Almost twenty years ago, David Blackbourn's history of Marian apparitions in the nineteenth-century village of Marpingen reminded historians that two Germanies existed long before the country's Cold War division: one bourgeois, liberal, and Protestant, and the other Catholic. By recovering Germans' uphill battle to bridge confessional hostilities and milieu identities after 1945, Maria D. Mitchell's recent monograph offers evidence of these two Germanies' longevity despite society's secularization as well as Nazism's efforts to destroy internal divisions. In doing so, the book makes an incontrovertible case for religion's ongoing importance to postwar political history.

Mitchell's first chapter lays out the numerous, failed attempts at intra-Christian cooperation before 1933 to underscore the long-term strength of confessional identities and locate interconfessionalism's impetus in the Catholic milieu. The rise of socialism and concerted efforts to secularize education convinced many Catholics as well as Protestants of the need to form a united front against the perceived enemies of Christianity. As outsiders to the hegemonic culture, however, Catholics more actively sought this alliance. Catholic trade union leaders in particular advocated interconfessionalism as a way to break out of the “Catholic tower” that protected yet also isolated Catholic Germans. The critical importance of these early efforts and of political Catholicism generally for the organization of an all-Christian political party after 1945 informs the rest of the book. Though it is no longer clear today, with the Protestant and once East German Angela Merkel at its helm, Mitchell reminds us that Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was first and foremost a Catholic project, one that drew extensively on the milieu's existing political networks and that required winning over Catholics—many of whom preferred the briefly revived Center Party—as well as wooing appropriately pious Protestants. Here, selective memory and a tradition of invoking “materialism . . . as a catch-all locution to discredit everything they associated with Germany's modernization and secularization” provided a vital basis for confessional cooperation (p. 77). The Nazis' early attack on churches and Christian involvement in anti-Nazi resistance helped Christian Democrats conceive of National Socialism as the culmination of those “materialist forces” long arrayed against Christianity. It was a highly attractive thesis that retroactively united all Christian Germans against Nazism and insisted on their exclusive status as victims of the Third Reich. It also made Germany's re-Christianization the obvious antidote for Nazism—and everything else that the CDU's founders interpreted as a threat to the Christian Occident. Hostility to Marxism, secularism, laissez-faire liberalism, and women's emancipation offered what Mitchell calls a “functioning consensus” on Christian Democratic antimaterialism and, together with re-Christianization, formed the cornerstone of early CDU politics.

For all the commonalities—and the CDU's electoral success—Mitchell demonstrates how confessional differences continued to cause conflict and divide the party throughout its first decade. Protestant Christian Democrats differed markedly from their Catholic counterparts in their relationship to the state, their commitment to confessional schools, and—in contrast to the “middle way between capitalism and socialism” that Mitchell finds common to CDU Catholics as different as Walter Dirks and Konrad Adenauer—their defense of liberalism. Indeed, if Catholic antimaterialism served to distinguish Christian Democratic economic policies, it also posed the greatest obstacle to increased Protestant membership. Through internal party debates and the drafting of state and federal constitutions, however, the party's antimaterialism—and thus according to Mitchell Christian democracy itself—was redefined to accommodate Protestant economic sensibilities and the changing conditions of postwar Germany. In this way the CDU was relieved of rhetoric that did not fit the widespread popularity of Ludwig Erhard's liberal economic policies or the consumerist culture that Catholic, Protestant, and secularist Germans increasingly embraced as evidence of democratic freedom (and the lack thereof in the east). In the end Mitchell concludes that confessional conflict petered out amid the changed social and cultural realities of the 1960s, its resolution a cause and effect of the secularization and de-Christianization of Germans' everyday life.

Recent scholarship has argued for Christian democracy's place in the pantheon of twentieth-century ideologies. As with similar attempts to reevaluate social democracy, however, the jury is still out, and one might wonder whether the very concept of ideology has become uncertain in our declaratively post-ideological age. Mitchell uses “Christian Democracy” alternately to refer to a political movement, a worldview, and the CDU proper; her frequent but never defined use of the term “ideology,” in particular, allows for considerable slippage and makes it sometimes difficult to grasp the scope of her claims. In the end it becomes clear that Mitchell wants to prove a full-blown Christian democratic worldview was born in the intra-Christian negotiations of the CDU's early years, negotiations that she argues fundamentally altered the political Catholicism that first inspired the party—usually, she seems to suggest, for the worse. It may be her own success in demonstrating the divisions among Catholics as well as between CDU Protestants and Catholics, and how these were not overcome but buried in one calculated compromise after another, that makes it difficult to perceive the end result as something more than a winning party platform. By her own account, whatever convictions originally inspired Christian Democrats, they were soon jettisoned (as in the case of Christian socialism and the postwar goal of re-Christianization) or redefined (as in the case of materialism) in the name of interconfessional harmony.

If the question of Christian democracy remains open, there is no doubt that Mitchell has given us an engaging and critical account of German interconfessionalism and its successful realization in the Christian Democratic Union. Anyone seeking a fresh perspective on the foundations of the Federal Republic of Germany would do well to pick up this volume. It is rich in detail and insights into the ongoing political relevance of religious identities after 1945.