld wrote her letter, Hümpfner published Clemens Brentanos Glaubwürdigkeit in seinen Emmerick-Aufzeichnungen, which made critical side-by-side comparisons of Brentano's sketchy notes with the greatly expanded final text of Das bittere Leiden. Hümpfner did not mince words in his conclusion: Brentano had engaged in “deliberate mystification,” sometimes fabricating stories whole cloth, sometimes altering his record of Emmerick's statements to fit his own views.Footnote ²⁰ Rome could not, in any case, endorse Emmerick's visions, any more than her stigmata, as sufficient proof of her saintly status. But because Brentano was also one of the most important sources for details of Emmerick's life, his lack of credibility threw the whole investigative process into doubt.Footnote ²¹

There were larger concerns besides what Emmerick enthusiasts came to refer to as the “Brentano question.” The Catholic Church, and the clergy charged with interpreting and defending its doctrines, faced a tricky cultural challenge in Weimar Germany. The modern spiritualist movement that had emerged in the late nineteenth century grew in significance and popularity in the wake of World War I. Political and economic uncertainty fueled interest in alternative sources of meaning: occultism, mysticism, and various strands of religious and political radicalism.Footnote ²² As Hermann Hesse insightfully observed in 1926, Weimar Germans felt themselves in a moral vacuum and longed for a new worldview: “Irreplaceable things have been lost and destroyed forever; new unheard of things are being imagined in their place. Destroyed and lost for the greater part of the civilized world are, beyond all else, the two universal foundations of life, culture and morality: religion and customary morals.” It was this, he argued, that drove contemporaries' interest in everything from spiritualism, Asian philosophy, and secret societies, to “a whole host of necromancers, sharpers, and clowns,” all streams of what was “the raging, murky flood of modern attempts at religion.”Footnote ²³ Establishment clergy and theologians, whose churches had supported the now tarnished Kaiserreich and its failed war effort, scrambled to reassert the relevance of traditional religion—and to differentiate it from the heterodoxies of spiritualist mysticism.Footnote ²⁴ A figure like Emmerick, the so-called Mystikerin des Münsterlandes, already immortalized as a stigmatic and visionary by Brentano, threatened to further muddy these already “murky” waters.Footnote ²⁵

It was nonetheless at this very historical moment that Anna Katharina Emmerick's cult reached its apotheosis, taking on the contours of an organized movement. Emmerick devotees attuned to the requirements of institutional saint-making now“domesticated” the nineteenth-century mystic in two senses: they “tamed” her mysticism by downplaying the more supernatural aspects of her story, and they tapped into existing networks of local memory and regional Catholic identity by making her an icon of rural, domestic wholesomeness. Most striking, however, the shapers of Emmerick's Weimar cult reimagined her as a saint suited to the tribulations of their present time, a “leader” (Führerin) to guide the defeated and oppressed German Volk down its own Via Dolorosa toward glorious resurrection.

Building an “Emmerick Movement”

In the nineteenth century, Thomas Wegener and his clerical contemporaries had focused primarily on documenting Emmerick's preexisting, grassroots cult of veneration, rather than on directing it. They recounted and publicized Emmerick's story, but otherwise let her cult develop more or less organically among the laity. Furthermore, Wegener and his fellow Augustinians did not actively enlist ordinary German Catholic believers in the institutional process of Emmerick's beatification. Instead, they collected the relevant information and presented it to Rome themselves. A new generation of Catholics in the 1920s would, however, take on a more ambitious goal: not only the spreading but also the shaping of Emmerick's cult, directing the forms it took and channeling the enthusiasm it produced toward the specific demands of the Congregation of the Sacred Rite. This time, moreover, German Catholic clergy would take an active, but not all-powerful role, working together with lay enthusiasts to create an “Emmerick Movement.”

These aspirations took concrete form in the Emmerick Bund, founded by a group of mostly male, middle-class Dülmeners in 1921.Footnote ²⁶ A document from its inaugural meeting reveals the scope of the Bund's ambitions and the range of tools at its disposal. “In every Catholic community and every Catholic association,” the group's mission statement declared, “a presentation about Anna Katharina Emmerick should be held … Then petitions for the beatification of Anna Katharina Emmerick should be sent from all communities to the Holy Father.”Footnote ²⁷ To facilitate this publicity campaign, the Bund produced prewritten presentations with accompanying slideshows. It distributed these presentations, along with preprinted form letters to the pope, so that parishes could petition for Emmerick's beatification simply by filling in the blanks with their names. Advertisements in Catholic newspapers and other national periodicals solicited donations. Daughter chapters of the Bund formed in other German cities.Footnote ²⁸ Dülmen's own Catholic publishing company, Laumann, produced reams of prayer cards and pamphlets.Footnote ²⁹ Bund members also promoted a select list of Emmerick devotional literature that they considered worthy of approbation. This list included Brentano's works and Wegener's biography, as well as the most recent publications: theologian Johannes Niessen's examination of Emmerick's visions, which also addressed the “Brentano Question,” and a sentimental biography just released by the popular author Anna Freiin von Krane.Footnote ³⁰

Two characteristics of the Weimar Emmerick Movement emerged from the start: the use of modern mass media and associational networks, and the assertion of central control over the script of Emmerick veneration through prewritten (or otherwise approved) statements. The Bund's methods also typified what would be an enduring feature of the beatification campaign: a complex interplay of clerical authority and lay initiative, as well as participation by men and women. On the one hand, its founding members were all laypersons, and, in its mission statement, the organization indeed described itself as “a lay association of German Catholics.”Footnote ³¹ On the other hand, its goal was to facilitate Emmerick's beatification, a process of the institutional Church, and the clerically-defined requirements of this process would dictate its focus. Parish networks were, furthermore, key to the success of the Bund's publicity and fundraising campaigns. Priests were on the frontline of Emmerick evangelization, and they would continue to compose much of Emmerick's devotional literature. At the same time, the letters sent to the Emmerick Haus suggest that most, though not all, of the ordinary German Catholics who heard and embraced the Bund's message were women, making up just over 75 percent of its correspondents between the two world wars.Footnote ³²

The leaders of the Emmerick Bund immediately set their ambitious plans in motion, arranging for Laumann to produce an initial print run of fifteen thousand Emmerick biographical pamphlets, at a cost of 50 pfennig apiece, as well as several thousand book-length biographies—which were all sold within months. Laumann and the Bund quickly developed new products: postcards, calendars, devotional images, and novenas. Meanwhile, local chapters of the Bund sprang up in bustling industrial centers, as well as in quiet villages. The Bund's copies of slide presentations were out on loan to these sister branches and to various parishes almost every Sunday.Footnote ³³ Yet, the Bund's most lavish productions were arguably the public festivals and lectures its members organized around the region. Within a few months of drawing up their founding charter, they put on the first of many annual “Emmerick Day” celebrations, not only in Dülmen and nearby Coesfeld but also in Cologne and Essen, with more cities to follow. Newspapers reported packed, enthusiastic crowds in overflowing festival halls. A variety of experts—male and female, clerical and lay—regaled them with speeches on Emmerick's life and subsequent veneration; this included theologians, archivists, physicians, and biographers, many of whom served on the central committee of the Emmerick Bund.Footnote ³⁴ “For us Catholics,” Dülmen's newspaper exulted, the “special significance” of the Emmerick Day celebration “will be that the cornerstone will be laid here, in these days, of a great, German-wide lay organization for the furthering of the beatification process of our fellow citizen, Anna Katharina Emmerick … All German dioceses, all classes and professions, will be represented.”Footnote ³⁵

The Emmerick Bund, and Emmerick's cult of veneration, continued to draw primarily on the Catholics of the Münsterland. Even so, the Dülmener Zeitung’s confident prediction that the movement would eventually enjoy a nationwide reach turned out to be more than just an empty boast. Of the surviving letters to the Emmerick Haus during the Weimar period, the majority are from the immediate region. Yet others came from much further away: not only from distant German cities like Berlin, Kiel, Heidelberg, and Trier, but also from foreign ones like The Hague, Dublin, Buenos Aires, and Chicago. In their prayer requests, as well as in their reports about prayers that had been answered, Emmerick devotees often mentioned the various ways in which they had discovered her. A Boy Scout in Ireland, for example, had received an Emmerick pamphlet (in English) from a priest he had met in the park.Footnote ³⁶ A Berlin woman came to venerate Emmerick after reading and being deeply moved by von Krane's biography.Footnote ³⁷ When a young Bavarian woman had a difficult pregnancy, an Augustinian priest recommended that she and her husband direct their prayers to Emmerick.Footnote ³⁸ Many also wrote to the Emmerick Haus about their powerful experiences on pilgrimages to Coesfeld and Dülmen: of praying at her graveside, of seeing the font where she had been baptized, of touching religious medals against her hallowed deathbed.

In many cases, these Catholics would become proselytizers for Emmerick's cause, sharing their devotion to her with others. One correspondent from Lüdinghausen took four Emmerick relics from a visit to Dülmen and quickly gave them away, sending one to a friend in the United States. He subsequently wrote the Emmerick Haus to ask for more: “I have such a great love and reverence for blessed A. K. Emmerich [sic] that now whenever I find a sick person or grief-stricken soul, I recommend to them the blessed one's intercession.”Footnote ³⁹ Another writer recounted how she had won a new devotee to Emmerick: upon laying a relic on the forehead of an ill female patient sharing her son's hospital room, the woman, who had long been unconscious, immediately began to improve. The mother eagerly told Emmerick's story to the woman upon her waking, and soon they were both praying five Our Fathers every day in her honor. Hospital staff noticed the woman's unexpected recovery, and the mother subsequently gave all the nurses pictures of Emmerick.Footnote ⁴⁰

What these and dozens of similar anecdotes reveal is the working in tandem of many different facets of Emmerick's cult. Mass-produced prayer cards and pamphlets, popular biographies, pilgrimage sites, word of mouth—all of this played a part in spreading and reinforcing Emmerick's devotion among the faithful in Germany and beyond. The Emmerick Bund and its associates produced or promoted many of these methods of veneration. The Augustinian Order, for its part, exercised its own decisive influence through oversight of the Emmerick Haus. In that capacity, it was able to gather together these letters, which provided the crucial intelligence it needed to demonstrate Emmerick's flourishing cult and her intercessory powers to the Congregation of the Sacred Rite. All the evidence they collected lends some credence to the triumphant claim of a Dülmen periodical that “the entire Catholic German people … have created a movement [Bewegung] that extends to ever wider circles.”Footnote ⁴¹ Emmerick's beatification campaign was more regional in nature than this might suggest, but the term movement is without doubt the correct label: a centrally organized effort with a specific goal, multiple means of proselytization, and many enthusiastic participants. David Blackbourn, Jonathan Sperber, Helmut Walser Smith, Jeffrey Zalar, and others have shown how modern transportation networks, voluntary associations, newspapers, and other print media helped sustain German Catholics' own “imagined community” of believers.Footnote ⁴² The Weimar “Emmerick Movement” provides another example of how this process worked in practice.

As is the case for any movement, the architects engaged in shaping Emmerick's Weimar cult could nevertheless only achieve so much. The institutional strictures of the Catholic Church's formal beatification process, on the one hand, and the lived religion of everyday Germans and their myriad personal worlds, on the other, also determined how Emmerick's cult would evolve. Furthermore, both centuries-old Catholic traditions and contemporary historical context played a role as well. The interplay of these actors and influences becomes apparent in the Weimar cult's reimagination of Emmerick's Münsterland roots and Napoleonic-era experiences.

Pilgrimage to the Heimat: Emmerick's Weimar Cult and the Reimagination of Place

It was no accident that the birthplace and headquarters of the Emmerick movement during Weimar was Dülmen, though alternative scenarios were just as probable: the nearby diocesan seat of Münster, for instance, could have also served as the capital of the Emmerick movement. Cologne was another potential candidate: a storied Catholic city whose bishop had exercised some oversight over Westphalia since the Middle Ages. In fact, diocesan authorities there had spearheaded the reestablishment of the Augustinians in Dülmen. Essen was another possibility—Esseners had been making an annual pilgrimage to Emmerick's grave for several decades—as were the large Catholic centers to the south, such as Munich. Any of these cities offered an ambitious movement both larger populations and more resources from which to draw than Dülmen did.

What Dülmen did have, however, was the oldest and densest network of Emmerick local memory. Just as important, it had Emmerick's bones, the bed in which she had lain, and the paths that she had walked. The neighboring town of Coesfeld was the site of Emmerick's childhood home, the font where she had been baptized, and the famous Kreuzweg where she had spent countless hours in prayer.Footnote ⁴³ For believers, this meant that the towns had an ineffable quality of holiness, which her presence had infused into the very soil. Mourners at Emmerick's funeral in 1824 had taken away clumps of earth from her grave. A hundred years later, Weimar Germans were still venerating the spot. As Emmerick became a revered figure, Dülmen, Coesfeld, and their environs became hallowed ground as well. The houses, places of worship, fields, and walkways with some Emmerick connection similarly became potential pilgrimage sites. Using the language of centuries-old traditions of saintly veneration, Catholics could reimagine not only Emmerick but also the humble towns in which she had lived and died. Those who lived in the region could commune with Emmerick, their countrywoman, in an especially profound way. And, at the same time, the Emmerick movement could create public memorial centers there that leveraged the spiritual power of her physical presence like no other place.

Dülmen and Coesfeld were central to German Catholics' imaginations of Emmerick for yet another reason: as rural towns rather than urban centers, they more readily evoked nostalgic visions of the Westphalian homeland (Heimat) and its distinctly Catholic identity. This imagined homeland had powerful appeal in the 1920s and 1930s, a time of continuing rapid industrialization, calls for political reform, and concerns over the impact of urbanization on German society. These contemporary longings and concerns influenced the way proselytizers of the Emmerick movement reimagined the sites central to her cult.

Without question, Westphalian Catholics, and especially those from Dülmen and Coesfeld, felt a particular devotion to Emmerick. Maria Holbreck, writing urgently to request relics for a gravely ill friend, explained why she felt confident in Emmerick's intercession: “she will not refuse the request of a Dülmener Kinde [sic].”Footnote ⁴⁴ Hedwig Kaiser, a frequent correspondent with the Emmerick Haus, developed an intimate relationship with Emmerick after moving to Dülmen and living there for several years, thinking of her not merely as a distant intercessor but “as my friend.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The ties of the Heimat bound Westphalians to Emmerick in a special way even beyond Germany's borders. Helene Barzik, a nanny living in the Netherlands, thought immediately of Emmerick when her young charge fell ill, “for I, too, am from Westphalia and have visited her home and grave.”Footnote ⁴⁶ A nun working at a hospital in Chicago made a point of making a pilgrimage to the Emmerick Haus on a “visit to the Heimat,” and later gave the biographical pamphlet of Emmerick she had bought there to one of her patients.Footnote ⁴⁷

Weimar Westphalians grounded their imaginations of Emmerick, their friend and countrywoman, in the soil of their Heimat. In doing so, they continued a century-old local tradition of interweaving Catholic elements with regional identity. “Westphalia” had been an intermittent presence on the maps of German-speaking Europe since the eighth century, but as a space with blurred boundaries, overlapping political and religious jurisdictions, and a limited claim on its inhabitants' heartstrings. It was only in 1815 that it first became a discretely bounded political space, namely, the Prussian province of Westphalia.Footnote ⁴⁸ The experience of Protestant Prussian rule was formative for the inhabitants of the Westphalian province, and the region's Catholic heritage became a central part of its identity and historical consciousness. One of the first associations in Germany devoted to local history, the Verein für Geschichte und Altertumskunde Westfalens, was founded in the diocesan seat of Münster in 1825.Footnote ⁴⁹ Generations of local historians and promoters of regional pride (Heimatpfleger) created a usable Westphalian past on which to construct their new province's identity. They readily appropriated the centuries-old history of Münster's Prince-Bishopric, reimagining it as a progenitor of the political unit of their own day. Westphalian clergy were equally prone to infuse church lore with regional pride, and even to portray pastoral work as a form of Heimatpflege.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the foreword to a lavishly produced 1933 history of the diocese of Münster, for example, Bishop Clemens August von Galen boasted that his predecessors had, “for more than eleven hundred years, in good and evil times, laid the foundation of our contemporary culture through tenacious work.” The history of the diocese, he continued, was a history of the “emergence and growth of our Heimatkultur,” and a study of this history should, he believed, foster a love of church and homeland alike.Footnote ⁵¹ Catholic faith and Westphalian culture thus became inseparable in these historical accounts.

Catholicism was a central part of Westphalians' reimagined past, yet other forces were also at work in shaping the future of the province. Industrialism, in particular, had transformed the region and forged new links with neighboring provinces. There is a snapshot of this transformation-in-process in the introduction to the third edition of a popular nostalgic volume, Das malerische und romantische Westfalen. When the first edition of this Heimat book had appeared in the 1840s, the author reflected, his beloved Westphalia had looked very different: with “no trains pulling it into the commerce of the great world,” it was a “quiet, sparsely inhabited, and little-known” province. Since that time, however, “a great transformation has occurred, a remarkable development achieved in all directions—in thirty years, Westphalia has become one of the most important industrial regions in the world.”Footnote ⁵² Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economy and industry of Westphalia had become densely interwoven with that of the neighboring Rhineland, particularly in the Ruhr region that straddled their provincial borders. During the Weimar Republic, both politicians and industrialists discussed the idea of merging part or all the political territory of Westphalia with those sections of the Rhineland regions with which it was linked economically. Westphalian Heimat enthusiasts came out in force against the proposed territorial reform, playing up in new publications what they described as a unique, cohesive, and historic Westphalian cultural identity.Footnote ⁵³

The literature produced by Emmerick's Weimar cult constituted a part of this ongoing dialogue about how Westphalians should imagine themselves and their Heimat. One indication of this was the frequency with which authors during this period used the language of regional identity to make claims on Emmerick and to exhort Westphalian Catholics to venerate her. Hagiographic books and articles from the decades after World War I were replete with references to Emmerick as “our countrywoman,” as the “mystic of the Münsterland,” or as the “endurer [Dulderin] of Dülmen.” In the flurry of articles written around the hundreth anniversary of Emmerick's death, for example, the Katholische Missions-Blatt extolled her as “a true daughter of the Münsterland.” The Gelsenkirchener Zeitung named her the Westphalian Münsterland's “suffering bride” (Leidensbraut). The Westfälische Volkszeitung urged its readers: “Awaken, Westphalia, and think on your great countrywoman!”Footnote ⁵⁴

Rural Westphalia was not a backdrop but rather a central feature in Weimar hagiographical narratives, glowingly described in the most sentimental and nostalgic terms. A reporter for the Stadtlohner Volksblatt, for example, described the experience of visiting “the birthhouse of our countrywoman” in this way: “We looked with familiarity at the cute little windows of the hut, as if they were old acquaintances.” Overall, the correspondent wrote, the Emmerick family home “seemed to us cozier, homier, more genuine.” The warm feelings evoked by the Emmerick family's quaint cottage brought to mind “the people who were happy there, without trains and radios, with their oil lamps and tallow candle stubs, their pious faith reflected in their lives …”Footnote ⁵⁵ Emmerick's Heimat, preserved for the visiting public and described in mass-produced media, was at once “homey” and “familiar,” yet radically alien from the trains and radios of modern urban life.

Popular author Anna Freiin von Krane struck a similar tone in an article she wrote in 1921 for a Catholic periodical. When visiting the preserved Emmerick home, she thought of how peaceful and green Emmerick's world had been in comparison with contemporary noisy cities: “no sounds of the outside world pressed in, except for the toll of the church bell in the neighboring village Coesfeld. Immediately behind the house, the green solitude [was] enclosed by hedges, where speckled cows grazed, and the chirping of crickets and the soft rustling of tree branches let your thoughts soar far above into the heavens.”Footnote ⁵⁶ She further idealized Emmerick's rural existence, drawing pointed contrasts with contemporary urban life, in a book-length biography of Emmerick published that same year: Die Leidensbraut: Geschichte eines Sühnenlebens. Opening with a flowery description of “the peaceful Westphalian Münsterland [and] its secluded hedgerows, under its high vaulted sky,” the book asserted that Emmerick could not have come from any other place: “There and only there could a flower of such a mystical nature bloom.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The nature theme continued throughout the book, and the author encouraged her readers “to give oneself up to God's miraculous garden and forget for a moment the cruel present.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In the process, Emmerick's home in the countryside became a point of physical and spiritual contrast to the industrial cities in which most Germans now lived. Returning to the peasant hut the Emmerick family had shared with livestock, von Krane described it not only as reminiscent of the stable where Jesus had been born, but also as a place that would “drive us city people to despair.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The star-filled sky that had inspired Emmerick's visions of heaven when she was a child was similarly alien to those accustomed to the “smoke-filled, hazy horizon of the cities.”Footnote ⁶⁰

For Emmerick devotees during Weimar who believed that “there and only there could a flower of such a mystical nature bloom,”this rural idyll was not merely a pretty backdrop for the story of the Mystikerin des Münsterlandes. Rather, Emmerick's Heimat became a formative element in her life in these accounts, a place whose deep Catholic heritage, simplicity, and wholesomeness reflected the would-be saint's own virtues. She was rooted in the soil of the Heimat: as one contemporary collection of Emmerick poems, essays, and speeches put it, she was “the passionflower of the red soil.”Footnote ⁶¹

Von Krane and her fellow standard-bearers of the Emmerick movement were, however, concerned with more than just extolling the virtues of the Westphalian Münsterland as Emmerick had known it a century ago. They were also keen to assert that this land had retained its sacred power, despite the enormous transformations Germany had undergone in more recent years. Even if contemporary Westphalians and other German Catholics now lived in the industrial cities of Cologne and Essen, Milwaukee and Chicago, they could still come to Dülmen and Coesfeld on a pilgrimage to the holy, healing Heimat. As one 1920s guidebook to the Emmerick Pilgrimage Trail exclaimed: “How happy is a man when he can wander about in God's beautiful nature! He shakes off the cares and worries of the everyday … But this wandering is twice as beautiful if it is a pilgrimage … Through the fresh, pure field and forest air, this pilgrimage, transfigured through the spirit of Emmerick, will give benefit to all in body and soul.”Footnote ⁶² The thousands of pilgrim-tourists who escaped German cities to visit Emmerick's hometown, her birthplace, and her deathbed were thus supposedly taking a journey that was both mentally and spiritually restorative, one that led away from the godless modern metropolis and toward a bucolic countryside dotted with churches and wayside shrines.

The Münsterland of the 1920s was hardly unspoiled by industrialization and urbanization, as the network of trains carrying pilgrims to Emmerick memorial sites made clear. The depictions of Emmerick's childhood that appeared in print were also highly idealized, making a quaint country cottage out of what had been the primitive hut of a tenant farmer, his wife, and their nine children. The surrounding field had similarly been a place where Emmerick and her family spent countless hours—not listening to crickets chirp and staring up at the clouds, but performing manual labor. Yet, a century removed from these realities, Emmerick's Weimar hagiographers looked around at the preserved and reconstructed pilgrimage sites in Coesfeld and Dülmen and reimagined them as idylls tucked away from the modern, urban, workaday world. The setting of her impoverished existence literally became, in this period, the stuff of weekend picnics and children's picture books.Footnote ⁶³ For Weimar Germans, these preserved and reconstructed stops along the Emmerick Pilgrim Trail evoked the wholesomeness of the rural homeland—at a time when many, discontented with modern life, pined for an imagined, rustic German past.Footnote ⁶⁴

“A Crucified Saint for a Crucified Volk”: Emmerick's Weimar Cult and the Reimagination of the Past and Present

That nostalgic tinge reveals an important fact: the imagination of place is also embedded in time. As hagiographers retold Emmerick's story to Weimar Germans, they made her real and present by grounding her in a familiar landscape; but, in so doing, they also insisted on the continued relevance of a woman who had died a century earlier. “Anna Katharina Emmerick was a shining example for her contemporary world,” attendees at Dülmen's Emmerick Day festivities were told in 1924, “but also for our own time, her cardinal virtues should be the starting and end points” of good conduct. The speaker went on to draw a striking parallel between Emmerick's time and his own, between her self-immersion in the way of the Cross and Weimar Germany's own Via Dolorosa: “Our German Volk has gone down a Via Cruxis for ten years, one pressed upon us by a genocidal war [völkermordender Krieg] and the storms of revolution. We must be strong to endure this Via Cruxis … We must develop true inner heroism. Humility, poverty, and self-sacrificial courage [Demut, Armut, und Opfermut]: these three virtues, which Anna Katharina so actively manifested, must also guide us.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As a stigmatic who emerged in the midst of Napoleonic occupation, and as a nun cast out of her convent by state secularization, Emmerick was seen by many contemporaries as a rebuke of the evils of their time. A century later, Weimar Germans took up this idea once again, but with a twist: at a time when French troops were once again occupying German soil in the Ruhr, they reimagined the era of the Napoleonic wars as a foreshadowing of their present—and Emmerick as a saint whose moment had come in their own day. In the process, Weimar-era festivals, articles, hagiographies, and memorial sites also placed very specific virtues—“Demut, Armut, und Opfermut”—at the center of their Emmerick narratives. Rather than portray her as a woman of supernatural ability and superhuman piety, they cast her as a woman to whom Germans could relate as they, too, faced (national) humiliation, impoverishment, and sacrifice.

As scholars such as Karen Hagemann, Reinhard Sprenger, Kay Wenzel, and Wolfgang Koller have shown, many Weimar Germans invoked the Napoleonic era—or, rather, their version of it—as instructive for their troubled present.Footnote ⁶⁶ From extolling its “national” heroes in schoolbooks and celebrating the Battle of Leipzig, to the making of popular films like Karl Grune's Waterloo of 1928, evocations of Germany's “Wars of Liberation” were both common and politically inflected.Footnote ⁶⁷ Emmerick's story was almost tailor-made for this pervasive Weimar reimagination of Germany's experiences during the Napoleonic years, and those engaged in the shaping of her Weimar cult took up the theme with gusto. One article described Emmerick as having risen like a pillar above the fray of a Europe destroyed by “French” Enlightenment, war, and revolution. A century later, it argued, the Fatherland was once again brought low by the evils of war and materialism, and it was for this reason that Emmerick and her rebuke of her time spoke to contemporary German hearts: “Despite the passing of one hundred years, she stands much closer to us in spirit … What our Volk, at least the upper classes, admiringly adopted at that time from France—the faithless Enlightenment—is still furrowing more or less deeply into many German heads.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At an Emmerick Day celebration in her hometown, a keynote speaker made the same point: “The darkness from the West, the Enlightenment, covers our country. The Lord chose the weakest as a light.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In an extended essay, an Augustinian father wrote the following:

Germans—including German Catholics—had been active participants in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.Footnote ⁷¹ German rulers were also eager collaborators in the process of Napoleonic secularization.Footnote ⁷² Moreover, a willingness to take up arms or contribute monetarily to Prussia's wars against Napoleon had been noticeably lower in the Catholic regions under Prussian control.Footnote ⁷³ In the wake of defeat in 1918, the French occupation of the Ruhr, and other painful experiences, some Emmerick promoters distorted or ignored these realities. Blending together Enlightenment, revolution, and war into one monolithic French menace, they recast secularization and waning belief in early nineteenth-century Germany as a purely Gallic import. Clergy and laity alike therefore presented Emmerick to German Catholics as a saint fit for their troubled times. She was a daughter of the countryside, and her humble home welcomed true believers on a pilgrimage escaping from urban squalor. A repudiator of Napoleon and the Enlightenment, she could defend German culture from the latest French assault.

It was not only the time and place, but also the substance of Emmerick's life that spoke to many Weimar Germans. As a stigmatic and ascetic, a woman who had embraced suffering as a path to salvation, she inspired the leaders of her beatification campaign to reinterpret the nation's dark hours though the transformative language of redemption. Because of the Brentano controversy and its detrimental effect on progress in Rome (discussed earlier), Emmerick's hagiographers and promoters were moving away from the prior emphasis on her famous visions. Instead, their speeches and writings praised her abstinence, her ascetic practices, and her acceptance of lifelong physical suffering as proof of her heroic virtue. At an Emmerick Day celebration in Coesfeld, for instance, one speaker told the assembled crowds: “It is entirely unimportant whether the investigation accepts Brentano's records. The proof [of Emmerick's sanctity] lies in an entirely different direction … She should be shown to the Volk as a patron of suffering [Leidenspatronin].”Footnote ⁷⁴ The next speaker agreed: “If we strike all that is untrue from Brentano's sketches, enough remains to celebrate the great mystic for her heroic, sacrificial soul [heroischen Opferseele].”Footnote ⁷⁵ The message was similar at another Emmerick Day celebration in Greven: “Not so much her stigmatization and her visionary gift, but far more her heroic life of virtue serves as proof of her great holiness and makes us glad to appeal to Emmerick as our countrywoman.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In an anthology of essays, poems, and articles about Emmerick, Coesfeld clergyman Joseph Dieninghoff exhorted his readers: “Let us adopt the attitude of the Church, [which] gives little regard to [the visions] in considering the holiness of the visionary … Let us be filled with enthusiasm only by the illuminating example of virtue [set by Emmerick], the suffering bride.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The language of Emmerick's 1920s beatification campaign consistently linked her sanctification through suffering to the allegedly unjust suffering of the German Fatherland after wartime defeat, which included the Treaty of Versailles and the ensuing economic crisis. As one Augustinian author exhorted his contemporaries:

This language of heroism and sacrifice, of soil and nationalism, with its lurking political connotations, found its way into the speeches of women as well as men. At a 1927 Emmerick celebration convened especially for women and girls, speaker Christine Teusch extolled Emmerick as “a true daughter of the red soil,” one who had “led a life of heroic sacrifice” and felt herself “united with the Volk.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Or, as Anna Freiin von Krane, author of the popular biography Die Leidensbraut, put it: “May the beatification process soon come to an end, so that our Volk has a saint sent to it: a crucified saint for a crucified Volk!”Footnote ⁸⁰

This “crucified Volk” narrative resonated with other strands of Weimar politics, of course. There were a surprising number of other instances in contemporary media in which Germans employed religious—and especially Catholic—language to reflect on recent developments in their state and society. The Berlin professor and Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch, for example, relied on surprisingly Catholic metaphors to express his outrage at the Treaty of Versailles, comparing the Paris Peace Conference to a “court of inquisition” that was obsessed with a “dogma of guilt” and that had treated Germany as a “heretic to be burned.”Footnote ⁸¹ Weimar politicians and pundits, as well as authors and journalists, often referred to Germany's fallen soldiers as “martyrs,” an epithet that radical groups on the right and left also bestowed upon comrades killed in street violence. Some even described the plight of Germans living in the Belgian- and French-occupied Rhineland as a form of “martyrdom.”Footnote ⁸² Munich-based agitator and future National Socialist Heinrich Distler dubbed the suffering of Rhinelanders a “Kreuzweg” (Via Cruxis).Footnote ⁸³ Adolf Hitler, who had been raised in the Catholic Church, was one of many who spoke at the time of a German “resurrection,” brought about through the renewal of a Volk steeled by sacrifice.Footnote ⁸⁴ Weimar politics and culture was so replete with these religious concepts and metaphors, George Mosse has argued, because they suffused with meaning the sacrifices that Germans had experienced since World War I: “the memory of the war was refashioned into a sacred experience which provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Reading the language of Emmerick's official cult against this background suggests that some of Germany's Catholics connected with the Weimar-era “Myth of the War Experience” in an especially profound way, given that it drew on language and imagery that suffused their own religious beliefs. In short, Emmerick's life, wounds, and visions made her the ideal saint for this nation of would-be martyrs.

In one respect, the available evidence suggests that believers living in Westphalia and beyond responded positively to the carefully crafted message put forth by hagiographers, the Catholic press, and the Emmerick Bund. They flocked to Emmerick memorial sites, eagerly consumed the latest devotional literature, and, as proselytizers working for her beatification, turned to Emmerick in times of need. Yet, the sources also suggest that it was personal suffering that animated these devotions, not just a revanchist national narrative. The letters sent to the Emmerick Haus reflected the particular troubles of Germans in the 1920s and 1930s—of husbands unemployed since the end of the war, of those who had lost their savings because of inflation and hyperinflation, of those struggling to find housing in crowded cities, and of those overwhelmed by the pressure to pass school exams in order to secure their future. Yet, the focus of these letters was the intimate relationship between petitioner and intercessor, and the longing for familial prosperity and security. None of them invoked Emmerick's intercession for the German nation or for society at large. Furthermore, the letters indicate that Emmerick's hagiographers and promoters during Weimar did not successfully divert attention away from her controversial, mystical phenomena. In fact, many devotees reported praying five Our Fathers in honor of each of Emmerick's five stigmata wounds. They also unashamedly mentioned reading about and marveling at her ecstatic visions.Footnote ⁸⁶

These mixed results of the “official” hagiographical line are unsurprising. The work of Patrick Houlihan, Jay Winter, and others on the Catholic culture(s) of World War I has shown how nationalist sermons and speeches by clergy and other elites existed alongside religious expressions of individual suffering, consolation, and hope. These scholars also provide ample evidence that the shock of industrialized warfare drove just as many, if not more, Europeans to embrace traditional beliefs as it did to inspire the avant-gardism of others.Footnote ⁸⁷ Emmerick's Weimar cult also reflected these nuances. Even as articles and speeches sought to create Emmerick anew as a twentieth-century German Führerin, her potency as a symbol derived from her existing veneration as a nineteenth-century Westphalian Mystikerin. Along similar lines, the tremendous symbolic power of her Via Cruxis as an allegory of German national suffering evoked the belief that she had assumed the wounds of Christ herself. Though Vatican officials demanded it, it proved difficult to appropriate and simultaneously successfully edit Catholics' communal memory of Anna Katharina Emmerick. The domestication of her mysticism could only proceed so far.