The past twenty years have been a fruitful period for scholarship on religion and nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany. In particular, our understanding of the construction of Catholic national identity during the rise of the German nation-state continues to be broadened. Forging ahead along the paths broken by Wolfgang Altgeld, Werner Blessing, Margaret Anderson, David Blackbourn, and Jonathan Sperber, historians such as Thomas Mergel, Helmut Smith, Olaf Blaschke, Till van Rahden, and Michael Gross have examined how confessional conflict shaped the parameters of national identity, especially in regard to how the German Catholic and Jewish communities defined, defended, and negotiated their place in the nation in the confrontation with “Protestant nationalism.” As Rebecca Bennette's illuminating new study of the Kulturkampf period demonstrates, for Germany's Catholics this process of negotiation involved a progressive relaxation of the rigid anti-Prussian stance of the Vormärz in order to engage in the pursuit of “integration” within the new state proclaimed in 1871.

Using the most influential and widely disseminated shapers of opinion in Catholic media (Germania, Historisch-Politische Blätter, Kölnische Volkszeitung) as her main sources, Bennette shows how a Catholic vision of the nation was constructed in the public sphere that ran parallel to, even as it complemented, the Center Party's evolving political accommodation with the Kaiserreich. Prominent intellectuals such as Conrad von Bolanden (Joseph Bischoff), Johannes Janssen, Wilhelm Emmanuel Ketteler, and Paul Majunke, among many others, urged their co-religionists’ commitment to the new state on the basis of a positive argument for Catholic inclusion. This commitment, Bennette explains, was essentially conservative in orientation, but she points out (and this is one of the strengths of the book) that it is a mistake to assume that Catholic antiliberalism was exclusively antinational (or, even, “anti-Enlightenment”).

Bennette divides her book into two parts: the first presents the context of the Kulturkampf; the second traces the formation of Catholic national identity as it emerged from this conflict in four areas—the promotion of a diverse federal state; the “feminization” of the national idea as an alternative to the values of an authoritarian and “masculine” Prussian militarism; the condemnation of a corrupting “liberal” bias in German science and scholarship; and the assertion of a “Christian universalism” that positioned a unified Germany as the defender of European (and Western) civilization.

Part 1's five relatively brief chapters sketch the Catholic engagement with the “German Question” after 1871 and through the era of the Kulturkampf. Bennette concludes that, despite fears of Prussian dominance, Catholic acceptance of the new Reich (as opposed to enthusiasm for the government in Berlin) was mediated through an enthusiasm for the resurrection of the imperial idea (the original Catholic polity) in a federal system that would, it was believed, protect Catholic interests more effectively than the outmoded particularism of the German Confederation. Obviously, with the promulgation of the May Laws in 1873 and the start of the Kulturkampf, this thesis was sorely tested. By the mid-1870s, however, Catholic intellectuals had adopted a new, and more fruitful, approach in their pursuit of common social and political ground with Protestant conservatives: anti-socialism. Along with tarring liberalism with the Marxist brush, this was a more palatable means of attacking the evils of modernity than antisemitism had been, given the problematic aspects of pointing to the “un-German” character of another religious minority.

Bennette makes her most compelling contribution to our understanding of the negotiation of Catholic integration into the Kaiserreich in part 2: “The Formation of Catholic National Identity,” which constitutes the conceptual core of the book. Chapter 6, “Mapping Germany from the Borders to Berlin,” examines the Catholic defense of a nation of “heartlands” that challenged the stultifying “homogeneity” of the liberal vision of Germany. As an 1876 article in the Historisch-Politische Blätter pointed out, regional (and, thus, confessional) diversity was a German virtue that stood in contrast to “un-German centralization” (p. 92). Chapter 7, “Femininity and the Debate over the Guiding Principle of the Nation,” explores the Catholic conviction that their faith countered Protestant (read Prussian) bellicosity with a more spiritual German national idea based on “morality over might” (p. 110). Embodied in the female figure of Germania, this “Marian” counterimage evoked a demilitarized and nurturing national community that positively rejected the canard of a degenerate and effeminate Catholic culture.

Chapter 8, “The Battle over Schools and Scholarship,” entertains with a depiction of the robust Catholic intellectual challenge to Protestantism's presumed monopoly on the rationalism at the core of German Wissenschaft. Equating this bias with “scholarly incompetence” (p. 144), this line of attack damningly identified France as the source of the “corruption” (p. 148) of liberal scholarship. As it touches on his own work, this reviewer cannot resist quoting Bennette's inclusion of the takedown of Heinrich von Sybel, dean of the “Prussian School” of history writing, in an 1874 issue of Germania: “[Sybel is] first among the currently living German master concocters of history.”

Bennette's book concludes with its longest chapter, “The Moral Geography of Europe and Beyond.” For those familiar with the imperial apologias of nineteenth-century anti-Prussian (and grossdeutsch) conservative historians such as Onno Klopp, it comes as no surprise that a central belief of advocates for Catholic integration in the new Reich was the claim that the imperial polity, the “respublica christiana,” had always stood in defense of a universal Western Christian civilization. In the vocabulary of modern nationalism, this assertion raised the German shield to protect true European civilization against French godlessness, Italian decadence, Austrian obsolescence, and Russian barbarism. However, given the cultural and religious assumptions that animated the “Drang nach Osten” at the turn of the century, one is permitted to question how persuasive this particular argument ultimately was.

Bennette presents a convincing case that the Catholic response to German unification in 1871 (and Catholic negotiation of the tensions and repression of the Kulturkampf) cannot be reduced to an obdurate and reactionary defense of particularism. Further, she adds to our understanding of a diverse and multivalent construction of a “positive” Catholic German national identity that operated outside of the conventional boundaries of political Catholicism.