Although Germany in 1871 was more than the sum of its parts, the new empire retained something of an improvised, unfinished appearance. Even the process of forging the Kaiserreich's new national identity, based on a shared culture and community of meaning, was complicated by a deep-seated religious rift that stretched all the way back to the sixteenth-century Reformation. This confessional divide entered deeply into the imagery and rhetoric of Germany's two Christian communities and influenced the nation's numerous religious disagreements and conflicts both before and after unification. Given this experience, most historians readily assume that Germany's post-1871 Catholic minority—weighed down by emotional, seemingly intractable issues left behind by century-long disputes—was late and ambivalent in its support of the new nation-state.

An important and notable challenge to that familiar historiographical assumption is this book by Rebecca Ayako Bennette. Unlike conventional accounts, which generally locate any shift in Catholic attitudes toward the collective aims of the Kaiserreich somewhere in the 1880s, Bennette argues that this late adaptation was in fact a continuation of a process that began as early as 1871. She shows that Germany's Catholic minority was neither an estranged, monolithic bloc nor reluctant in its support of the new empire. While it is true, she admits, that Catholics rejected the Bismarckian and liberal version of national identity, with its emphasis on Protestantism and masculinity, they did not reject national unity as such. To make this point, Bennette concentrates her attention on the decade following unification and the beginnings of the Kulturkampf, a major state-church dispute that dominated the national debate in Germany throughout the 1870s and into much of the 1880s. This confrontation, led by Otto von Bismarck and his liberal allies, attempted to weaken the church's influence, to bring it under stricter state control, and to consolidate German national culture. In pursuit of this ambitious agenda, the Kulturkampf's proponents branded adherents of the Roman faith second-class citizens, deficient in the sorts of German patriotism, loyalty, and political reliability essential to national unity.

Despite the rigors and humiliating innuendo of that Kulturkampf or past religious discord, Bennette convincingly demonstrates that Catholic allegiance to Germany's new political and territorial arrangements was far less damaged by those experiences than historians have commonly assumed. In place of the dominant, official version for German nationhood crafted by a Protestant majority, she argues that Catholics forged a competing vision of national unity in which their strong confessional identity informed the way in which they belonged to the larger national community, legitimized their participation, and established the underpinnings for their long-term inclusion as coparticipants in shaping the Kaiserreich's future. In spite of setbacks and disappointments, Bennette claims, Catholics defined the empire in terms of its regional and religious diversity and stressed the indispensable role they could play in shaping Germany's future. Although Catholics displayed respect for Christian universalism, they at the same time saw themselves as Germans, as members of a nation with a special, privileged role that echoed the Kaiserreich's larger ambitions. Catholics also expressed confidence in Wilhelm I, the new kaiser, fulfilled their civic duties, reached out to potential allies, held to the belief that common ground existed between the Christian denominations, and even accepted the exclusion of predominantly Catholic Austria from the newly fashioned Kaiserreich. Taken together, Bennette concludes, these attitudes and behavior patterns, reinforced by a complicated web of Catholic interests, preoccupations, and calculations regarding economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment and priorities, even political empowerment, constitute something of a political barometer sending an unmistakable reading of inclusion.

Important though these findings are, however, what distinguishes Bennette's account is her discussion of how that alternative version of national culture, underpinned as it was by religious conviction, respect for diversity, ties of kinship, and regional affiliations, provided a new vocabulary for imagining the German nation. In making her case, Bennette closely and painstakingly reexamines long-familiar sources, above all the denominational newspaper press, the pronouncements of public forums and congresses, and the writings or statements of Catholic leaders and publicists. All combined, she writes, to call attention to the contributions made by Catholics in defining the values and ethos of the new Kaiserreich, to describe the way in which the nation was to be imagined, and to stress how the empire's political arrangements and cultural values were to be safeguarded. Because this religious minority experienced firsthand the destructive consequences of policies initiated by opponents who held so much political and economic power in their hands, she continues, the Catholic response surprisingly was neither vengeful nor vindictive. In the face of superior power arrayed against them, Catholics instead publicized their plight within a harsh Fatherland and articulated a competing vision that in Bennette's words “ultimately gendered the nation as feminine” (100). This feminization of the Catholic vision as she describes it, so central to her inquiry, was in part a reflection of Catholic nonviolent, passive resistance to Kulturkampf coercion, in part a widespread perception among Catholics of their victimhood at the hands of the Bismarckian state, in part an admission that Catholics could not or would not compete with the majority at their own game, and in part the outcome of the long-term feminization of religion, particularly Catholicism, during the nineteenth century. According to Bennette, this more “feminine” vision had as its hallmarks a disinclination to violence, a special affinity with morality and compassion, and an emphasis on a more inclusive, less coercive German state. As such, that vision represented an alternative to the familiar “masculine” Kaiserreich with its mainstream values of Bismarckian militarism, discipline and obedience, exclusionism, and the efficacy of force.

Without losing sight of the extensive research and stimulating ideas that make her book so provocative and interesting, it nonetheless remains obvious that Bennette's account, so rich in detail for the 1870s, tells us little about the long-term prospects for that Catholic, gendered vision of the nation. The test for that vision, of course, was whether Catholics could be consistent in pursuit of that ideal image within a more general campaign to construct a stable, peaceful polity. Some readers therefore may wish for a more explicit and detailed analysis of the way in which the two Christian denominations reconciled their competing concepts of state, memory, and destiny along the lines, for example, of Helmut Walser Smith's Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton University Press, 1995), a work which she otherwise places at the center of her concerns. Although Bennette has much to say about the way in which Germany's Catholics imagined their nation and how that vision was made and sustained, her analysis tells us more about the vision itself than its potential for winning respect among its Protestant or liberal detractors, or the degree to which Germans in the end reconciled their competing visions of state, memory, or future destiny to forge a national identity that included a Catholic contribution.

These questions of emphasis, however, in no way detract from the merits of this thoughtful and useful book. Not only does it remind us of the abiding importance of religious differences in imperial Germany, but at the same time it also addresses the complicated efforts by the country's Catholic minority to imagine a German identity and shape a joint sense of purpose with their fellow countrymen. Whatever degree of harmony was achieved, Bennette implies, or however uneven was the progress toward inclusion, Catholics and Protestants in the end learned to live together, to manage religious differences, and to comprehend the particularities of the other.