Those discovering the growing number of writings on the religious history of the Federal Republic of Germany might be forgiven for thinking that they had entered a parallel universe. To use the terminology popularized by M. Rainer Lepsius, Christian milieus have largely disintegrated and their members been integrated into the mainstream of political and economic life. Yet until recently, research on German Catholicism and Protestantism has remained confined to confessional ghettos that many members of these religious subcultures once sought to escape. The dozens of monographs that have appeared in the last five years have yet to be incorporated into the central narratives that dominate the secular histories of the postwar era. Many have still to be reviewed in non-religious journals. Edited volumes that purport to analyze the many facets of the Federal Republic include few if any chapters on religion.Footnote ¹

But this new wave of scholarly literature is not the literature of church fathers of bygone generations. No longer “church history” with the theological meanings this once implied, scholarly work on the religious landscape of post-1945 West Germany has gradually broadened to become almost as diverse as the secular historical mainstream. It now analyzes not just patriarchs, synods, and Verbände, but also gender, memory, and the media. Its authors hail from both major confessions, while some pledge no religious affiliation at all. Coming from both sides of the Atlantic, they are more likely than not to be younger, having been born too late to recall with any coherence the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. These scholars innovatively show that the two major religious organizations underwent an immense mental and cultural transformation in the postwar era not just in the 1960s, but also in the decades immediately before and since. With some delays, religious history has followed the trajectory of the secular historical profession: it has moved from narrow ecclesiastical and political histories to embrace social history and, most recently, cultural history derived from poststructuralist methodologies.

Why, then, has this growing body of literature yet to enter into the secular canon on both sides of the Atlantic, when the inclusion of scholarship from other subfields, such as gender studies, labor history, and the history of memory is de rigeur for the postwar era? One could point to the narrowness and insularity of some of the lengthy tomes that have recently appeared, as a small number of these recent works do remain narrow ecclesiastical histories with no effort to elucidate underlying mentalities or connect religious institutions to larger societal currents: yet the charge of insularity might also be levied against much scholarship on nonreligious topics. It is also true that few books on contemporary religious history are biconfessional. The overwhelming majority focus exclusively on German Catholicism, a minority solely on German Protestantism, and only one or two venture across confessional lines.Footnote ² No monograph in the postwar era compares the erosion of Catholic and Socialist subcultures. But the lack of comparisons to other religious institutions and “socio-moral milieus” does not adequately explain the ongoing isolation of religious history. By this standard, most works of secular history should have remained unheeded, as they, too, lack the courage, ability, or resources to venture far-reaching comparisons: comparative history is always easier to trumpet than to perform. Furthermore, a growing number of trailblazing works on religious history are, indeed, crossing national borders to wage comparisons with religious experiences in other European nations and even in the United States.

A more compelling explanation for the seeming alienation of religious history from the historical mainstream points the finger at disciplinary structures in both the English-speaking and German academy. Religious narratives often hinge on subtle points of doctrine. The Protestant church's coming to terms with the Nazi past cannot, for instance, be understood without grappling with the theological clashes between orthodox Lutherans and Reformed thinkers influenced by Karl Barth. Such rigorous attention to the nuances of religious doctrine is certainly not the bread and butter of profane historians with no theological training and a secular Weltanschauung more likely to lie on the left-liberal side of the political spectrum. Not surprisingly, many of these recent works came from the pens of German scholars ensconced within theology and not history departments. Most German universities still uphold the distinction between secular history and Kirchengeschichte, the latter anchored in departments of theology and with confessional commitments to uphold. Without a doubt, such departmental barriers limited the possibilities for cross-fertilization. But the power of these arguments is minimized by the fact that profane historians of medieval and early modern Europe routinely master the theological nuances necessary for their fields; the key reasons for the neglect of religious history clearly lie elsewhere.

More significant is the fact that the first historical examinations of the postwar Roman Catholic church focused chiefly on the intersection of politics and religion. This is hardly surprising, since the first comprehensive accounts of any era tend to be written by political historians. Many of the earliest accounts of political Catholicism since 1945 and its role in shaping the political cultural of the Federal Republic were written in the 1970s and 1980s by scholars affiliated with Die Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Founded in 1962, this Catholic historical association was originally housed in the Catholic Academy in Munich and moved to Bonn in 1972. Although this institution is most commonly associated with more than 100 publications on the relationship between the Catholic Church and National Socialism, early blueprints from the mid to late 1950s already envisioned greater research on the post-1945 era.Footnote ³ On its boards were not only scholars but churchmen and politicians. As early as the late 1960s, Heinrich Krone, an influential Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician who between 1955 and 1961 served as Vorsitzender of the CDU-Christian Social Union (CSU) Bundestagsfraktion, urged his fellow members of the Kommission to research and tell the story of the Catholic contribution to the Federal Republic before critics could “distort” the Christian Democratic legacy.Footnote ⁴ Krone, by this time, was not the dominant figure in the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, but publications in the 1970s and 1980s by many scholars associated with the institution he helped to found undoubtedly politicized the field, although its own network of historians, which included clerics, consisted primarily of profane historians and not “Kirchenhistoriker.” Some of these historians were part of a working group on Catholic history in the nineteenth and twentieth century, whose publications in the 1970s and 1980s were regarded as having lauded the achievements of Adenauer's CDU and looking askance at the era of Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) rule that seemingly ushered in an era of turbulence and political unrest.Footnote ⁵ In 1980, the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte expanded the focus of its Blaue Reihe, or Blue Series, to include the postwar Federal Republic. These meticulously researched monographs have provided the largest and most valuable source of scholarly writing on Catholicism since 1945, even including works of social and cultural history after the turn of the century. But even these outstanding works found less resonance among secular historians simply on account of their brand-name, their scholarship often unfairly linked to a narrative of Catholic political achievement against which many other historians of the Federal Republic had rebelled.Footnote ⁶

An alternative series, the Konfession und Gesellschafts Reihe of the Kohlhammer Verlag—the so-called “Orange Series”—was founded in the late 1980s to integrate religious history into the historical mainstream, in part by anchoring it in larger histories of society and social history.Footnote ⁷ But even the appearance of this interconfessional series could not overcome the disproportionate scholarly attraction to Catholicism. The greater vitality of Catholicism in the political and cultural arenas of the Federal Republic led to the creation of more dynamic scholarly venues such as the Münsteraner Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung and the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung. The only comparable scholarly nexus that exists for Protestant research for the postwar era is the Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which, like the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, publishes its own series of primary sources and monographs, the Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte.Footnote ⁸

Yet the ultimate reason for the continued isolation of religious scholarship lies not primarily in the formation of politicized historical networks but in the stories being told. For scholars and the lay public, narratives of the churches under democracies are less compelling than those of the churches under dictatorships. The former lacks the sense of drama and moral urgency that have been the driving forces behind so much of the accounts of the churches in the 1930s and 1940s. It is hardly surprising that recent literature on the Protestant churches in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or on the response of West German Protestants to the “national question,” with some notable exceptions, exceeds in quantity, if not in quality, that of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (EKD) in the Federal Republic.Footnote ⁹

Most critically, the master narratives of contemporary religious history strikingly diverge from those plied together by mainstream historians of postwar Germany. Whereas the master narratives from secular historians focus on “modernization” and the normalization of West German society, the dominant narrative remained, until recently, one of “secularization,” or the erosion of religious milieus.Footnote ¹⁰ This almost primeval narrative was hardwired into the narratives produced by historians and churchmen from the nineteenth century onward, even where “objective” statistics actually showed a picture of religious growth.Footnote ¹¹ Ironically, the overtly political writings of historians such as Rudolf Morsey and Hans-Peter Schwartz have more in common with the master narratives of mainstream Germany than with many writings on church decline—they tell the story of a successful political modernization, but one engineered by the representatives of political Catholicism.Footnote ¹² This was not a narrative to be embraced by more critical voices on the left for whom a “second founding” of the Federal Republic in the 1960s was necessary to right the wrongs of the “conservative restoration” of the 1950s and to put Germany firmly back on the path toward democratization.Footnote ¹³

While it is possible to link these two master narratives of societal democratization and religious loss through an overly simplistic thesis—modernization after 1945 led to secularization—a more careful analysis renders such an argument untenable. The erosion was far from linear, religious belief did not completely evaporate, and most recently, Islamic subcultures have begun to fill the vacuum left by the erosion of Christian milieus. Alternatively, one can speak of the unintended consequences of the modernization processes put in place by Catholic political leaders: the erosion of the Catholic milieu took place not only in spite of but also precisely because of the policies put in place during the Adenauer Era such as the expansion of the welfare state and social conservative measures to promote family values.Footnote ¹⁴

The most successful impetus to reconcile religious and profane history comes paradoxically from those historians who call into question the validity of both the secularization and modernization paradigms.Footnote ¹⁵ Often influenced by poststructuralist models of cultural history, they seek to replace the models of modernization and secularization with that of religious transformation, which, in fact, may be a more accurate description of the religious journeys undertaken by both major churches during the postwar era.Footnote ¹⁶ By underscoring religious transformation, they leave open the question of cause and effect. The churches adapted to larger societal currents but the changes within these religious bodies also helped to transform the culture and society of the Federal Republic.

This essay is an attempt to take stock of more than twenty new works that have appeared within the last five years in both Germany and the United States. Some will be looked at in greater depth, others more summarily. Of course, not all of the recent scholarship can be analyzed here: more than twenty-five additional monographs and edited volumes can only be cited briefly in the footnotes. This essay is loosely structured around the prevalent themes in this literature—coming to terms with the Nazi past in the immediate postwar era, the religious transformations of the 1950s through the 1970s, the poststructuralist challenges to these narratives, and finally, cross-cultural comparisons. This essay will also point to new avenues for historical inquiry and questions ripe for exploration. It is a plea to bring together the fruits of secular and profane research and to put contemporary religious history where it properly belongs—into the historical mainstream.

* * *

It comes as little surprise that scholars of religious history first turned their attention to the churches' immediate postwar political activities. The United States and Great Britain placed relatively few restrictions on the records of their military governments in Germany, allowing scholars to research the churches' relationship to the Western Allied military occupations as early as the 1970s. Researchers discovered that the aftermath of National Socialism was nearly as morally charged as the Nazi crimes themselves. In spite of having just experienced bitter persecution at the hands of the Nazi state, leading representatives of both churches fervently denounced denazification, the Nuremberg trials, most subsequent war crimes trials, and even the trials of SS Einsatzgruppenführer. These churchmen expressed greater public sympathy for convicted war criminals than for the murdered Jews or concentration camp survivors. The roles from the Kirchenkampf were clearly reversed, as the churches now embraced a new status as the spokesmen for the defeated German nation and spoke out on behalf of their former persecutors.

Suzanne Brown Fleming's refreshingly concise book, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany, turns our attention to these moral problems.Footnote ¹⁷ She focuses on Aloyisius Muench, Bishop of Fargo, North Dakota, a member of the military occupation and, most importantly, papal nuncio to Germany. She waded through Muench's diaries, an accomplishment in its own right in light of Muench's notoriously poor penmanship. She also supplemented her research with extensive legal and diplomatic records from the Allied military government.

Brown-Fleming's book has, not surprisingly, generated controversy, echoing larger debates about the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and National Socialism for the period, 1933–1945.Footnote ¹⁸ Her evidence, however, on Muench is indisputable. Like most Germans, Catholics and Protestants alike, Muench empathized far more with German “victims,” expellees from the east and targets of denazification, than with Jewish victims of Nazism.

Even before his arrival in Germany early in 1946, Muench had penned an article, “One World in Charity,” in which he railed against Allied accusations of collective guilt and equated Allied and Nazi crimes. This lengthy manifesto made its way to Germany, where it was copied and distributed in channels that resembled those used to distribute pastoral letters during the Nazi era. Muench subsequently received hundreds of letters from Germans begging for clemency. While he declined to intervene on behalf of all of those subjected to denazification proceedings or war-crimes trials, he did take up the case of Hans Eisele, a Roman Catholic doctor at Dachau and Buchenwald who had performed experimental vivisections on Dutch Jews.

Muench's attitudes were, in the opinion of this reviewer, often indistinguishable from those around him. They were shared by many religious and secular leaders in the military occupation. Karl Arndt, a high-ranking official in the Religious Affairs Branch in Baden-Württemberg—and of course, of German descent—was equally disdainful of the “39ers,” a code word for German-Jewish émigrés who arrived in the United States in 1939.Footnote ¹⁹ He hailed from the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, a bulwark of confessional Lutherans in the United States and Canada renowned for their conservative intransigence. Along these lines, one can argue that Muench's and Arndt's opposition to the supposedly punitive policies of the American military occupation was an extension of the conservative opposition to the domestic policy of New Deal liberals. The New Dealers, Muench wrote in one letter, attempted to do in Germany what they could not accomplish at home. Muench's story is evidence of how the fault lines of American politics intersected with those of German political and economic reconstruction. Though he took the same positions on questions of denazification, decartelization, and reeducation as the German Catholic bishops, Muench appears not as a lackey but as a second-generation German-American who sought to prove his patriotism by adopting the prejudices of fellow Americans on the conservative end of the political spectrum.Footnote ²⁰ He spoke flawless and elegant German but was still regarded by his fellow German bishops—and not only on account of his flat Midwestern accent—as an outsider “from the prairie,” as Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne put it with typical Rhenish irony.Footnote ²¹ Even his anti-Semitism was of a home-grown American Midwestern variety and certainly not the remnants of the Nazis' virulent biological racism.

If Brown-Fleming offers up rich criticism of her subject, Norbert Trippen is more reluctant to apply the critical razor in his otherwise masterful two-volume biography of Cardinal Frings.Footnote ²² Trippen's work is, in fact, an official biography of sorts, one commissioned by Frings's successor, Cardinal Höffner, in 1987. Trippen was the first to be given nearly unrestricted access to the vast holdings of the archdiocesan archive in Cologne that pertained to his subject, an endeavor that required nearly fifteen years of tireless labor. Equally impressively, Trippen mastered Frings's cryptic handwriting, as his growing blindness during the last two decades of his life reduced his never-legible scrawl to indecipherable hieroglyphics.

Trippen's encomium to the deceased churchman was clearly designed not just for scholars but for public consumption within popular Catholic circles, a task at which Trippen magnificently succeeded, since his work has become the best-selling set of volumes in the Blaue Reihe of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Like Brown-Fleming, he eschews probing the psychological depths of his churchman. Trippen's work is not a strict biography but a compelling account of the life and times of the Cologne archbishop, who in 1945 assumed the helm of the Fulda Bishops' Conference upon the death of Adolf Bertram. Through this function, Frings emerged as a critical spokesman for the bishops on questions of rations for the German population, refugees, prisoners of war, and most confrontationally, of denazification and war-crimes trials. He played a significant role behind the scenes in the drafting of the West German Constitution. During the Second Vatican Council, Frings gained a reputation as one of the most effective German spokesmen, whose speeches regularly led participants to abandon their places at the side in St. Peter's or the seats at nearby cafes and to reconvene in their proper places in the pews.

In other respects, Trippen's magnum opus serves as a foil to Brown-Fleming's account. While her succinct book contains only 130 pages of text, Trippen's two volumes combined straddle more than 1,200 pages. In places, it reads as a secret glance into Frings's daily calendar, providing glimpses into his daily routine and above all into his meetings with political, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical figures of high renown. Nearly 200 pages in Volume II provide a blow-by-blow account of Frings's role at Vatican II from 1962 to 1965. To illustrate these meetings and ensuing correspondence, Trippen presents lengthy block quotations that place Frings at the center of a tumultuous religious and political world, an oasis in the turbulence of two decades of societal change. Only at the close of Frings's career in the late 1960s does one sense that Frings lost control of events, as the growing uncertainly about how to implement precisely the directives of the Second Vatican Council corresponded with the mounting calls from Roman Catholic laity and youth for a democratization of the church structures and a relaxation of the prohibitions on forbidden sexual behavior.

Trippen's understated approach brings with it advantages and drawbacks. For the first-time reader, the pages of block quotations allow the reader to encounter Frings's quiet, sometimes ironic, but indelibly iconic voice; however, it also leads Trippen's voice to blur with that of his subject so that Frings's positions occasionally become indistinguishable from those of his biographer. Reading about Frings's opposition to Allied war-crimes trials, one discovers, “Die Kölner Akten lassen erkennen, dass der Einsatz von Kardinal Frings für die zum Tode verurteilten Kriegsverbrecher wie für zu hart bestrafte ehemalige Nationalsozialisten unendlich viel Arbeit und Mühe gemacht hat. Der Kardinal erntete dabei . . . durchaus nicht nur Zustimmung und Anerkennung. Bisweilen überwog sogar lieblose Kritik.”Footnote ²³ One finds the echoes of ideological battles from the 1970s, in which Trippen refers to the American journalist, Frederic Spotts, an old nemesis of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte and an early chronicler of the political engagement of churchmen, including Frings in the postwar era, in the present tense.Footnote ²⁴

As rich in insights as they are, the work of both Brown-Fleming and Trippen shows the need to move beyond the polarities that have characterized the writing on the churches. It is precisely this goal that is masterfully realized in the closing chapter of Annette Merten's eminently readable dissertation, Himmlers Klostersturm. Der Angriff auf katholische Einrichtungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und die Wiedergutmachung nach 1945.Footnote ²⁵ While focusing largely on the seizure of Catholic monasteries under Himmler, not Bormann (an important correction to the existing literature), she carries her story past 1945 and highlights the Catholic attempts to reclaim the property and assets during the Nazi years. Himmler's henchmen took over hundreds of monasteries, leaving thousands of nuns and brothers on the street overnight. These seizures under the pretext of housing repatriated ethnic Germans from the east and wounded soldiers from the front. In reality, they were an attempt to up the ante in the ongoing war against the Catholic Church. Yet the churches did not automatically receive their property back after the Nazi capitulation, a situation that exacerbated relations between Allied authorities and Catholic leaders. The Allies continued to use monasteries as camps for displaced persons or as military barracks, denying no less than Cardinal Frings the return of his archdiocesan seminary at Bensberg, which was being used as a Belgian hospital. But as late as the 1960s, the churches' claims for compensation remained entangled in legal proceedings. The different Allied zones and the federal states had put forward conflicting criteria under which it was unclear whether the churches were to receive their properties and assets back or alternative forms of restitution. By this time, many Catholic orders had redefined their missions, so that the return of property stolen decades earlier had become extraneous. Mertens might have mentioned that claims for restitution were a catalyst for one of the earliest historical examinations of the Catholic past. After a British board of review in case from 1951 involving restitution asserted that it “was not convinced . . . that the sum total of the measures referred to by counsel amounted, as at the 8th May 1956, to an intention to eliminate the Catholic Church in its entirety from the cultural and economic life of Germany,” the historian Hans Buchheim compiled an extensive brief for the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich that argued that the Catholic church and National Socialism stood in such opposition to each other that the existence of the latter depended on the annihilation of the former.Footnote ²⁶

Like Merten's monograph, the volume by Andreas Holzem and Christoph Holzapfel, Zwischen Kriegs- und Diktaturerfahrung. Katholizismus und Protestantismus in der Nachkriegszeit, in the so-called Orange Series, rises above the polarized politics that all too frequently has dominated writings on the churches in the immediate postwar era.Footnote ²⁷ This edition is one of the first to center attention on the semantic constructions used by churchmen to make sense of the upheaval in the months and years following the Nazi surrender. While early chapters examine elements of the wartime experience such as the seizure of monasteries and everyday religiosity during the fighting, the pièces de résistance in this volume scrutinize the historical memory of the Catholic past under National Socialism and examine the construction of Catholic memory both in the institutional church and in the CDU. Martin Brockhausen provides a compelling account of the CDU's own founding mythology as a party “born in resistance.” After questioning this fundamental plank of CDU identity, he concludes by affirming that Christian Democracy can indeed legitimately claim to have its roots in religious opposition to National Socialism.Footnote ²⁸

Christian Schmidtmann's essay on the construction of the Catholic past is, without a doubt, a tour de force.Footnote ²⁹ Prefaced with the title, “answering questions about the present with events of the past,” Schmidtmann traces the constructions of the Catholic past from the close of World War II through the mid 1960s. In one table, he displays the number of publications about the Catholic Church's past under National Socialism, noting peaks in the immediate postwar years and again in the 1960s, and in particular, from 1960 to 1965. This latter era, of course, corresponds with articles, plays, and monographs critical of the church's conduct during the Third Reich by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Rolf Hochhuth (author of The Deputy, which lambasted Pius XII's silence in the face of the Holocaust), the American pacifist Gordon Zahn, and Günter Lewy. To Schmidtmann's credit is his refusal to pass judgments himself about the veracity and integrity of these historical constructions. He couches this reluctance to ascend the historical bully-pulpit in a somewhat unwieldy poststructuralist rhetoric, asserting, “dass die erinnerte Vergangenheit nicht als etwas Objektives in die jeweilige Gegenwart hineinragt, sondern eine ihrer Existenzformen ist.”

Though the volume is ostensibly biconfessional, the eight individual chapters focus overwhelmingly—and somewhat regrettably—on Roman Catholicism. Only in Andreas Holzem's introduction do confessional differences emerge as a significant theme in their own right. Protestants, he argues, held on to a specifically nationalist model for dealing with the past much longer than Catholics, who were more apt to turn to universal schemata for guidance. Unfortunately, a similar history of the constructions of the Protestant past, such as Christian Schmidtmann brilliantly and succinctly provides for German Catholicism, has yet to be fully written. The Protestant Kommission für die Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes in der nationalsozialistischen Zeit initiated its own program of scholarship in the mid 1950s, even before representatives of political Catholicism commissioned Catholic scholars with the aid of federal funds to begin comparable work in their field.Footnote ³⁰ The Catholic scholarship in the 1950s was driven forward by confessional rivalries and criticism of the Catholic church spawned in SPD circles critical of the CDU.Footnote ³¹

Three recent volumes, however, partially redress this omission by placing the Protestant experience at center stage. Martin Greschat's dense narrative, Die evangelische Christenheit und die deutsche Geschichte nach 1945. Weichenstellungen in der Nachkriegszeit, will no doubt long remain the definitive tome.Footnote ³² This work by this distinguished historian of German Protestantism comprehensively examines not only the restructuring of the Protestant churches and the formation of the EKD after the upheavals of the Nazi years but also sidebars such as the battles waged between church leaders over the legacy of National Socialism, the relationship with all four occupation powers, and the everyday life of the churches in landscapes of rubble. As its title promises, Greschat focuses on the course set by church leaders in the immediate postwar era, a path that endured for decades.

Greschat underscores the continuity in personnel, theology, and political values in German Protestantism. The leadership of the Protestant church remained in the hands of those who had fought in World War I—and remained imbued with a supercharged nationalism. The theological battles between Lutherans and Reformed Protestants from the 1930s reemerged with a vengeance after 1945 as orthodox Lutherans opposed not only the doctrinal unity supposedly brought about by the Barmen Declaration of Faith from 1934 (which had brought together Lutherans and Reformed in an effort to counter the theology of the German Christians) but also all efforts to unify the church that did not leave them in the driver's seat. It is no coincidence, Greschat argues, that the more divided church leaders were on questions of church unity, the more they closed ranks on questions pertaining to the larger German nation, opposing denazification efforts and war-crimes trials with a fury that far surpassed any opposition they offered to the National Socialist state.

Clearly, most Protestant leaders remained mired in national Protestant traditions, still identifying themselves and their institutions as the cultural foundations of the German nation. As fervent as these attitudes were, they could not cover up the new fissures opening up as the Cold War heated up. Some Protestant leaders, and in particular, Martin Niemöller, forged a leftward course, bitterly protesting the division of Germany into east and west and pointing fingers at the Americans in an outpouring of anti-American sentiment that had long been a staple of the German right. For others, anti-Communism took priority, allowing them to accede to Adenauer's western course.

Greschat's work has much to recommend it: an evenhandedness of tone, even if he is not uncritical of his subjects; splendidly drawn parallels to the world of German Catholicism, and an unparalleled mastery of the theological differences that shaped the Protestant quest for church unity in the Third Reich and postwar eras. Matthew Hockenos's work, likewise, impressively draws upon a rich corpus of primary sources in arguing that theological differences between Reformed, Lutheran, and Union Protestants shaped churchmen's behavior in the postwar era.Footnote ³³ While he provides the finest and most concise summary to be found of the Protestant Kirchenkampf in the 1930s, the focus of A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past is ultimately much narrower. Vergangenheitsbewältigung—or rather the lack thereof—drives his narrative. Where Greschat shows how the understanding of the recent past informed the struggles for church unity, Hockenos focuses on the Protestant coming to terms with the past as an end in itself. And here, he convincingly argues, often contradictory understandings of forgiveness that dated back to the sixteenth century—and not just aggrieved nationalism—allowed them to put their own guilt out of mind with relative ease.

It is clear that Hockenos does not respect the positions taken by many of his subjects, particularly those Lutherans whom he terms “conservative.” These Lutherans “equivocated,” “contrived,” “embellished,” “concealed,” and “deliberately employed religious rhetoric to blur their failings.”Footnote ³⁴ Hockenos sums up their contribution to the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung almost aphoristically: “wisdom was not forthcoming from these leaders.” Hockenos's heroes, such as the Swiss-German theologian, Karl Barth, undeniably lie on the Reformed side of the Protestant spectrum or among those Lutheran and United churchmen, such as Martin Niemöller and Hans Iwand, who broke with orthodox Lutheranism. In places, Hockenos's work reads as a lament for the inability of Protestants to follow the path urged by the Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Complicit in the ascent of the National Socialist state, conservative Lutherans subsequently developed a myth of “conservative churchly resistance” to soothe their consciences and curry favor with the Allied occupations.Footnote ³⁵ They claimed that that National Socialism was merely the result of secularization in Europe.Footnote ³⁶ Conservatives, he concludes, imbibed what Dietrich Bonhoeffer had long derided as “cheap grace.”Footnote ³⁷ Even the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt from October 1945 was anything but a landmark statement of penitence. Protestants from abroad urged it onto the German brethren, arguing that the absence of such a statement would harm the German church in its effort to gain material assistance from abroad. Not surprisingly, it was bitterly contested by most clergy and laity, who condemned it as a capitulation.

In his concluding chapters, Hockenos similarly indicts many Protestants, and in particular, the Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, for their lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Theophil Wurm, Hockenos writes, harbored “distasteful prejudices,” made clear by a “damning piece of evidence” in which Wurm asked, “Can one issue a statement on the Jewish question in Germany without mentioning the way Jewish literati, since the days of Heinrich Heine, sinned against the German people by mocking all that is sacred and how in many areas the peasants suffered as a result of Jewish profiteers?”Footnote ³⁸ Somewhat regrettably, neither Greschat nor Hockenos dwells on Wurm's tireless efforts and interventions on behalf of convicted Nazi war criminals such as the high-ranking SS leader, Oswald Pohl—details that would have added greater weight to their criticisms.Footnote ³⁹ Confessional Lutherans will no doubt object to Hockenos's moralizing, but his portraits of many Protestant leaders are right on target.

Manfred Gailus and Wolfgang Krogel's volume, Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft der Kirche im Nationalen: Regionalstudien zu Protestantismus. Nationalsozialismus und Nachkriegsgeschichte 1930 bis 2000, offers similar fare.Footnote ⁴⁰ The results of a conference from 2002, it brings together nineteen contributors who paint portraits of individual Landeskirchen and church provinces on a larger canvas than that of Greschat or Hockenos. Although the subtitle holds out the year 1930 as its point of departure, these chapters, in reality, take the reader on a journey from World War I to the present. As its title suggests, this is a work not at all flattering to the Protestant churches. It describes the self-imposed Babylonian exile of the Protestant church, in which it was held captive by nationalist ideas. No social milieu in Germany, Gailus states, was as susceptible to the siren call of National Socialism as Protestantism: “A sharp drawing of the borders between Protestantism and National Socialism is not possible” (p. 24). Echoing Greschat and Hockenos, these authors look for caesuras after 1945 and instead find continuity in both leadership and attitudes. As a result, the examination of the Nazi past was, in the words of Gailus, “dragging, hesistant, repressed and silent, transfigured, and glossed over.”Footnote ⁴¹ Not until an entire generation of leaders such as Theophil Wurm and Hans Meiser had departed the stage (Otto Dibelius stepped down only in 1966 at the age of 85) could the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung begin in earnest. And even then, a work unflinchingly critical of the Confessing Church's response to Nazi anti-Semitism such as Wolfgang Gerlach's dissertation from 1970, And The Witnesses were Silent, was immediately tabled and not published until 1987.Footnote ⁴²

Pioneering as they are, these three volumes on German Protestantism leave open ample questions for subsequent research. For this, they cannot be faulted: all three volumes represent a belated attempt to sift through the murky currents of the Protestant past. But as a result, they are often top-down accounts that focus on the pronouncements of church leaders and the reactions they engendered. Absent is a social and cultural history of German Protestantism that has been so carefully constructed for German Catholicism—of the Verbände, youth organizations, social composition of the clergy, forms of piety, changes in rituals, changes in the conceptions of transcendence and the sacred. All three authors hint at the leftward movement in the church that would take place in the 1970s.Footnote ⁴³ As works devoted largely to an earlier era, however, they do not purport to answer how the conservative theological and political restoration of the 1940s was superseded by the avant-garde of openly left-leaning Christians, who commanded headlines as they championed the peace and environmental movements, called for jettisoning anti-Judaic traditions, and emerged as the public face of German Protestantism.Footnote ⁴⁴ Of course, their prominence in the mass media may well obscure the reality that they probably were not representative of Protestantism as a whole.

The social and cultural textures so lacking in accounts of German Protestantism sit at the center of research on postwar German Catholicism. This should not surprise. Protestant church historians had long focused on the history of theology, seen often narrowly as the unfolding of the Word of God. In contrast, Catholic theologians were apt to see the hand of God in creation, society, and human relations, opening the door for church historians to behold broader historical vistas. During the last two decades, Catholic historians have remained indebted to the paradigm of socio-moral milieus, which have been applied less widely to Protestant research.Footnote ⁴⁵ This model was first proposed by the sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius, who drew on trenchant criticisms of Catholic insularity put forward by the outspoken left-wing Catholic, Carl Amery, in the early 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁶ For historians of the postwar era, however, Lepsius's arguments were less influential than the models put forward by the Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung in Münster.Footnote ⁴⁷ This working group of more than one dozen graduate students and young academics was, at the time, under the leadership of Wilhelm Damberg, whose mammoth, nearly ten-year-old, and 600-page-tome on the transformations in the diocese of Münster, Abschied vom Milieu?, remains the titan in the field.Footnote ⁴⁸ The model of a socio-moral milieu they cobbled together was a reaction against Wilfried Loth's criticism of existing milieu theories and his postulation of the existence of Catholic “Teilmilieu” in the Kaiserreich.Footnote ⁴⁹ But even here, religious history suffered from a time lag, in which newer historical methods entered only belatedly. Social history, pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s, found its way into the history of postwar German Catholicism only in the second half of the 1990s.Footnote ⁵⁰

The proponents of milieu theory created a model in which a coherent Catholic subculture took shape in the 1870s and 1880s as a response to industrialization, state persecution, and religious revivals.Footnote ⁵¹ While the milieu “peaked” politically in the 1880s and 1890s, many individual Verbände reached their high-water mark in the 1920s and 1930s, as the German landscape was characterized by an intense ideological polarization and social mobilization. According to this model, Catholic organizations had nowhere to go but down, as the dislocations brought on by the war and German defeat drastically altered social, cultural demographic textures that had long undergirded the Catholic milieu. But most early milieu theories were less than precise in describing the waning of the Catholic milieu. They postulated different dates for the collapse—the early twentieth century, 1933, the 1960s—but more commonly simply glossed over the final phase of the milieu. Not surprisingly, many accounts of Catholicism since 1945 recount either different facets of milieu erosion or react viscerally against this paradigm.

Obviously indebted to milieu theories, Michael Hirschfeld's book, Katholisches Milieu und Vertriebene. Eine Fallstudie am Beispiel des Oldenburger Landes, 1945–1965 attributes postwar religious erosion to the flood of refugees into western Germany from the former German east. In this extremely dense work of more than 600 pages, he convincingly highlights the failure of church leaders to minister effectively to the throngs of Catholic refugees from upper Silesia and the Ermland who settled in this enclave in the German northwest. While church leaders in the diocese of Münster (to which Oldenburg belongs) succeeded in building churches, they were unable to develop and implement pastoral strategies that met the needs of these particular groups of expellees. Silesian Catholics, for instance, were determined to hold on to their own unique Christmas rituals, a position that put them at odds with local inhabitants. Many diocesan officials were loath to support a new organization that would tend solely to the refugees. Existing organizations, they insisted, could more than adequately tend to these newcomers. In response, some expellees clung to their own traditions with an even deeper fervor, essentially defying the wishes of local Catholic administrators. Others, in contrast, distanced themselves from the church altogether, particularly in the parts of Oldenburg that were predominantly Protestant. Over time, they were swallowed up by a mainstream Protestant culture.

Hirschfeld's mammoth and extremely well-researched book—he visited more than thirty archives—comes as a welcome relief after the flood of often tendentious and highly politicized literature on the German expellees. His use of the milieu paradigm, however, raises some conceptual red flags. Measuring the erosion of the Catholic milieu, as Hirschfeld intends to do, requires yardsticks. How religious were Ermlanders and Upper Silesians prior to the expulsion in 1945? Did other areas that experienced an influx of refugees experience a similar process of erosion? Did the refugees weaken the religiosity of indigenous Oldenburgers? If the process of erosion was indeed highly localized, can one indeed speak of a coherent, unitary Catholic milieu, or, as Wilfried Loth suggested long ago for the nineteenth century, of partial milieus (Teilmilieu)?Footnote ⁵²

If the topic of the expellees is old hat, Petra von der Osten turns her attention to an area long neglected by historians—Catholic women's charity—in a dissertation that was published in the Blaue Reihe in 2002 under the title, Jugend- und Gefährdetenfürsorge im Sozialstaat. Auf dem Weg zum Sozialdienst katholischer Frauen, 1945–1968.Footnote ⁵³ On one level, this account remains a narrow organizational history of one women's charity organization, the Katholischer Fürsorgeverein für Mädchen, Frauen und Kinder, that, she argues, was anchored in the structures of the Catholic milieu. But on another level, her work provides a vibrant example of the transformation of the Catholic milieu itself, as Catholics entered the societal mainstream in the postwar era. Leaders of the organization had long wrestled with the traditional gender roles that they had inherited, shaped, and promoted. After vigorous debates, the Katholischer Fürsorgeverein für Mädchen, Frauen und Kinder changed its name in 1968 to the Sozialdienst Katholischer Frauen—and took on a very different identity. Through the 1950s, its workers were either women religious or volunteers. But by the late 1950s onward—and von der Osten makes it clear that this direction was set already immediately at the close of World War II—its ranks came to consist largely of paid professionals, who no longer treated their charges as moral charges in need of salvation but as clients and customers. Gone was the all-pervasive guilt: instead, the employees stressed that “more worldliness, more humanity, more Leiblichkeiten is necessary today for the realization of being a Christian.” And so this modernized charity organization became an integral part of both the rapidly expanding German welfare state and the new service economy. Or as Wilhelm Damberg has postulated, “the milieu is dead. Long live the service sector!”Footnote ⁵⁴

Christian Kuchler develops further in his book, Kirche und Kino. Katholische Filmarbeit in Bayern (1945–1965), the argument that Catholicism was on its way to becoming a provider of goods and services in the new postwar German economy.Footnote ⁵⁵ Like von der Osten, Kuchler offers an impressive corrective to descriptions of Catholic Germany as a uniformly conservative bastion that sought to stave off modern intrusions such as dancing or cinema. In fact, Kuchler shows that Catholics were far more involved in film work than even their contemporaries believed possible. While Catholics did protest films such as Die Sünderin in the early 1950s and championed the Heimatfilme, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, they gave up on the idea of rechristianizing society through film. Instead, they promoted an intellectually demanding and artistically challenging cinema that was to be the “artistic means of expression of its time.” Film was no longer to serve as an instrument of ministry but as a “service provider for West German media society.” For Kuchler, there was far more to Catholicism than mere prohibitions and strictures. It was on its way to becoming a professionalized entity, one that fit perfectly into the new service-based economy of the Federal Republic.

Oliver Schütz's nearly 700-page volume on the founding of Catholic Academies is utterly comprehensive but a squandered opportunity. Begegnung von Kirche und Welt. Die Gründung Katholischer Akademien in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945–1975 painstakingly describes the founding of twenty-one Catholic academies and social institutes in the Federal Republic of Germany.Footnote ⁵⁶ These institutes were intended to promote Catholic social teachings, which traditionally had been passed down by Catholic Verbände. Many of the more progressive ancillary organizations, however, had been dissolved in the 1930s, precisely when many bishops were becoming inspired by notions of Catholic Action. Catholic Action urged laity to go into the world to spread Catholic influence but under the aegis of the local bishop: it represented a method with which to chasten the often unwieldy Vereine, which crossed diocesan lines. As a result, most local bishops sanctioned the creation of these local academies, which served as an intellectual nexus for decades, sponsoring lectures, continuing education programs, and lay-training workshops. Schütz presents 21 narrow organizational histories that focus only on the academies' founding—and not of their subsequent activities. As he informs us, “focusing on the founding forbids one from casting judgments about the success or lack of success of the work of the academies.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Schütz's encyclopedic work is so detailed and meticulously researched that few historians will probably dare to tread this turf again. As a result, broader questions linking the academies to more far-reaching intellectual and cultural changes in Catholic Germany will remain unanswered.

As these works make clear, the milieu paradigm inspired many younger, largely social historians to delve into individual aspects of the Catholic subculture in the postwar era that had long remained obscured as a result of the focus on the history of the CDU and church-state relations. Even so, this model has since come under increasing fire from revisionists in the last ten years. Many lambaste milieu theorists for having overlooked semantic, linguistic, and cultural constructions in spite of admonitions in the model put together by the Arbeitskreis from Münster to explore the cultural dimensions of Catholicism.Footnote ⁵⁸ More specifically, historians specializing in the nineteenth century allege that the milieu model overstates Catholic homogeneity and internal coherence during the supposed formative phase. Historians of the postwar era criticize the unwarranted focus on the erosion of religiosity, since most models of the milieu presuppose a decline in the second half of the twentieth century. Studies of milieu erosion, according to this view, take on the weaknesses endemic to theories of secularization. In an essay from 2000, Benjamin Ziemann argued that continuing to focus on the erosion of the Catholic milieu offered “no truly fruitful heuristic possibilities.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Most fundamentally, Ziemann argued, the milieu paradigm overstated decline and understated transformation: it failed to describe what emerged after the collapse of the milieu.Footnote ⁶⁰ Catholic Germany, he avers, was transformed institutionally not only through the Second Vatican Council from 1962 and 1965 but also through the synods convened in subsequent years to implement these reforms.

Ziemann no doubt overstates the case here. Works by Kuchler and von der Osten clearly underscore the social and cultural transformations taking place within the Catholic milieu. Nonetheless, his pioneering Habilitation, Katholische Kirche und Sozialwissenschaften, 1945–1975, welds these criticisms of the Catholic milieu into a work of sundry original and often provocative insights.Footnote ⁶¹ He brilliantly argues that Catholic leaders turned to the methods of social science to make sense of the bewildering societal and cultural changes that threatened to engulf them. In their use of the social sciences, church leaders had a rich history upon which to draw. At the turn of the century, they began to make use of statistics to position themselves more effectively against Protestants. By the 1950s, Catholic leaders grabbed onto these techniques to help stave off secularization. To minister more effectively, they carried out surveys of social groups, such as young Catholic workers, who had distanced themselves from Catholic institutions. By the 1960s, however, the societal transformations threatened to pit reformers against conservatives and young against old. Factions within these internecine battles over how to implement council and synodical reforms embraced techniques of polling, statistics, sociology, and even psychotherapy to further their own political and religious agendas. Most compelling is Ziemann's description of psychotherapy in the church, long a forbidden fruit. By the 1960s, parish priests were even urged to remodel the sacrament of confession after psychotherapy sessions, forgoing the traditional approach of absolving sin in favor of healing illnesses.

Without a doubt, this work will remain, along with Damberg's work from a decade earlier, Abschied vom Milieu?, one of the pillars of the field, even if its prose remains anything but limpid. Ziemann's writing frequently takes on the characteristics of his sources from the Catholic social sciences, whereby his voice occasionally merges with his sources. The importance of this work lies perhaps less in the conclusions he raises—the impact of the social sciences on Catholicism was ambivalent—than in the methodological challenges he poses. For Ziemann, secularization has little utility as a master narrative. Yet his theme—the use of social science techniques or Verwissenschaftlichung—clearly does not have the weight to replace the erosion of the Catholic milieu as an alternative master narrative. For one, the use of the social sciences cut both ways. While it appeared to be a promising tool with which to combat secularization, it also left conservatives filled with trepidation, because they correctly recognized that such empiricism could easily desacralize their own institutions and rituals and render the transcendent immanent. Was Verwissenschaftlichung the cause or effect of the changes that Ziemann deftly describes? As a result, it is unclear from Ziemann's account which master narratives suffice to tell the story of Catholicism in the postwar era. But even his work leaves open the possibility that there might be some validity to traditional narratives of secularization and milieu erosion. He continues to use the term secularization, defining it as “functional differentiation,” but, he adds, church leaders possessed various options of how to respond to larger societal currents.Footnote ⁶²

Like Ziemann, Michael Fellner's unusually well-written work, Katholische Kirche in Bayern, 1945–1960, reiterates criticisms of the milieu paradigm and promises instead a fusion of social and cultural history.Footnote ⁶³ Rather surprisingly, Fellner does not deploy one argument that would have augmented his already keen analysis. The model of the Catholic milieu, particularly as drawn up by the Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung in Münster, postulated a Catholic subculture in which ancillary organizations (Vereine) constantly exerted their muscle. In Bavaria, however, religious Vereine did not dominate the landscape in the same manner. What turns up in this wonderfully concise book is actually more social than cultural history—but for good reason. Fellner compares three regions in the archdiocese of München-Freising that experienced different forms of social and economic transformation from the immediate postwar era into the late 1950s. The insularity of the rural deanery of Ebersberg was punctured by throngs of refugees, expellees, and commuters to nearby cities; the Berchtesgaden region witnessed a budding tourist industry that came into its own; and, not least, the city of Munich saw its population swell to more than one million during this time. Fellner's conclusions resist easy summary but they corroborate the findings of this author for the same period in Lower Franconia.Footnote ⁶⁴ The church was able to seam together new pastoral approaches based on a mélange of tradition and innovation under the aegis of a “conservative-restorative discourse.” Each region posed unique challenges. In rural Ebersberg, parishioners actively resisted changes, including the introduction of new liturgical forms or sharing their pews with newcomers from the east. But there, innovations such as the Rural Catholic Youth Movement fell on fertile soil. Parish leaders in the city of Munich found a greater openness to innovation but their efforts were often hampered by the smaller size of their base in this city with its rich anticlerical tradition. In this cautious but precise and reflective work, Fellner falls back on the framework of modernization in presenting his findings, describing the manner in which Bavarian Catholic leaders navigated the societal transition from scarcity to prosperity.

Christian Schmidtmann, in contrast, has no hesitation about making the leap into the poststructural abyss. From the very outset, it is clear that his revised dissertation, Katholische Studierende. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur-und Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, abandons epistemological certainties and pursues with utmost rigor a poststructuralist template even to the point of occasional absurdity.Footnote ⁶⁵ Echoing Ziemann, Schmidtmann insists that existing narratives of modernization and secularization are mere constructions: focusing on the erosion of the Catholic milieu, he reiterates, is heuristically fruitless.Footnote ⁶⁶ But unlike his fellow Bochumite, he makes no attempt zu retten, was zu retten ist. He smashes existing metanarratives and historical categories with glee, filling the void with dense descriptions of myriad cultural representations by individual young Catholics. As such, “Katholische Studierende” contains a logically consistent—and necessarily inchoate—structure. This is no organizational history, even if he devotes more than forty pages (out of 500 pages of text) to formal Catholic student Vereinigungen. There is, he informs us, no history of Catholic students, only histories of individual students for whom their self-understanding as Catholics served as the bedrock for their own personal identities. Centered on the construction of collective identities, this work is organized only loosely on chronology: the concluding eighty pages provide autobiographical accounts of Catholic students derived from oral histories and divorced from any linear presentation.

But what emerges is a whirl of competing Catholic identities, even for generations once presumed to be coherent. Helmut Schelsky described the generation coming of age in the immediate postwar era as “skeptical”; others affix labels such as the “Flakhelfergeneration,” “Heimkehrergeneration,” Hitler youth generation, or “45ers.” Schmidtmann will have none of that—and rightly so. Out of that one generation, however we designate it, emerged individuals with a stunning plurality of views: Joseph Ratzinger, Johann Baptist Metz, Bishop Franz Dyba, and the historians Konrad Repgen and Hans Maier.Footnote ⁶⁷ Catholic student organizations clearly struggled over how to define themselves during these formative student years, and Schmidtmann revels in the ensuing disagreements. In the late 1940s, Catholic students wrangled over whether to wear apparel bearing the colors of Bünde stemming from the Catholic youth movement. This process of self-definition was made much more complicated little more than a decade later, as students confronted non-conformist Catholic “clans” that put forward trenchant criticisms of the Catholic past during the Third Reich and of atrophied, undemocratic, and intolerant hierarchical institutional structures. By the early 1970s, Catholic identities appeared as little more than a blur. Schmidtmann writes, “Es gab eine Vielzahl miteinander konkurriender und sich voneinander abgrenzender Konzepte von “Katholizität,” die von ganz unterschiedlichen Wirklichkeitskonstruktionen, Erinnerungen und Handlungsorientierungen gestützt wurden und diese gleichzeitig herausbildeten.”Footnote ⁶⁸ There was no longer a uniquely Catholic discourse to uphold distinctly “Catholic” frameworks and structures.

Like Ziemann's Habilitation, this is a work that is brilliant and exasperating alike. Why could they have not used a more accessible, less jargon-filled vocabulary and made their arguments even more powerful? In spite of Schmidtmann's best efforts to the contrary, the remnants of traditional narratives still seep through. This work essentially tells the story of the integration of Catholics into the societal mainstream. Catholic students groups splintered and their identities sputtered—a telltale sign of Catholic pluralization. To its credit, this methodologically subversive work appears in the Blaue Reihe, the first work of cultural history to be published in a series known for conservatism.

Both Ziemann and Schmidtmann attempt to decenter existing metanarratives, arguing that they present little more than a tired narrative of religious decline. With less fanfare, however, a growing number of scholars are turning to cross-cultural and comparative approaches that fertilize the field equally well.Footnote ⁶⁹ Some of their volumes are genuine works of comparative history that methodically posit similarities and differences. Others are inquests into interaction that show nationally hued religious cultures colliding, reconciling, and in the process, transforming each other.

Two recent works take the latter approach. Without deploying grandiose methodological arguments, they quietly address a sore spot in Catholic history, the relationships between Polish and German Catholics. Arkadiusz Stempin's work, Das Maximilian-Kolbe Werk. Wegbereiter der deutsch-polnischen Aussöhnung 1960–1989, describes the tentative steps toward reconciliation taken by scattered Catholic groups associated with the Pax Christi movement in the 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁰ An outgrowth of the Catholic peace movement, their efforts crystallized institutionally in what became known as the Maximilian Kolbe Werk, named after the Polish priest who sacrificed his life for a fellow inmate at Auschwitz. Though initially small in scope, the initiatives toward reconciliation taken by Catholics of a decidedly more pronounced critical bent such as Alfons Erb were all the more remarkable in that they often took place without the direct support of the German hierarchy. In fact, as Stempin deftly points out, their efforts put the German hierarchy in something of a bind. Most Catholic politicians—and as Stempin argues, the milieu as a whole—maintained a cool reserve when it came to their Polish brethren. On paper, the CDU remained committed to justice for the German expellees from Silesia, Ermland, and Pomerania and to a revision of the German-Polish border. Equally troubling, Stempin shows, were anti-Polish stereotypes that had lingered in spite of German defeat during World War II.

These pioneers put into practice their motto that reconciliation was impossible without restitution. As early as the 1960s, they created a fund to compensate financially surviving Polish victims of German concentration camps. They raised the money and sought out Polish survivors themselves. As their efforts grew during the 1960s and 1970s, so, too, did the number of beneficiaries, rising from less than one hundred in the 1960s to the thousands by the early 1980s. These leaders of reconciliation also invited former Polish inmates to Germany, hoping to overcome the legacy of hatred and mistrust that German occupation had wrought. In the most gripping section of this work, Stempin quotes at length from the testimonies of the Polish laborers and concentration-camp survivors, who were often moved to tears by the generosity and hospitality of these Pax Christi volunteers. One woman summed up her experiences during this unexpected sojourn in Freiburg, where the Kolbe Werk was based: “I have been liberated twice from the concentration camp, once in 1945 and again in 1978 in Freiburg.”Footnote ⁷¹

In its thrust, Stempin's somewhat unconventional volume is present-minded. At the outset, he refers to a journey of reconciliation between the two neighbors that has yet to be completed. But rather remarkably, his account remains free of armchair moralizing, even though, or perhaps because, the author is a Pole whose manuscript was the revised version of his dissertation completed in Freiburg. He refuses to let emotions color his discussion of the controversies now surrounding Maximilian Kolbe, who issued various anti-Semitic utterances in the 1930s and 1940s. Only a somewhat archaic choice of syntax gives a hint of his origins, but even his somewhat ponderous sentences do not detract from the merits of this outstanding monograph, which appeared in the Blaue Reihe of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte.

Robert Zurek covers similar terrain but for an earlier period in his revised dissertation, Zwischen Nationalismus und Versöhnung. Die Kirchen und die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen 1945–1956.Footnote ⁷² Like Stempin, he brings a dispassionate analysis to bear on a cauldron of resentments and grievances, but with one critical difference: his point of departure is firmly rooted in moral categories. Why did Christians, when navigating the divide between Poland and the Federal Republic, take their bearings from political considerations and not Christian ethics of forgiveness? While he delineates obvious answers—a century's worth of anti-Polish stereotypes was reinforced by the fresh wounds of the expulsions—he has much more to say. Though the Polish Cardinal August Hlond offered an olive branch to German Catholics shortly before his death in 1948, further Polish efforts at reconciliation were hampered not only by the raw memories of the brutal German occupation but also by the arrest of many leading clerics by the Communist regime. Yet it is unlikely, Zurek makes clear, that additional Polish initiatives would have borne fruit. German Catholics responded more enthusiastically to the steps at reconciliation taken by their brothers and sisters to the west in nations such as France, where the injuries wreaked by the Germans were not of the same magnitude. Polish Catholics often expected nothing less than a full-fledged confession of guilt from their German brethren, a statement that would never have been forthcoming from the western side of the Oder-Neisse line. And so his monograph tells the story of reconciliation efforts that largely foundered, an exposé that hardly surprises but which easily sustains its own weight over 300 pages. He points out that the measures proposed by Protestant radicals such as Heinrich Grüber often enjoyed more success: similar Catholic success stories had to await the measures taken by Alfons Erb and his successors in the Maximillian-Kolbe Werk.

While occasionally frayed on the edges, the ties between American and German Catholics lacked the baggage of the Polish-German relationship. Two notable volumes accordingly draw parallels between Catholicism in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the United States. Antonius Liedhegener, author of a magisterial tome that placed Protestantism and Catholicism in Bochum and Münster during the German Empire side by side, hones his skills in drawing comparisons still further in the published version of his Habilitation, Macht, Moral und Mehrheiten. Der politische Katholizismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA seit 1960.Footnote ⁷³ Unlike Schmidtmann and Ziemann, Liedhegener, a political scientist, does not abandon the concept of modernization which, in fact, serves as a key building block in his analysis. How could these two nations evince such striking differences in their religious and political cultures, he asks, when they were subjected to similar processes of social and economic modernization?Footnote ⁷⁴

Liedhegener's skills as a social historian reemerge in select passages. He collates data on church affiliation, compiles charts on church attendance, and presents demographic data as he did in his pathbreaking quantitative dissertation. In general, however, the methodology of the political sciences reigns supreme. Rife with models, this work reads as a primer for political lobbyists, detailing the individual actors and variables in the political process—ancillary organizations, budgets, services, and fundraisers. The reader learns about the role of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the Bishops' Conferences, and the Zentralkommittee der Deutschen Katholiken. Most of this is a cut and dry lay of the land, but he also delves into the hard core of political activism—hot button questions of abortion, arms programs, and sexual education. Regrettably, Liedhegener overlooks the positions taken by the American bishops on civil rights. The bishops' threats to excommunicate or deny the sacraments to Catholics who did not toe the line were revived by the next generations of less progressive bishops, who brandished the same weapons against Catholic politicians who took divergent positions on abortion.

Still, this work is an impressive achievement, even if one occasionally senses that Liedhegener's analysis is strongest when he is on his home turf.Footnote ⁷⁵ While certain concluding pronouncements ring trite—Catholicism will continue to play an important role in the politics of both nations—the strength of his analysis lies in his keen attention to manifold layers of political activity. He notes, for instance, that American Catholicism lacks effective organizational structures to allow Catholic laity to participate in the political process that go beyond the bishops' conference and standard diocesan organizations.Footnote ⁷⁶ He also underscores the reality that Catholicism in both nations has become pluralistic, a development that has allowed it to wield political influence even after the classic structures of the Catholic milieu have eroded. Here on the concluding pages, one finds a partial answer to Benjamin Ziemann's query about what follows the Catholic milieu. Ultimately, Liedhegener makes a compelling case for his comparative analysis, which renders both American and German Catholicism less exceptional than many would have it. Both nations evince similar macro-trends: declining numbers of priests, increased lay participation in the parish level, and above all, growing pluralization.

Once again presenting American and German Catholicism in tandem, Liedhegener dishes up additional transatlantic comparisons along with his coeditor Wilhelm Damberg in Katholiken in den USA und Deutschland. Kirche, Gesellschaft und Politik.Footnote ⁷⁷ Bringing together sociologists, historians, political scientists, and journalists, this volume includes such notables as Andrew Greeley, Karl Gabriel, and Peter Steinfels. Its nine chapters methodically cover the totality of Catholic life, institutionally and spiritually. They run the gamut from liturgy, pastoral planning, charity, and education to politics, peace movements, gender, and religiosity. Its conclusions obviously resist easy summary, but this volume is the undeniable product of an ethos of globalization. The editors tellingly refer to the Catholic church as a “global player.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The volume is a by-product of the “Crossing Over” project that not only launched the conference in Berlin from which this volume emerged but also annually dispatches groups of American and German priests for three-week exchanges “across the pond.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The approaches taken by these largely younger scholars confirm many of the findings presented in Zeitgeschichtliche Katholizismusforschung, a volume edited by Karl-Joseph Hummel, director of the research center of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn.Footnote ⁸⁰ This edited collection emerged out of a conference held at the Katholische Akademie in Bavaria in May 2003 that commemorated the seventy-fifth birthday of Rudolf Morsey and the eightieth birthday of Konrad Repgen, two of the Kommission's most prominent and founding members. Taking stock of the existing state of research on German Catholicism, many of the deans of Catholic history, including Urs Altermatt of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, called for Catholic historians to undertake excursions into new methodologies, including social, cultural, and comparative history—exactly the course steered by the growing numbers of younger historians entering the field.

Clearly audible, however, was also the lament that the voice of the Kommission, as expressed in the sundry tomes of the Blaue Reihe, had gone unheard in the secular historical profession. The frustration expressed in certain contributions stems, in part, from a self-understanding of some doyens of the Kommission as both historical positivists and partisan advocates for the church in the ongoing battles to defend the church from slanderous attacks. Yet this seemingly contradictory sense of self—one should open the doors to new approaches and simultaneously stay true to original visions and faiths—may well be the signs of maturation. It augurs a generational shift in the field in which religious history is losing its distinctive identity as church history or an in-house confessional history. It echoes conflicts from a hundred years ago over whether to “come down from the tower.” The church portals have been opened. It is now up to the historical “mainstream” to shed its reserve toward religious topics in the postwar era, receive this new scholarship with open arms, and integrate it with all of its complexity into the new master narratives of the postwar Federal Republic.

Why should secular historians pay heed to the histories of the sacred for the post-1945 era and how might the inclusion of religious topics reshape the larger metanarratives of the Federal Republic? To be sure, the overwhelming majority of West German citizens claimed membership in one of the two major denominations. While the participation of Roman Catholics in church functions remained consistently higher than that of their Protestant brothers and sisters until recently, the fact that most Germans were at the least nominal members of Christian churches meant that German politics, culture, society, and everyday life were, at the very least, tinged if not strongly colored by these organizations. Even today, a small and often vocal minority steadfastly adheres to the faith. That Christian charity organizations—Diakonie for the Protestants and Caritas for the Catholics—became the largest employers in Germany underscores the importance of Christian values of social justice and their roles in the German welfare state.

More importantly, the loss of distinctive religious identities that went hand in hand with the transformation of religious institutions in the 1960s and 1970s was clearly emblematic of larger processes of homogenization within the society of the Federal Republic. On one level, the erosion of religious subcultures such as the Catholic milieu was an effect of “modernization”—economic prosperity, increased mobility, a culture of consumption—that challenged not only religious but also socialist institutions, regional dialects, and local cultures, among other factors.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet at the same time, religious leaders often took the initiative in transforming their institutions and diluting traditional teachings, sometimes fearing the corrosive effects of secularization but also genuinely hoping to reform institutional structures and values that had become musty. And calls to shift scholarly attention away from “erosion” and toward “transformation” direct us to those moments such as the Würzburger Synod from 1971 to 1975 where Roman Catholic lay and clerical leaders grappled with the concrete details of how to implement the directives coming from the Second Vatican Council. In this utterly complicated landscape, representatives of the hierarchy, lay leaders of Catholic ancillary organizations, and laity who had been appointed by the hierarchy almost desperately sought to find a consensus. But they often ran up against certain limits from Rome, which, for instance, dashed hopes of ordaining women to become deaconesses. The result was a stalemate, in which the frustration of lay Catholic representatives began to grow. By the second half of the 1970s, moreover, many younger Catholics and Protestants wielded the club of gender: Catholic youth leaders had wrestled since the early part of the decade over questions of coeducation. And so, many Verbände and Vereine, Protestant and Catholic alike, altered identities, traditions, and teachings in the 1960s and 1970s, as lay Christians frequently clashed with a divided hierarchy. On a grander scale, historians could write a history of the sacred in the postwar era, describing the continuities and alterations in conceptions of the transcendent and immanent.

It is precisely this terrain, finally, that is necessary to understand the growth of Islam and evangelical sects in Germany during the last decades. While what might be called the “Turkish milieu” in the Federal Republic was not necessarily anchored in religious structures, Islam took root in a post-Christian soil, or at least one strongly influenced by the religious “transformations” that had swept across western Europe. Radical and even moderate religious movements articulated themselves dialectically, defining themselves in opposition to prevailing secularist currents, movements for women's emancipation, and the loss of “traditional” Christian identities. Christian leaders from the 1960s onward took note of these religious newcomers as well and were forced to position themselves vis-à-vis these communities as well as preexisting Jewish communities. The erosion and transformation of the old and the emergence of the new will thus provide fertile ground for future histories of the Federal Republic.