Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession 9781107300378, 1107300371

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures and Maps
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Time Line of Organized Secularism in Germany and Berlin
Introduction
Secularism as a Social Formation
Secularism in the Religious and Political History of Nineteenth-Century Germany
Confession in German History
Toward a Quadriconfessional History of Nineteenth-Century Germany
Methodological Considerations
1 Dissidence and Confession, 1845 to 1847
The Confessional Order prior to 1845
The Deutschkatholiken
The “Tolerance Patent” of March 1847
“Christian State” and “Fourth Confession”
2 Free Religious Worldview: From Christian Rationalism to Naturalistic Monism
Negative Work: Dissent and Secularization
Positive Work: Monist Worldview around 1850
The Confrontation between Idealistic and Naturalistic Monism
3 The Sociology of Dissent: Free Religion and Popular Science
The Social Profile of a Free Religious Congregation
The Free Religious as Town Citizens
Popular Natural Science as Bildung and Halbbildung
Social Change and the Differentiation of Secularism from 1881 to 1914
4 Politics and Free Religion in the 1860s and 1870s
The Secularist Political Imaginary
Left-Liberalism
The Democratic Movement
Free Religion and the Formation of Social Democracy
5 Secularism in the Berlin Kulturkampf, 1869–1880
The “Moabit Klostersturm” of 1869
Secularism and Kulturkampf, 1871–1878
The “Socialist Laws” and Free Religion, 1878–1880
6 From Worldview to Ethics: Secularism and the “Jewish Question,” 1878–1892
AntiSemitism and Confession
PhiloSemitism and Secularism
Jewish Responses to Secularist PhiloSemitism
7 Secularism in Wilhelmine Germany
The Confessional Framework
Worldview
Secularist Sociology
Politics and Secularism
Epilogue: German Secularism after 1914
Appendix: Membership Statistics of the Principal Secularist Organizations
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany The Rise of the Fourth Confession

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid–nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany’s fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform. Todd H. Weir is Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen’s University Belfast. After a formative experience as an exchange student in East Germany in 1988, Weir trained as a historian at Humboldt University in Berlin and Columbia University in New York. He has previously taught at Humboldt University, Seattle University, and the University of Washington. Weir has been a resident scholar at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities of the University of Washington, and the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. He is the editor of Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (2012), and his articles have appeared in Central European History, Church History, German History, and Deutschland Archiv. Weir’s research has been supported by grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany The Rise of the Fourth Confession

TODD H. WEIR Queen’s University Belfast

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107041561 © Todd H. Weir 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Weir, Todd H. Secularism and religion in nineteenth-century Germany : the rise of the fourth confession / Todd H. Weir, Queen’s University Belfast. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-04156-1 (alk. paper) 1. Germany – Religion – 19th century. 2. Secularism – Germany – History – 19th century. I. Title. bl980.g3w44 2013 2110 .6094309034–dc23 2013034919 isbn 978-1-107-04156-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Lithograph (ca. 1847) showing the conflict between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the three leaders of the breakaway German Catholic Church (1845), from left to right, former priests Johannes Czerski and Johannes Ronge, and newspaper editor Robert Blum. The German Catholic movement was the seedbed of Germany’s subsequent secularist organizations (courtesy of bpk).

Contents

List of Figures and Maps

page vii

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Time Line of Organized Secularism in Germany and Berlin Introduction Secularism as a Social Formation Secularism in the Religious and Political History of Nineteenth-Century Germany Confession in German History Toward a Quadriconfessional History of Nineteenth-Century Germany Methodological Considerations

1

2

3

Dissidence and Confession, 1845 to 1847 The Confessional Order prior to 1845 The Deutschkatholiken The “Tolerance Patent” of March 1847 “Christian State” and “Fourth Confession” Free Religious Worldview: From Christian Rationalism to Naturalistic Monism Negative Work: Dissent and Secularization Positive Work: Monist Worldview around 1850 The Confrontation between Idealistic and Naturalistic Monism The Sociology of Dissent: Free Religion and Popular Science The Social Profile of a Free Religious Congregation The Free Religious as Town Citizens Popular Natural Science as Bildung and Halbbildung Social Change and the Differentiation of Secularism from 1881 to 1914

ix xiii xv 1 5 7 14 17 23 29 31 39 54 58 66 70 84 96 105 106 112 117 130 v

Contents

vi

4 Politics and Free Religion in the 1860s and 1870s The Secularist Political Imaginary Left-Liberalism The Democratic Movement Free Religion and the Formation of Social Democracy

136 137 144 153 158

5 Secularism in the Berlin Kulturkampf, 1869–1880 The “Moabit Klostersturm” of 1869 Secularism and Kulturkampf, 1871–1878 The “Socialist Laws” and Free Religion, 1878–1880

173 176 187 200

6 From Worldview to Ethics: Secularism and the “Jewish Question,” 1878–1892 Antisemitism and Confession Philosemitism and Secularism Jewish Responses to Secularist Philosemitism

208 210 218 224

7 Secularism in Wilhelmine Germany The Confessional Framework Worldview Secularist Sociology Politics and Secularism

253 253 255 260 265

Epilogue: German Secularism after 1914

269

Appendix: Membership Statistics of the Principal Secularist Organizations Bibliography

279 283

Index

293

List of Figures and Maps

figures 1 2

3 4 5

6 7

8

9

Nineteenth-century leaders of the Berlin Deutschkatholisch/ Free Religious Congregation. Leading German secularists, 1845 to 1870: Emil Rossmässler, Eduard Baltzer, Ernst Haeckel and Ludwig Büchner. Leipzig Free Religious preacher Ludwig Würkert in front of his congregation, 1864. Johann Jacoby and Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch. “The later the day, the more beautiful the guests.” An anti-Catholic satire of monks fleeing Austria for Berlin Moabit. Kladderadatsch, 1869. Two Berlin antisemites: historian Heinrich von Treitschke and Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker. A ball of the Berlin Free Press Association, featuring members of the Freethought Association Lessing: Richard Schmidt-Cabanis, Guido Weiss, Rudolf Elcho, Robert Schweichel, and Lina Morgenstern. “The honest shepard” (Bismark) says to the new Pope, “if you turn my sheep from black ones to black-white ones, I’ll travel to Canossa.” Kladderadatsch, 1878. Eduard Lasker, liberal parliamentarian and patron of the Freethought Association Lessing, 1873.

page 42

90 95 138

177 211

228

229 230

vii

List of Figures and Maps

viii

maps 1

2

Free Religion on the eve of the Revolution of 1848. Locations of the larger Deutschkatholisch (May 1847) and Free Protestant Congregations (February 1848). Secularist organizations in nineteenth-century Berlin.

41 131

Acknowledgments

“Church Elder, ‘Too Scientific,’ Loses his Job.” Thus read a headline on the front page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on March 19, 1915. The accompanying article described the expulsion of David Hamilton Weir from his local Presbyterian church for unorthodox religious views expressed while giving Bible instruction. My great-grandfather’s “heresy” of rationalist biblical interpretation and his earlier religious formation as a young man growing up in a confessionally divided town in northern Ireland echo two of the chief themes of this book. The paths that bring scholars to their subjects often originate in past family experience, and it may be that my great-grandfather had an indirect impact on me. However, I only learned of his experiences after this book was nearly complete. When I reflect on the people who sparked my curiosity about heterodox religious and political views and helped me develop the means to study them, I have to look to my own experience. First of all, I recall the farranging conversations across the dinner table with my parents, Tom and Kristi Weir, and my brother Brian. Second, I remember the communities of friends with whom I have shared a delight in critical inquiry, among them Sandor Katz, Pardis Barjesteh, Caroline Crumpacker, and Claudia Franz. Finally, I recognize the example set by inspired teachers, including Bob Mazelow, Lindsay Heather, Neil Lazarus, Andreas Huyssen, and Ludolf Herbst. In the course of my research I had the good fortune to meet or correspond with leading scholars of German secularism. Martin Friedrich, Sebastian Prüfer, Horst Groschopp, Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Dieter Fricke, and Michael Rudloff generously shared their insights and some of their materials with me. Friedrich Bork was kind enough to let me use the private archive of his grandfather Adolf Harndt, and Manuel Borruta, Uffa Jensen, and Michael Gross provided published and unpublished copies of their articles, for which I am grateful. Martin Luchterhandt of the Landesarchiv Berlin deserves thanks for his help in obtaining needed documents on short notice. ix

x

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the many friends and colleagues who provided essential feedback on the chapters of this book at various points along the way: Tracie Matysik, Moritz Föllmer, Ben Martin, Sean Connelly, Matt Woods, Sabine Wichert, Helmut Walser Smith, John Toews, and Kristi Weir. Special thanks are due to Hugh McLeod, Lucian Hölscher, and the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press, who offered generous comments on the entire draft manuscript. Late changes were driven by the incisive criticism and sure editorial instincts of Ari Joskowicz. I greatly appreciate my former advisor at Columbia University, Volker Berghahn, for his critical acumen and his unfailing support of this project. I was fortunate to be able write sections of this book during fellowships at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University and at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. I wish to thank Karin Goihl at the Berlin Program and Kathleen Woodward and her staff at the Simpson Center for their generous support. During my sabbatical stay at the University of Washington, the Simpson Center’s Society of Scholars and the History Research Group of the Department of History provided congenial forums for discussing works in progress, and I am grateful to their members for thoughtful feedback. Over the years, a number of scholars have kindly invited me to present my findings to their research colloquia, including Wolfgang Hardtwig at Humboldt University, Gisela Bock at the Free University, Jochen-Christoph Kaiser at the University of Marburg, Helmuth Walser Smith at Vanderbilt University, and Michael Rosenthal at the University of Washington. I have also benefited from collaboration in joint panels with Ari Joskowicz, Manuel Borutta, Tracie Matysik, Igor Polianski, and Andreas Daum. Lucian Hölscher in Bochum has been a great interlocutor over the years and has supported my research through invitations to join conference workshops in Chicago and Munich. My thinking on worldview and monism was further developed by a Wiles Colloquium I organized in 2009. I am thankful for discussions at that time and since with Tracie Matysik, Gauri Viswanathan, Nicolaas Rupke, Fred Gregory, and Igor Polianski. Although I was not aware of my great-grandfather’s penchant for heresy, being aware of his country of origin opened my eyes to a job announcement from Queen’s University Belfast in 2006. I would like to thank my colleagues there for making Queen’s such a wonderful place to work and write, in particular Eric Morier-Genoud, Andrew Holmes, Veronique Altglas, Matt Woods, David Hayton, Sean O’Connell, Fearghal McGarry, James Davis, and Peter Gray. Generous research support was provided by Queen’s University Belfast, Columbia University, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. I am grateful to Lew Bateman and Shaun Vigil of Cambridge University Press in New York for their help in nursing this book along and to David Cox for drawing its maps. Thanks are also owed to the Wallstein Verlag and Cambridge

Acknowledgments

xi

University Press for granting permission to reprint sections of Chapters 3 and 6, which were previously published in The Presence of God in Modern Society: Transcendence and Religious Community in Germany, ed. Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006, 197–229, and Central European History, vol. 46, no. 4 (2013), respectively. Returning to my family, I am thankful to Anna Salzano for sharing this life with me. Our children, Sasha and Marta Salzano-Weir, have been a fantastic distraction and, in that, a source of support for the writing of this book. I dedicate it to all three.

Abbreviations

ADAV BBAW CEH DFB DGEK DMB EHH FRC GStA LAB SDAP SED SPD UFRC USPD VDAV VFF ZpF

Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften Central European History Deutscher Freidenkerbund Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur Deutscher Monistenbund Ernst-Haeckel-Haus Free Religious Congregation Geheimes Staatsarchiv Landesarchiv Berlin Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Union of Free Religious Congregations Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung Zentralverband proletarischer Freidenker

xiii

Time Line of Organized Secularism in Germany and Berlin

1841 1844 1845 1846 1859 1862 1880 1881

1886/87 1892 1900 1905 1906 1908

1909 1911

Gnadau, Province of Saxony: Association of Protestant Friends (Beginning of Lichtfreunde) Schneidemühl, Pommerania: first Christkatholische Congregation (Beginning of Deutschkatholizismus) Berlin: Christkatholische Gemeinde Leipzig: First Council of Deutschkatholiken Königsberg: first Protestant Free Congregation Gotha: Union of Free Religious Congregations (Bund der Freireligiösen Gemeinden Deutschlands) Berlin: Christkatholische Congregation renamed Free Religious Congregation Brussels: International Federation of Freethinkers/Internationaler Freidenkerbund Frankfurt am Main: German Union of Freethinkers (Deutscher Freidenkerbund) Berlin: Freethought Association Lessing Berlin: Election of FRC board members sympathetic to the SPD, secession of minority to form the Humanist Congregation Berlin: German Society for Ethical Culture (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ethische Kultur) Berlin: Giordano Bruno League Berlin: Association of Freethinkers for Cremation (Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung) Jena: German Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund) Eisenach: Central Union of German (later Proletarian) Freethought Associations (Zentralverband deutscher [proletarischer] Freidenkervereine) Weimar Cartel Berlin: Komitee Konfessionslos xv

Introduction

Over the course of the nineteenth century a succession of secularist movements appeared in Germany. Freethought and Ethical Culture had international origins and found adherents among liberal reformers in Germany, whereas Free Religion and monism were homegrown inventions that spread in the global German diaspora and beyond. Were it possible to ask the adherents of these movements whether they would have consented to being investigated as Germany’s “fourth confession” alongside the Protestant and Catholic churches and the Jewish congregations, the answer would almost certainly have been negative. The one thing that all agreed upon was their opposition to “confessionalism.” In the language of the day, Konfessionalismus was used variously to mean the sectarian division of society and nation, the insistence that the state retain a Christian foundation with privileges for the established churches, and a narrow-minded dogmatism in Christian belief and practice. Secularists supported the separation of church and state as a first step toward solving these ills, and by the 1880s most went even further and argued that traditional religion had become a hindrance to science, education, and true spirituality. Treating secularism as a confession is nevertheless productive. Confession was the term through which nineteenth-century Germans negotiated religious identities, rights, and conflicts, and it provides, as will become clear in the following pages, a sophisticated framework for understanding secularism’s place in society. Unlike anticlericalism or secularization – two terms more commonly associated with secularism in the scholarly literature – confession immediately opens up ways of viewing the relationship of secularism to religion that go beyond mere opposition. This is necessary because, from the very beginning, secularism appeared as a dynamic force operating within and between Germany’s religious communities, as much as against them. The first organizational form of secularism was Free Religion, which emerged in 1844 and 1845, when rising tensions between the ecclesiastical authorities and 1

2

Introduction

fractious rationalists led tens of thousands of Germans, particularly in Prussia, to break away from the established churches and form autonomous Deutschkatholisch (German-Catholic) or Protestant “Free” Congregations. The goal of Free Religion was to erase divisions between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews and prepare the way for a spiritual union of free German citizens. In 1859, the largest Protestant and Catholic dissident congregations joined together to form the Union of Free Religious Congregations.1 The secularist thrust of this dissent became quickly apparent when leading Free Religionists abandoned Christian rationalism in favor of pantheism and a belief in the divinity of humanity. Their embrace of an immanent conception of religion reflected the radical conclusions of Left-Hegelian theologians, but it also rested heavily on developments outside of theology in the natural sciences, particularly in efforts by science popularizers to create a holistic and naturalistic worldview. In the course of the 1850s, radicals in the dissident congregations moved from criticisms within Christianity to increasingly anticlerical, atheistic attacks against Christianity. This led to fierce internal debates about the relationship of the movement to religion, in which critics asked whether Free Religion meant “free in religion” or “free from religion.”2 Some advocated the abandonment of religion for scientific materialism and anticlericalism. August Specht, a leading Free Religious publicist, argued that the “the eggshells of their church origin still cling too visibly” to the Free Religious,3 and advocated Freethought as a more appropriate form of secularist organization. In 1881, he joined with Ludwig Büchner, the physician who had achieved international fame with the materialist cannonade Force and Matter of 1856, to form the German Union of Freethinkers (Deutscher Freidenkerbund DFB). Despite Specht’s rhetorical distancing of Freethought from Free Religion, their relationship was not one of opposition. Free Religious preachers formed the largest professional group within the early leadership of Freethought and entire congregations joined as corporate members. With time, the two movements became even more intertwined; they shared a joint president from 1899 onward, and later fused their national umbrella organizations. Also in terms of belief, Freethought had not overcome religion. Although they rejected dualistic religions as illusory, most Freethinkers professed a belief in monistic Weltanschauung, or worldview, which achieved its most influential 1

2

3

To reduce complexity for the reader, I will use “Free Religion” as a collective designation not only for the members of the Union of Free Religious Congregations, but also for their forerunners in the pre-1859 Deutschkatholisch, Christkatholisch, and Free Congregations. Eugen Dühring, Der Werth des Lebens, 2nd ed. (Fues: Leipzig, 1877), 273; Anon., “Weigelt’s Erklärung gegen Dr. Rasch: Von einem abgesetzten schlewigschen Geistlichen,” Norddeutsche Grenzbote, no. 56 (1862), 449. Quoted in Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 83.

Introduction

3

articulation in the work of biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). Haeckel argued that although disproving the existence of a transcendent spirit, mechanistic science had recuperated it in nature, proving that mind and matter were but two modes of a single substance. This form of naturalism, which Haeckel in the 1860s named “monism,” had already been broadly accepted at that time by many Free Religious leaders and remained, essentially unchanged, the dominant worldview of secularism well into the twentieth century. Following a further wave of interest in monism around the turn of the century, Haeckel founded the German Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund DMB) in 1906. Passionate avowals of the monistic unity of energy and matter or body and spirit were often accompanied by savage anticlericalism, as for example in the following formulation by Max Nordau, the cultural critic and Freethinker who later played a leading role in the emergence of secular Zionism: We consider the cosmos a mass of matter [Stoffmasse], which has the attribute of movement. Essentially unitary, it reaches our perception in the form of various energies. [. . .] That is our Weltanschauung. [. . .] It penetrates us with the air that we breathe. It has become impossible to close oneself off to it. The Pope, who damned it in the encyclicals, stood under its influence. The Jesuit adept, whom they attempt to shield from it by raising him in an artificial atmosphere of medieval theology and scholasticism, rather like one tries to sustain a sea animal in an inland aquarium with seawater brought from far away, even the Jesuit adept is filled by it [the Weltanschauung, T.W.].4

Whereas Nordau may have believed that he was merely drawing self-evident conclusions from natural science and empirical observation, outside observers saw in such statements proof of the paradoxical relationship that Freethinkers maintained with religion, and they teased the Freethinkers for their unreflected zealotry. When socialist Freethinkers called for an anticlerical campaign at the 1890 Social Democratic Party congress, party leader Wilhelm Liebknecht took the floor to denounce those who “in fighting religion themselves reveal a certain religiosity [. . .] better yet, a residue of papishness [Pfafferei]. I have no love for the papists, and just as little for the anti-papists [Antipfaffen] as for the real ones.”5 Writing just prior to the First World War, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch took evident pleasure in concluding that the Freethinkers’ tendency toward dogmatic scientism reflected an “ecclesiastically orthodox mode of thought, which desiderates a uniform and absolute truth.”6 Many contemporary observers put the religious qualities of secularism down to a religious or scientific error. However, the combination of anticlericalism with the affirmation of a new worldview is better understood as the movement’s 4

5

6

Max Nordau, Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 14 ed. (Leipzig: B. Elischer Nachf., 1889), 25–27. Quoted in Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage 1863–1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 339. Ernst Troeltsch, “Free-Thought,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings; (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1908–1926), vol. 6, 120–124, quotation 122.

4

Introduction

chief constitutive factor. The Owenite radical and leader of English Freethinkers, George Holyoake (1817–1906), pointed to this combination when he proposed “Secularism” as a new term to replace “Freethought” around 1851. “Secularism,” he wrote, “is a development of freethinking, including its positive as well as its negative side. Secularists consider freethinking as a double protest – a protest against specific speculative error, and in favour of specific moral truth.”7 I prefer the term “secularism” over those terms used by its German advocates for collective self-description, because unlike “Freethought” (Freidenkertum) and “Free Spirituality” (Freigeistigkeit), Holyoake’s definition gives his term more analytical precision. By explicitly connecting “negative” anticlericalism and “positive” belief, it helps expose the conceit in the notion cherished by Freethinkers that their worldview was produced by reason and scientific observation and was thus essentially unrelated to the religion it rejected. According to Holyoake, secularism was a “creed,” and as a creed it conflicted naturally with religion. The difference between Holyoake’s brand of secularism and the materialistic Freethought advocated by the likes of Max Nordau lay less in the nature of the creed than in the acknowledgment of its existence. If the linkage of “positive” worldview and “negative” anticlericalism is the central axiom of secularism, its corollaries can be drawn from what Holyoake called the three principles of secularism: “1. The improvement of this life by material means. 2. That science is the available Providence of man. 3. That it is good to do good. Whether there be other good or not, the good of the present life is good, and it is good to seek that good.”8 These points may be restated in the following working definition of secularism to be used in this study: Nineteenth-century secularism understood itself to possess an immanent and totalizing worldview validated by natural science. Secularism was praxisoriented and justified its social and political interventions with a eudemonistic ethical system. It not only considered the metaphysical aspects of religion intellectually irrelevant and psychologically harmful – secularism was structurally anticlerical. That is, the forms of its religious community and its political practice were to a large extent structured by an antagonistic relationship to the state churches.9 The presence of these three elements – immanent worldview, practical ethics, and anticlericalism – defines secularism as an ideal type. The balance struck 7

8 9

George Holyoake, “The Principles of Secularism,” Reasoner, Jan. 8, 1854, reprinted in: Edward Royle, The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh (London: Macmillan, 1976), 151–152. George Holyoake, English Secularism: A Confession of Belief (Chicago: Open Court, 1896), 35. For a discussion of the role of anticlericalism in secularist community formation, see Todd Weir, “Towards a History and Sociology of Atheist Vergemeinschaftung: The Berlin Free Religious Congregation 1845–1921,” in The Presence of God in Modern Society: Transcendence and Religious Community in Germany, ed. Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 197–229.

Secularism as a Social Formation

5

among these elements can be used to differentiate the organizational types of secularism. When applied as a measure to the organizations that feature in this study, the German Society for Ethical Culture is revealed to have been marginally secularist, for, at the founding meeting in 1892, its leaders sought to exclude strident advocates of monist worldview and anticlericalism from their ranks. By contrast, the official and unofficial creedal statements of the Freethinkers, Monists, and the Free Religionists often touched on all three elements. For example, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation approved a declaration of principles in 1877 that defined religion “not in any relationship to an extraterrestrial, supernatural being (God or the Devil) and life (heaven or hell), but rather in the more and more conscious eternal human striving for a harmonious relationship to the world that surrounds us on the basis of our own eternal inner harmony, i.e. our honesty and conscience.” Following this immanent definition of the divine, the declaration struck out at “priests and theologians with their myths and mysteries” before calling for ethical education based on the realization that the individual can only find personal well-being in communal wellbeing.10

secularism as a social formation This book is not intended as an intellectual history of German secularism. If it were, the 1840s would appear as a somewhat arbitrary starting point in medias res. Recent investigations have shown that many of the key tenets of modern secularism had already found expression at the margins of the early Enlightenment. There too, the location of secularism within, outside, and between the religions was crucial. Church historian Winfried Schröder found that whereas pantheist arguments emerged within theological criticism, rougher atheist tracts circulated outside the walls of academic theology. Martin Mulsow pointed out the way in which Christian critics profited from the disputes between Jewish and Christian theologians by taking the perspectives opened up by Jewish apologists in order to deny aspects of revelation.11 Nineteenth-century secularists were well aware of their early modern antecedents and regularly sought to demonstrate that their worldview had in fact already been clearly articulated by the heretical philosophers Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza. What was novel in 1845 was that, for the first time, secularist ideas achieved wide social articulation in popular organizations. In that year, tens of thousands turned out to hear Catholic priest Johannes Ronge as he toured German cities 10

11

Grundsätze und Satzungen der Freireligiösen Gemeinde Groß-Berlin e.V.: Kulturgemeinschaft der Freidenker (Berlin: Amelung, [1924]). Winfried Schöder, Ursprünge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998); Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland 1680–1720 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002).

6

Introduction

calling for the formation of democratic congregations, thousands of Protestants attended a meeting of the rationalist “Lichtfreunde” in the town of Köthen in Prussian Saxony, and in Berlin a Society for the Reform of Judaism was founded with the aim of ending the “sacrifice of our holy freedom to the despotism of the dead letter” of “old rabbinical Judaism.” These movements were not entirely secularist. They contained an admixture of religious rationalism, humanism, and pantheism. However, it was here that the constitutive “double protest” of anticlericalism and (increasingly) immanent worldview became the basis for community formation for many thousands of ordinary Germans, and it was here that a clearly secularist movement would emerge by the 1860s. Secularist thought, which had long been available to intellectuals within the republic of letters, now became a social fact that thrust new questions about religion into public debates over constitutional law, civic rights, and national identity. The public nature of secularist dissent acted as a lightning rod for the nascent partisan formations of the left. Vormärz liberals welcomed the opportunity to take a stand against opponents in church and state, while radical republicans were attracted to the communitarian ethos of the congregations. Generations of Social Democratic leaders received secularist education, and in 1908 socialists formed an independent “proletarian” Freethought alliance. Secularist dissent was also a laboratory for cultural and social innovation. Utopian thought found practical expression in new forms of devotional practices and democratic structures. Free Religious associational life served as a crystal around which groups formed that were dedicated to women’s emancipation, workers’ education, and pacifism. Sustained by a shared commitment to a secular ethics, naturalistic worldview, and opposition to clerical authorities, patterns of cooperation were replicated over generations. Key figures in the early women’s movement, such as Louise Otto and Malwida von Meysenbug, cooperated in the 1840s in the women’s support associations of the Deutschkatholiken, while the founders of Berlin’s first socialist women’s organizations, such as Emma Ihrer, Ottilie Baader, and Agnes Wabnitz, were first active in the Free Religious Congregation in the 1870s and 1880s.12 Wilhelmine sexual reformers such as Helene Stoecker and Greta Meisel-Hess were, by contrast, speakers for the German Monist League. Similar patterns were manifested by the German peace movement. Julius Rupp, the preacher of the Königsberg Free Congregation, founded Germany’s first pacifist associations in 1850, while the Bund Neues Vaterland, the most important “bourgeois” organization to emerge in opposition to the First World War, was formed out of the Berlin chapter of the Monist League.13

12

13

Catherine M. Prelinger, “Religious Dissent, Women’s Rights, and the Hamburger Hochschule für das weibliche Geschlecht in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Church History, vol. 45, no. 1 (1976): 42–55; Emma Ihrer, Die Organisationen der Arbeiterinnen Deutschlands, ihre Entstehung und Entwickelung (Berlin: author’s edition, 1893). Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 40, 45, 126,

Secularism in the Religious and Political History

7

The formative influence of organized secularism also extended to its enemies. The encounter with organized secularism helped shape how conservative Christians responded to the successive challenges of Jewish emancipation, revolution, liberalism, and socialism, as well as science and secularization. The Prussian confessional state responded to the rise of rationalist dissent by altering the laws governing religion in 1847, the same year in which Friedrich Julius Stahl, an influential legal scholar in the coterie of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, redefined the notion of the “Christian State” upon an explicitly antisecularist foundation. Guided by the conviction that the key to understanding modern secularism lies in its social articulation, this book focuses on the four main associational types of secularism: Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. These associations provide the anchor for studying the interactions of secularism with friendly and hostile institutions, religious competitors, and state structures. By moving from the texts produced within the four associations to these many contexts, the book seeks to come to a better understanding of each. Its aims are thus at once modest (to provide a synthetic history of a number of somewhat marginal social movements) – and ambitious (to demonstrate how secularism shaped broader developments in German history). To prepare the latter case, this introductory chapter now turns a critical eye on the treatment of secularism in contemporary historical writing.

secularism in the religious and political history of nineteenth-century germany Reflecting on recent trends in international scholarship, historian Jürgen Osterhammel has proposed placing religion “at the center of a global history of the nineteenth century.”14 This certainly characterizes developments in the study of nineteenth-century Germany, where, over the past three decades, scholars have been integrating the once ghettoized field of religious history into the broader sweep of German culture and politics. Noticeably absent from these studies, however, has been a substantive engagement with the history of organized secularism. This absence appears in the comparative context. There have been numerous studies of the role of secularism in the formation of the political cultures of nineteenth-century Spain, France, Italy, and Britain. Anticlericalism and positivism were central elements in the culture of Spanish republicanism, and they shaped the national project of many of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s followers during the Italian Risorgimento. After French radicals secured power in 1877, laïcité became a cornerstone of the Third Republic and contributed to the separation

14

129, 131; Annette Kuhn, Theorie und Praxis historischer Friedensforschung (Stuttgart and Munich: Klett and Kösel, 1971). Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2009), 1239.

8

Introduction

law of 1905. British historians have paid significant attention to Freethought because of its important role in left-wing politics in the half-century between the demise of the Chartist movement and the rise of the Labour Party.15 In Germany, too, secularism was allied to the radical republicanism that went by the name Demokratie. A central actor in the 1848 revolution, the Democratic movement was subsequently eviscerated by the struggle between moderate liberalism and the early rise of radical socialism in Germany. This weakness of its chief political ally is thus one reason that historians of Germany have paid little attention to secularism. A second reason can be found in the fragmentary way that the existing studies of German secularism have framed the subject. The best have focused on the brief period between the emergence of Free Religion in the rationalist Christian sects of 1845 and its precipitous decline in the early 1850s in the wake of the failed Revolution of 1848. Given the time span under consideration, these studies have, with few exceptions, adapted an implicit rise-and-fall narrative to the short tale they have told. The older analyses by Hans Rosenberg and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf maintained that as dissidents translated religious impulses into the language of political revolution, they found less need for religion, thereby falling victim to the very forces of secularization they promoted.16 More recent studies have instead drawn attention to the role of fierce governmental repression in the movement’s contraction. However, by failing to connect the dissent of the Vormärz to the secularism that later flourished in Imperial 15

16

Julio de la Cueva and Feliciano Montero, eds., La secularización conflictiva: España (1898–1931) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007); Guido Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’Unita (RomeBari: Laterza, 1996); Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 1848–1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997); Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). Hans Rosenberg, “Theologischer Rationalismus und vormärzlicher Vulgärliberalismus,” in idem., Politische Denkströmungen im deutschen Vormärz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972 [1930]), 18–50; Wolfgang Leesch, Die Geschichte des Deutschkatholizismus in Schlesien (1844–1852) unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner politischen Haltung (Breslau: Priebatsch, 1938); Günter Kolbe, “Demokratische Opposition in religiösem Gewande und antikirchliche Bewegung im Königreich Sachsen. Zur Geschichte der deutschkatholiken und freien Gemeinden sowie freireligiösen Vereinigungen von den 40er Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts bis um 1900 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur kleinbürgerlich-demokratischen und Arbeiterbewegung” (Leipzig: PhD. Diss., 1964); Jörn Brederlow, “Lichtfreunde” und “Freie Gemeinden”: Religiöser Protest und Freiheitsbewegung im Vormärz und in der Revolution von 1848–49 (Munich, Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1976); Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Politisierung des religiösen Bewußtseins. Die bürgerlichen Religionsparteien im deutschen Vormärz: Das Beispiel des Deutschkatholizismus (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog 1978); Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Secularism in the Religious and Political History

9

Germany, they too have depicted Free Religion as a movement of only fleeting historical importance.17 There have been numerous studies of Wilhelminian reform movements that touch on secularist positions,18 and Horst Groschopp and Frank Simon-Ritz have gone far to demonstrate that the myriad of secularist organizations in fact formed a broad movement held together by a coherent set of common premises and by practical cooperation.19 However, these intellectual and organizational histories have focused more on the connections within the secularist scene than on the place of secularism in the wider context of German social and political history.20 If the lack of a long-term synthetic history of German secularism provides a second reason secularism has appeared only at the margins of the new histories of religion in modern Germany, we must also consider a third, namely blind spots that inhere in the interpretative models that have emerged following the crisis of modernization theory and its corollary, the secularization thesis. In German history, this crisis lay at the center of the so-called Sonderweg debate, sparked off in the early 1980s when Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn challenged the notion held by many social historians that the failure of nineteenthcentury liberals to dominate the workers’ movement and the monarchical state led to incomplete political modernization in Germany. Eley and Blackbourn argued by contrast that German liberals compensated their political weakness with dominance in civil society, making the German case more similar to liberal states such as France and Britain than previously believed.21 The Sonderweg debate fed directly into reevaluations of the role of religion in the “Kulturkampf” or “culture war” that was fought between the Prussian state and its political allies, and the Catholic Church after national unification in 1871. To social historians who assumed that secularization was a necessary and value-neutral macrohistorical process, the Kulturkampf had appeared as an inevitable conflict brought on by recidivist traditional institutions, who opposed the modern separation of politics and religion. Indeed, the doyen of the German 17

18

19

20

21

Andreas Holzem, Kirchenreform und Sektenstiftung. Deutschkatholiken, Reformkatholiken und Ultramontane am Oberrhein (1844–1856) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994). Sylvia Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens: Frauen im Deutschkatholizismus und in den freien Gemeinden 1841–1852 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990). Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke, eds., Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen: 1880– 1933 (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1998); Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Antipolitics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1997); Frank Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1997). An exception: Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 87.

Introduction

10

social-historical school, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, claimed that the “true significance” of the Kulturkampf was “a greater secularization of German society.”22 Today, such a conclusion appears dated. The crisis of the secularization paradigm has opened the ears of historians to the voices of nineteenth-century participants in religious struggles. Although the resultant studies resist easy typology, we can nonetheless elucidate two new interpretive models for understanding religious conflict. Whereas some historians have characterized the period following the 1830s as an “Age of Culture Wars,” others have dubbed it as an “Age of Confessionalism.”23 Secularism and Liberal Hegemony In the influential volume Culture Wars, Wolfram Kaiser proposed taking the conflicts over religion in the nineteenth century quite literally as manifestations of a struggle between two cultures, secular liberalism and Christian conservatism, particularly in the form of ultramontane Catholicism.24 Although some historians of Germany, such as David Blackbourn and Margaret Anderson, retained both cultures in their horizons of inquiry,25 many have focused on the liberal protagonists and interpreted the Kulturkampf as the self-interested strategy of liberal elites to exert cultural hegemony over the entire nation. The best studies of the intellectuals, institutions, and discourses of nineteenth-century German liberalism, such Georg Bollenbeck’s investigation of Kultur and Bildung or Gangolf Hübinger’s work on cultural Protestantism, have carefully chosen to speak of the “hegemonic claims” of liberals, indicating thereby that claims did not necessarily translate into actual hegemony.26 22

23

24

25

26

Hans Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1985), 116–117. See discussions in: Benjamin Ziemann, “Säkularisierung, Konfessionalisierung, Organisationsbildung: Dimensionen der Sozialgeschichte der Religion im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 47 (2007), 485–508; and Olaf Blaschke, “Germany in the Age of Culture Wars,” in Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, ed. Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), 125–140. Wolfram Kaiser, “Clericalism: That’s Our Enemy!,” in Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47–76, esp. 47–50. Margaret L. Anderson, “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” CEH 19 (1986): 82–115; David Blackbourn, Volksfrömmigkeit und Fortschrittsglaube im Kulturkampf (Wiesbaden, 1988); idem, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1996); Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994); Konrad Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones, “German Liberalism Reconsidered: Inevitable Decline, Bourgeois Hegemony or Partial Achievement?,” in In Search of a Liberal Germany: Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present, ed. Konrad Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones (New York: Berg, 1990), 1–23.

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11

The model of cultural hegemony has proven fruitful for explaining the genesis and function of anticatholic stereotyping.27 In his impressive comparative investigation of anticatholicism in Germany and Italy, historian Manuel Borutta has employed Edward Said’s concept of orientalism to argue that Catholicism functioned as a foil for European liberals, making it liberalism’s Other. Yet, a methodological pitfall of such approaches becomes apparent when applied to social or political history. The scholar can find it difficult to escape the binary categories employed by his or her would-be hegemon and, as a result, may reduce the social field to colonizer and colonized, when, in fact, more actors may have been in play. Thus, even a subtle study that remains sensitive to the complexity of anticatholic movements, such as Borutta’s, ultimately lets radical secularists drift along in the wake of the “main actors,” who are taken to be liberal elites.28

Conflicting Definitions of Secularism The rising explanatory power of postcolonial theory in European history writing is important to our study for another reason: it is from this quarter that the term “secularism” has emerged as a central category of political and historical analysis. Whereas many sociologists of religion have now consigned secularization theory to the dustbin of history,29 postcolonial theorists have sought to historicize it. Instead of a neutral theory, they have found in secularization an interested ideology and a technique of statecraft developed and deployed in the nineteenth century by those who would rule the religious communities of England, Ireland, India, etc. By removing the “ization” and adding “ism,” the new critical histories of “secularism” have signaled their effort to demystify or, better yet, secularize the theory of secularization by revealing that what was once held for science was, in fact, ideology.30 Secularism, accordingly, encompasses the discourses, policies, and constitutional arrangements whereby modern states and liberal elites have sought to regulate religion. It is, in other words, quite different from the definition of secularism I have proposed for this study. The manner in which

27 28

29

30

Roisin Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston: Humanities Press [Brill], 2003). Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), 1–17. On the demystification of secularization, see Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Other influential works on political secularism include Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Anuradha Needham and Rajeswari Rajan, eds., The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

12

Introduction

postcolonial theorists treat this discrepancy is instructive and deserves closer attention. In one of the key texts of the new literature, Formations of the Secular, anthropologist Talal Asad inserts Holyoake’s neologism into a genealogy of secularism as an “embedded concept.”31 Asad correctly ties the emergence of the term in 1851 to Holyoake’s attempt to make Freethought more palatable to the wider liberal movement, and Asad may also be right when he correlates Freethought with “projects of total reconstruction by means of legislation.” However, when he concludes that secularism is “a political and governmental doctrine that has its origin in nineteenth-century liberal society,” he has deftly liberated the term from its radical origin and turned it precisely against what Holyoake meant by secularism.32 This is important for our story because the way Asad incorporates and thereby dispenses with the English secularist movement parallels the way in which German historians have subsumed radical secularists under the umbrella of a presumably hegemonic liberal culture. One of the tasks of this book is to demonstrate that the history of organized secularism resists such conflation with liberalism, and, in so doing, problematizes what are now dominant models of explaining secular–religious conflict. Holyoake himself had directly resisted the usurpation of his term already in the late nineteenth century. The value of the term “Secularism” to Holyoake lay not only in its distance from “Freethinking,” but also its distance from “secular,” a term had been brought into play in the late 1840s by British left liberals such as Richard Cobden, who were calling for religious instruction to be removed from the schools.33 Although keen to align his movement with the secular aims of such liberals, Holyoake later reiterated that the two were not identical: Things secular are as separate from the Church as land from the ocean. And what nobody seems to discern is that things secular are in themselves quite different from Secularism. The secular is a mode of instruction; Secularism is a code of conduct. [. . .] Secularist teaching would [conflict with theology], but secular instruction would not.34

In other words, Holyoake demanded from the state a secular educational system that was neutral in matters of religion, while he himself taught secularism, a creed that competed with religion. His distinction between “mode” and “code” is a useful one for distinguishing between Asad’s definition of political secularism (i.e., the principle of secular governance) and what I am calling organized secularism. The “mode” of secular governance is not of concern to this study,

31

32 33 34

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 17. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 16, 23–24. Royle, Victorian Infidels, 147. Holyoake, English Secularism, 2.

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13

except as it pertains to the specific cultural “code” that was organized secularism.35 Our history of German secularism must account for two aspects of Holyoake’s inability to control the definition of the term he created. On the one hand, he was frustrated because organized secularism was, in fact, being subordinated to larger macrohistorical developments, such as liberal dominance and political secularization. On the other hand, however, his frustration indicates that secularism continued to resist this subordination. The disparity between Asad’s account and Holyoake’s own definition of secularism points to a problem that inheres in the use of binary schemes for interpreting modern religious history. As Gauri Viswanathan has noted, binary models foreclose the investigation of heterogeneous or heterodox positions that fall outside of either category.36 This applies not only to the binary assumptions that inhere in the theory of secularization, but also to the newer theories of political secularism and liberal hegemony that have replaced it. Because organized secularism was a form of heterodoxy that resisted secularization, even as it spoke in its name, the historian of secularism must likewise resist, even as he or she makes use of theories of cultural hegemony and political secularism. We can, in other words, accept Asad’s placement of organized secularism in the updraft of a rising liberal bourgeoisie and expanding bureaucratic state, while at the same time pointing out where radical secularists clashed with the liberal supporters of state secularization. Attention to this clash may contribute to a fuller understanding of the origins of the theory of secularization, as developed by sociologists Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies in Wilhelmine Germany. Whereas many scholars now recognize the importance of anticatholicism and the Kulturkampf in the genesis of Weber’s theory,37 little consideration has been given to the thesis posed a half century ago by the political philosopher Hermann Lübbe that the theory of secularization developed, in part, out of liberal efforts to subdue the forces of organized secularism. In his conceptual history of secularization, Lübbe argued that by plucking the term out of the arsenal of political secularists and transforming it into a social scientific term to describe an impersonal, macrohistorical process, Weber and

35

36

37

In another passage, Holyoake introduces the useful term “secularity” as the aim of the “mode” of secular education. In the field of religion “irreconcilable diversity exists,” whereas “[i]n secularity there is no disunity.” Only secularity, which took no stance on the validity of the competing moral codes, could form the basis of liberal governance. Holyoake, English Secularism, 67. Gauri Viswanathan, “Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 123, no. 2 (2008): 466–476. According to Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, secularization theory remains perhaps “the most enduring legacy of the European culture wars” of the nineteenth century. “Introduction,” Culture Wars, 7. Similar arguments by Borutta, Antikatholizismus, 414–415; and Oded Heilbronner, “From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography,” Journal of Modern History vol. 72, no. 2 (2000): 453–495.

Introduction

14

Tönnies effectively “neutralized” secularism.38 As we shall see later in this study, Tönnies was a key figure in the Ethical Culture movement, and he proposed that a science of ethics based on the comparative religious study might overcome not only dogmatic Christianity, but the dogmatism of Freethought and naturalistic monism as well. A second neutralization of secularism took place in Protestant theology a half century later. Whereas church apologists began to use the term “Säkularismus” in the late Weimar Republic to characterize the threat of radical Freethought and communism, they did not differentiate it from secularization. Only after the war could theologian Friedrich Gogarten separate secularization, as a healthy development compatible with and indeed produced by modern Protestantism, from secularism, which was rejected as an apotheosis of the secular.39 Writing organized secularism into the history of religious conflict in nineteenth-century Germany requires an open model of analysis that can account for both liberal predominance in the cultural realm and for the action of other heterodox contenders. For, as the comparative historian of religion Hugh McLeod has argued, “[r]ather than seeing secularisation as an impersonal ‘process’ [. . .] it would be better to see this as a ‘contest’, in which adherents of rival world-views battled it out.”40 In Germany, this contest was more complicated than the “culture wars” of monoconfessional countries such as France and Italy. In Germany, Protestant liberals and organized secularists may have been united against Catholics, but they were also pitted against one another in the contest over secularization. A model for such multidimensional struggle can be established by linking secularism to the concept of confession. However, before developing this model, we must first critically engage with those historians who have described the nineteenth century as an “Age of Confessionalism.”

confession in german history In contrast to “secularism,” “confession” has emerged as a key term in historical studies of nineteenth-century Germany. Since the 1970s there have been a number of important investigations into the role played by new Catholic and 38

39

40

Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung. Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs, 2nd ed. (Munich: Karl Alber, 1975). Gogarten called secularization “the necessary and legitimate consequence of Christian faith” and secularism a “perversion (Entartung) of secularization” that occurs when the secular impulse of “questioning non-knowledge” oversteps its bounds and attempts to explain or deny the totality that is the preserve of faith. Friedrich Gogarten, Verhängnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit: Die Säkularisierung als theologisches Problem (Munich, Hamburg: Seibenstern, 1958), 143–144. Kurt Nowak, “Zur protestantischen Säkularismus-Debatte um 1930,” in Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft 69 (1980): 37–51. Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 28.

Confession in German History

15

Protestant lay organizations in the revival of popular piety.41 Some of the largest, such as the Catholic Volksverein (founded 1890) and the Protestant League (founded 1886), were in part defensive formations born of the increasing denominational antagonism produced by the Kulturkampf.42 These antagonisms were also central to the formation of Germany’s emerging party system. Whereas early German liberalism understood itself to be essentially Protestant, the Center Party was refounded in 1871 out the perceived need to defend Catholic interests against liberalism and the new and predominantly Protestant German state.43 Such was the generative force of the Catholic–Protestant rivalry in structuring German civil society and politics that historian Olaf Blaschke proposed calling the period between 1830 and 1970 a “second confessional age.”44 This thesis has been vigorously debated, with critics largely rejecting the parallels that Blaschke drew to the confessionalization of post-Reformation Germany. An “invisible wall” may have still separated nineteenth-century Catholics and Protestants in many aspects of social life, but confessional divisions did not recreate the high levels of violence seen in early modern Germany.45 Nonetheless, the heat generated by the debate points to the relevance that historians now grant to denominational rivalry in nineteenth-century social history.

41

42

43

44

45

Wolfgang Schieder, “Kirche und Revolution: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte vol. 14 (1974): 419–454; Blackbourn, Marpingen; Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict. Culture, Ideology, Politics 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus. On the Protestant Union, see Armin Müller-Dreier, Konfession in Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur des Kaiserreichs: Der Evangelische Bund 1886–1914 (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1998). For a historiographical discussions of confession, see Helmut Walser Smith and Christopher Clark, “The Fate of Nathan,” in Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 3–29. See also Gangolf Hübinger, “Confessionalism,” in Imperial Germany: A Historical Companion, ed. Roger Chickering (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 156–184. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Olaf Blaschke, “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft vol. 26 (2000): 38–75; Olaf Blaschke, “Abschied von der Säkularisierungslegende. Daten zur Karrierekurve der Religion (1800–1970) im zweiten konfessionellen Zeitalter: eine Parabel,” in zeitenblicke vol. 5, no. 1 (2006). URL: http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2006/1/Blaschke/ index_html, URN: urn:nbn:de:0009-9-2691. See Helmut Walser Smith’s trenchant commentary in his review of Blaschke’s edited volume Konfessionen im Konflikt: Das zweite konfessionelle Zeitalter zwischen 1800 und 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002), in German Historical Institute London Bulletin, vol. 25, no. 1 (2003): 101–106. See also Anthony Steinhoff, “Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter? Nachdenken über die Religion im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft vol. 30, no. 4 (2004): 549–570.

16

Introduction

Yet Konfession meant more than denominational rivalry. The term itself was central to the state administration of religion in nineteenth-century Germany. Originally an ecclesiastical term for the Lutheran adherents of the confessio augustana, only after 1800 did Konfession come to be widely applied as an abstract term to designate Germany’s three “privileged religious societies,” that is, the Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic churches. According to historian Lucian Hölscher, this semantic shift corresponded to changes in the relationship between the state and the churches.46 The Prussian Civil Code (Allgemeines Landrecht) of 1794 had subordinated the historic rights of the churches to more uniform legal categories, and the growing acceptance of natural rights law further developed the notion that individual freedom of conscience should have a corollary in the equality of corporate rights of religious communities.47 The extension of Napoleonic hegemony over Europe further shook church– state relations. In the so-called secularization of 1803, the member states of the Holy Roman Empire dissolved the church principalities and seized many monasteries and other properties from the Catholic Church. In exchange, the states were obliged to provide for the operational needs of the clergy. This placed the Catholic Church, now shorn of many of its non-spiritual fields of action and more closely bound to the state, in a position like that of the Protestant state churches.48 Konfession gained wider use in constitutional law around 1815 as a term that “bracketed out the question of religious truth and concentrated itself exclusively on the legality of religious convictions.”49 This neutral quality was of great advantage to states such as Prussia and Bavaria that had become increasingly multi-confessional following the incorporation of new territories awarded at the Treaty of Vienna. The function of Konfession as a juridical concept corresponded to aspects of secular statecraft outlined by Asad. It enhanced state neutrality and eased intervention, while also contributing to a modern definition of citizenship tethered to natural rights law. Hölscher concludes that confession became an “ordering model” for managing religious conflict. However, it is important to emphasize that the post-Napoleonic states employed confession not only to adjudicate between religious communities, but also to reinforce their unequal rights inherited from the post-Reformation era.50 Furthermore, in Prussia, as in England, the monarch was the highest official of the established Protestant Church(es). As Awakened piety spread through the highest circles of European society in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, many Germans looked to 46

47

48 49 50

Lucian Hölscher, “Konfessionspolitik in Deutschland zwischen Glaubensstreit und Koexistenz,” in Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche: Sprachliche Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 11–53, esp. 22–25. Hans Erich Bödeker, “Kirche als Religionsgesellschaft im Diskurs der deutschen protestantischen Aufklärung: Eine Strukturskizze,” in Hölscher, Baupläne, 53–89, 81, 88–89. Nowak, Geschichte des Christentums, 44–48. Hölscher, “Konfessionspolitik,” 25. Hölscher, “Konfessionspolitik,” 25–29.

Toward a Quadriconfessional History of Nineteenth-Century Germany

17

their monarchs as divine agents with a providential role to play in support of one or more of the Christian confessions. Because of the state’s dual role as impartial judge, on the one hand, and protector of true religion, on the other hand, conflicts about confession inevitably led to conflicts with and about the state. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the bureaucratic innovations associated with the rise of the juridical term Konfession often engendered resistance from the Catholic Church and from Protestant conservatives, who perceived in them a step toward the secularization of the state. From the 1840s onward, resistance came from liberals, dissidents, and Jews, who felt, on the contrary, that the confessional state was preventing civic secularization. As an analytical concept, confession has helped move religion toward the center of modern German history writing because it frames religion less as a matter of belief and more as a marker of community identity, civic status, and access to institutions. Confession has brought into relief two fundamental aspects of nineteenth-century politics: first, the manner in which the state administered society via religious identity and, second, the manner in which religious identity structured partisan politics. These aspects were joined in the contestation over confessional rights. For, as the nineteenth-century monarchical state turned confessionality into a key attribute in the bureaucratic management of the totality of its subjects, the elimination of confessional privilege and overcoming confessional difference became central to the liberal construction of the free citizen and the free nation. Both of these developments drew attention to the status of those at the margins of the confessional system. At the founding of the German empire in 1871, over 98 percent of all Germans were members of the recognized Christian confessions. The remaining 2 percent of the population outside the confessions were Jews or “dissidents” belonging principally to the Free Religious Congregations or Protestant sects, all of whom were subject to discrimination.51

toward a quadriconfessional history of nineteenth-century germany The importance of marginal religious communities to the formation of modern European states and empires has been show in comparative studies of religious emancipation.52 In the German context, historian Dagmar Herzog demonstrated how Vormärz liberals effectively championed the rights of Jews and Deutschkatholiken in order to expose the contradiction inherent in the state’s 51 52

Hübinger, “Confessionalism,” 168, fn 58. The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants: Minorities and the Nation State in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Rainer Liedtke and Stephan Wendehorst (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1999); Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

18

Introduction

dual confessional role as neutral arbiter and defender of the established churches. Kurt Nowak argued that the dynamics of confession in nineteenthcentury German church history can only be understood if scholars account for interactions with Jews. He thus called for a “triconfessional” history, not of the three Christian confessions that existed before the Prussian state unified the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in 1821, but rather of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism.53 Other historians have echoed Nowak’s call,54 but to date no one has followed Herzog’s lead and developed a “quadriconfessional” model that includes secularism. This is surprising given that the 1966 essay that inspired much of the recent work on confession, M. Rainer Lepsius’s “Party System and Social Structure,” identified four “socio-moral milieus” as the pillars of late nineteenthcentury German society.55 The Catholic milieu sustained the Center Party, while the conservative and liberal milieus were predominantly Protestant. The working and lower-middle-class milieu that supported the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratishche Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) was strongly shaped by popular scientific materialism and anticlericalism, yet socialism and radical secularism have been largely left out of the recent historical writing on confessionalism. This omission may reflect the fact that the SPD formally distanced itself from Free Religion and Freethought and did not produce its own secularist “confessional” organizations analogous to the Protestant League or the Catholic Volksverein.56 Furthermore, unaware of organized secularism’s long-term coherence, historians have viewed it instead as a quintessential expression of what Thomas Nipperdey called the “peripatetic religiosity” of the fin de siècle German middle classes.57 Most important, however, the purportedly nonreligious nature of secularism has led to its prima facie exclusion from consideration as a confessional actor, such as occurred in Thomas Welskopp’s otherwise excellent study of early Social Democracy. His definition of religion as “the faith in a divinely created paradise in a spiritual beyond” blinded his analysis to Free Religion and led to the foregone conclusion that there was no “real mixture of politics and religion” in early German socialism.58 It is noteworthy that in an essay on confession in nineteenth-century

53 54

55

56 57 58

Herzog, Intimacy; Nowak, Geschichte des Christentums, 61. Smith and Clark, “The Fate of Nathan,” 7; Borutta, Antikatholizismus, 397; Alexander Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). M. Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zur Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in idem., Demokratie in Deutschland: Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), 25–50. Prüfer, Sozialismus. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918 (Munich: Beck, 1990), vol. 1, 121. Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn: Dietz, 2000), 149, 581, 582, 584. Partial exceptions:

Toward a Quadriconfessional History of Nineteenth-Century Germany

19

Germany, Gangolf Hübinger, a historian aware of the secularist affinities of the socialist movement, nevertheless subsumed the Monists, Free Religious, and Freethinkers into the liberal milieu, as “rudimentary,” “transient,” and “diverse” appearances on the radical fringe of cultural Protestantism.59 Because historians have viewed organized secularism as deeply fragmented and the socialist movement as seemingly beyond religion, both secularism and socialism have largely slipped under the radar of recent studies of confessional conflict. International comparison highlights the difficulty that secularism poses for the German literature on confession. In a recent volume on multi-confessional societies in Europe, one contributor proposed loaning the status of confession to French laïcité for comparative purposes. In his review of this volume, Blaschke objected to this loose appropriation of the term. Either one uses confession as it was understood by contemporaries (i.e., to refer solely to the state churches and the milieus they organized), or one applies it “in inverted commas” to entities that competed with the churches and shared certain analogous structures to them, but, Blaschke insisted, “one should decide.”60 I would argue, in contrast, that rather than deciding between these two definitions of confession, we must adopt both at the same time if we are to properly model the relationship of secularism to religious conflict in nineteenthcentury Germany. For, while the concept of confession regulated relations between Catholics and Protestants, it also regulated the relations between these religious communities and those not conferred full confessional rights. Secularism cannot simply be subsumed under Protestantism, because unlike secular Protestants, organized secularists were excluded from many confessional rights, and precisely this exclusion gave them their confessional position and contributed to their social formation. Like Jews, secularist dissidents existed outside of the confessional fold but inside the field of juridical, social, and political relations structured by the category of confession. In order to model secularism’s paradoxical position at once inside and outside of confession, I will employ a modified version of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the religious field. According to Bourdieu, modern society is structured not just by the functional differentiation of social domains – politics, religion, academe, etc. – but by the uneven competition between individuals and groups over the “goods” specific to each domain. The religious field is constituted by the competition over the dispensation and receipt of religious goods in the form of

59 60

Heiner Grote, Sozialdemokratie und Religion: Eine Dokumentation für die Jahre 1863 bis 1875 (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr (Paul Seibeck), 1968); Vernon Lidtke, “August Bebel and German Social Democracy’s Relation to the Christian Churches,” Journal of the History of Ideas, no. 27 (1966): 245–264, Prüfer, Sozialismus. Hübinger, “Confessionalism,” 168. Olaf Blaschke, Review of: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt / Dieter Langewiesche (Hg.): Nation und Religion in Europa. Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/ Main: Campus 2004, sehepunkte vol. 4 (2004), no. 12 [15.12.2004], URL: http://www.sehepunkte.historicum.net/2004/12/6360.html.

20

Introduction

salvation, patronage, sinecures, etc. Although the ecclesiastical hierarchy appropriates to itself legitimate control of these goods and hence dominates the religious field, its competition with dissenting forces, such as sects, shapes the form and content of both orthodoxy and heterodoxy.61 Bourdieu elaborated this model with examples drawn from societies, such as medieval France, where there was effectively one ecclesiastical hierarchy. But, in mid–nineteenth-century Germany, the religious field was divided into the spheres of influence of at least three religious societies: the Protestant and Catholic state churches and the Jewish congregations. Thus to apply Bourdieu’s model to nineteenth-century Germany, one has to account for competition not only within but also between religions. I propose the term “confessional field” to describe principally the latter aspect of religious competition. We can identify those goods over which the parties struggled as specifically confessional goods: that is, those goods the state placed under the remit of confession in the nineteenth century. These included the right to enter state service, the right to public worship, the right to clerical oversight of education, the right to determine the religious identity of the offspring of mixed marriages, etc. Indeed it was over these rights rather than over questions of doctrinal truth that the major confessional battles of the nineteenth century were fought. A confessional field defined not by the formal definition of Konfession, but rather by competition over confessional goods, can take into account the statesanctioned monopoly enjoyed by the established orthodox confessions, while also accounting for the significant presence of structurally heterodox movements that sought access to these goods. If their push for inclusion was strong enough to exert a significant force in shaping the confessional field, then these groups might be considered heterodox “confessions.” This is the ironic understanding of confession that I will apply to German secularists. There were, of course, other heterodox groups besides secularists and Jews in nineteenth-century Germany who challenged the state churches. These included the schismatic “Old Lutherans,” who rejected the forced merger of the two Protestant denominations in Prussia in 1821, and the “Old Catholics,” who left the Catholic Church in protest over the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870. However, these movements could be and ultimately were accommodated by the confessional system without significant change to it. They will not concern us in this book. Jews and organized secularists, by contrast, did challenge the essential structures of the confessional system. In referring to them as the third and the fourth “confessions,” respectively, I want to suggest that, although denied the constitutional status of confession, they were crucial actors who contributed significantly to the reshaping of the confessional field in the nineteenth century. 61

Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” Comparative Social Research vol. 13 (1991): 1–44; Pierre Bourdieu, “Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash (London, Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 119–136.

Toward a Quadriconfessional History of Nineteenth-Century Germany

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Examining secularism from its place in the confessional field allows us to overcome two obstacles that have hindered the analysis of secularism within the history of religion. First, it neatly skirts the issue of whether pantheism and atheism meet an arbitrary definition of religion (do they have an understanding of transcendence, do they have a deity?) and asks instead whether pantheists and atheists sought inclusion in the confessional rights and privileges administered by the state. The petitions submitted by the Free Religious and Freethinkers to the German parliaments for the right to take alternate oaths, the right to cremation, and the right to dispensation from religious instruction in schools attest to their participation in the confessional field. So too does the periodic recognition by the state churches that secularism constituted a significant, if unwanted and illegitimate, competitor. Furthermore, the confessional field allows us to identify anticlericalism as a force not just against but also within the religious sphere. Religious minorities have often mobilized anticlericalism with the aim of secularizing the confessional state. Secularist anticlericalism went a step further and sought the dissolution of religion as a whole. The effort to dissolve religion within a confessional framework contributed to the secularist types of religious community formation. In 1870, Free Religious preacher G. S. Schaefer stated his agreement in principle with those who wished “to insert philosophy in the place of religion.” He understood their sentiment that “the formation of religious communities,” such as his own Free Religious Congregation, “is sectarian and thus to be avoided.” However, he asked them to consider, “whether under present conditions it might not appear more expedient to initially overcome religion through religion, i.e., to call religion that which constitutes our inmost and noblest conviction, just as occurs on the opposing side.”62 This is one of the paradoxes of secularism. It continued to be constituted by competition within the confessional field even as it attempted to dismantle and secularize this field. In this way, crucial structural elements, born of the competition of the dissenting sects with the state churches at the beginning of Free Religion in the Vormärz, were continually re-inscribed in secularist organizations until the end of the Kaiserreich and, indeed, beyond. *** If applied heuristically, the concept of the “fourth confession” can help grasp the presence of secularist forces amid the fierce political and religious struggles of nineteenth-century Germany. Only thus can the concept of the “fourth confession” overcome the potential objection that Freethought, monism, and Free Religion were simply too marginal to have played a key role in nineteenthcentury confessional conflicts. If one tallies up the numbers of all organizations 62

G. S. Schaefer, Die Grundsätze der freireligiösen Gemeinde. Als Entwurf der allgemeinen öffentlichen Kritik, insbesondere der freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Berlin übergeben. (Berlin: author’s edition, 1870), 8.

22

Introduction

that were primarily secularist (i.e., whose primary arena of action was the confessional field), one finds that between peaks during the Revolution of 1848, when it is estimated that as many as 120,000 Germans attended the dissenting congregations, and the late Weimar Republic, when proletarian Freethought was over half a million strong, there were usually only 20,000 to 50,000 organized secularists active in Germany.63 Although the secularist organizations under consideration here may have been too small to have held down a significant portion of the confessional field in their own right, they were paradigmatic of the ways in which a much wider spectrum of organizations adopted secularism and entered the play of confessional forces in Germany, thereby helping to shape the field. This study will concentrate on the strong presence of secularism in popular science and in political movements from left-liberalism to democracy to socialism, and show the importance of anticlericalism and natural scientific materialism to the formation of urban milieus. In passing it will point to the many connections with early feminism, the homosexual rights movement, artistic avant-gardes, and the various life reform associations. If organized secularism operated primarily within the confessional field, these other movements may be said to have crossed into this field obliquely. The history of organized secularism brings the confessional dynamics and secularist culture of these movements into relief. The inappropriateness of conceiving of the “fourth confession” in a monolithic fashion becomes apparent when considering biographies. Because many, perhaps most, Free Religionists, Freethinkers, Ethicists, and Monists remained nominal members of their confessions of origin, dissident confessionality was lived as a complicated admixture. Borrowing historian Till van Rahden’s concept of “situative ethnicity” to explain the position of nineteenth-century German Jews,64 one may speak of a situative confessionality to account for the multiple confessional forces overlapping in biographies. A case in point is Eduard Lasker, the liberal parliamentarian who played a key role in developing the legal framework of the new German state in the 1870s.65 What were his confessional motivations in advancing secularizing legislation at that time? He was a National Liberal leader who shared his party’s animus toward ultramontane Catholicism, as well as a Jewish lawyer, who suffered professional discrimination for not being Christian. At the same time, Lasker was a freemason with pronounced secularist views who ended his career in cooperation with the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing.

63 64

65

See membership statistics in Appendix. Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Eduard Lasker (1829–1884) was a central figure in the Prussian Diet from 1865 to 1879, and the Reichstag between 1867 and 1883. He left the Progressive Party in 1866 to cofound the NationalLiberal Party. Opposition to Bismarck’s political turn led him to quit the National-Liberals in 1880 and form the Secession in 1881.

Methodological Considerations

23

This study reveals the extent to which much nineteenth-century biography, culture, and politics were shot through with secularism. Secularism’s confessional impact was also felt among its opponents, such as the Protestant Inner Mission, an evangelizing institution founded in 1848 to fight the “antichristianity” that had appeared as the “organizing principle” of the revolution.66 Antisecularism was a key concern of Court Chaplain Adolf Stoecker, who folded it into the antisemitism of his Christian Social Movement of the 1870s and 1880s. Stoecker’s tradition was carried forward into the Weimar Republic by conservative theologians, whose crisis theologies responded directly to the threat of secularism. This is but one indication that the religious battles that characterized Germany’s experience after the First World War were more directly beholden to the peculiarities of its nineteenth-century confessional system than theorists of liberal hegemony might allow.

methodological considerations This study of the confessionality of secularism will be guided by the following questions: What role did confessional laws and state practice play in the articulation of secularism? How did secularist beliefs interact with theology and other forms of knowledge, in particular natural science? What role did secularism play in the articulation of social conflicts, and which professional and class segments were represented in the different associational types? How did secularism figure in the formation of Germany’s modern party system? Each of these questions points to a different dimension of secularism. In order to do justice to each and to find the interconnections between them, I chose to focus my research on the four main types of secularist organizations in a single location: Berlin. Utilizing microhistorical methods, I move from these associations and their members out into broader contexts, from the urban setting and city politics to the Prussian state and finally to the Reich. The advantage of limiting the geographic scope in this way is that we can see where characters reappear in different guises and trace relationships between them and to those outside the secularist fold. It is also possible to provide a more nuanced picture of the connections between secularism and science education, political radicalism, religious criticism, and social conflict. My ability to provide a “thick” description of organized secularism in Berlin required, of course, a thick source base, and this I found in Berlin archives. For the most part, these sources are not, as one might have expected, the records of the secularist organizations under investigation. After Berlin’s secularist organizations were banned in 1933 and 1934, their own archives were subject to spontaneous destruction at the hands of the Sturmabteilung (SA or 66

Johannes Wichern, Die innere Mission der deutschen evangelischen Kirche: Eine Denkschrift an die deutsche Nation, im Auftrage des Centralausschusses für die innere Mission, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Agentur des Rauhen Hauses, 1849), 200.

Introduction

24

Stormtroopers), dissipated following police seizure, fell victim to Allied bombing, or were simply lost.67 Only remnants remain. Given these losses, the historian of secularism finds him- or herself confronted with a problem not unlike that faced by historians of ancient Christian heresies: one has to rely on the observations made by the movement’s enemies. From the inception of the Free Religious Congregation in March 1845, Berlin police officers and civil servants in the Ministry of the Interior engaged in systematic surveillance of the secularist associations. It a testament to the anxiety secularism produced for the confessional state that the Berlin police president regularly sent an officer to observe the weekly meetings of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation and take notes on the sermons, audiences, songs, and debates. The Catholic and Protestant churches also kept voluminous records of the misdeeds of the secularist organizations. These materials, plus the wealth of published books, pamphlets, protocols, and newspaper articles by the secularists, their supporters and opponents, provided a rich source base for this study.

Berlin, Prussia, and German Reich Given that the Christian State and modern nationalism shaped the confessional field, the interactions of Berlin secularists with state officials and urban liberals do tell a German story. However, these relations were not necessarily typical of other early centers of rationalist dissent such as Breslau or Halberstadt, let alone of the towns and cities outside of Prussia. The microhistorical approach brings with it the methodological problem of perspective. German secularism and the confessional dynamics it provoked are necessarily viewed through Berlin spectacles. As critical historians have repeatedly warned, studies that take Berlin as representative of Prussia, or Prussia as representative of Germany, ride roughshod over regional variation and produce a skewed picture of the whole.68 Instead, we need to treat Berlin secularism as a regional case, the specificities of which have to be understood, in part, as a reflection of local conditions. The comparison with other centers of secularism reveals three peculiarities of Berlin. First, politically and theologically, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation 67

68

Part of the library of the Berlin FRC was burned in 1933 at the order of the socialist vice chairman Otto Braß. The remainder was seized in a police raid in summer 1934 and used against leading socialist members of the congregation, as indicated in a letter from Ewald Harndt to the Staatspolizei on November 12, 1934 (Adolf Harndt papers, unpag.) According to Peter Bahn (Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 93), the archive of national Union of Free Religious Congregations in Leipzig was destroyed during a bomb attack on December 4, 1943. In 1937, 140 boxes of documents pertaining to the Deutscher Freidenker Verband were delivered to the Gestapo and were likely destroyed or lost during the war. (Letters from the commissar of the Vaterländische Volksversicherung to the board, November 4 and December 20, 1937, Achive of FRC Berlin.) James J. Sheehan, “What Is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 53 (March 1981): 1–23.

Methodological Considerations

25

charted a particularly radical course, embracing immanence, then atheism, and finally socialism. Second, toward the end of the century, the city’s secularists achieved a high degree of organizational differentiation. By the early twentieth century, Berlin was one of few German cities to have representatives of all major forms of secularist organization. Third, Berlin’s secularist organizations generally had the largest membership rolls of any in Germany (see Appendix). All three of these peculiarities point to the evolving conditions within the city. The strength of theological liberalism and an overwhelmingly Protestant population provided a propitious climate for the emergence and survival of rationalist sects among the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant communities of the Vormärz. Like Halle, the epicenter of the Lichtfreunde, Berlin was a university city with a strong tradition of religious criticism going back to the radical Enlightenment and continuing through to the Hegelian Left. At midcentury, Berlin was growing rapidly and, similar to the Silesian city Breslau, the acknowledged center of the Deutschkatholisch movement, urban migration led to a high degree of interconfessional mixing between the dominant Protestants and growing numbers of Catholics and Jews. Urbanization, commercialization, and class division led to a breakdown of traditional parish ties and stimulated secularization, which the Protestant Church failed to successfully counteract. The situation was most critical in the growing working-class Berlin neighborhoods, which had among the worst ratios of ministers to parishioners anywhere in Germany.69 The widespread de-Christianization of entire districts that made Berlin one of the most secular cities in the world also created a supportive atmosphere for the growth of secularist culture and radical political movements.70 Although not representative of Germany as a whole, Berlin secularism was not just one case among many. First of all, the demographic changes in Berlin were typical of the experience of many Germany cities, and the drift toward atheist and socialist positions in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in the 1870s and 1880s became typical of developments in other urban centers by 1900. Second, although it had begun as a regional variation, by the end of the nineteenth century, the size and diversity of Berlin secularism and its concentration of intellectuals meant that Berlin increasingly set the tone for the secularist movements of Germany. Third, the city was the nerve center of the Prussian and later the imperial German state bureaucracy, as well as the home of the most important parliaments. Taken together, these three factors set Berlin up to become the chief showplace of debates over secularism in united Germany after 1871. 69

70

In 1875, there were 889,000 Protestant, 46,600 Catholic, and ca. 50,000 Jewish Berliners. See Berliner Städtisches Jahrbuch für Volkswirthschaft und Statistik, vol. 2 (This is volume 8 of Berlin und seine Entwickelung) (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1875), 138–140. Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870–1914 (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1996), 3–28.

26

Introduction

Chapter Summaries The first four chapters of this book dissect secularism according to the key dimensions that comprised nineteenth-century confession: constitutional frameworks, creeds, social milieus, and popular politics. On the basis of this foundation, the last three chapters engage in a multidimensional analysis of the complex historical conflicts that occurred after 1870. Chapter 1 examines how the response of the Prussian state to rationalist religious dissent in the 1840s helped shape a legal space for the fourth confession. In order to force rationalists from the state churches without creating new denominational rivals, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV promulgated a law in 1847 that allowed dissidents to leave their church without having to convert to another. He linked this nominal liberation of the subject from the tyranny of confession with a series of civic liabilities that re-inscribed the “confessionless” dissidents into the confessional system. The intellectual and religious foundations of German secularism in Free Religious thought form the subject of the second chapter. Two key transformations of belief will concern us; the first is the shift from Christian rationalism to Left-Hegelian humanism in the 1840s and early 1850s, and the second is the shift to natural scientific monism in the late 1860s. Although monism is generally attributed to the influence of Ernst Haeckel’s popular philosophy, this chapter shows the earlier eclectic roots of naturalistic monism within secularist dissent. The third chapter provides a sociological analysis of secularism. Although the secularist worldview held broad appeal for the middle and working classes and was widely disseminated via popular science, only a narrow segment of the urban population joined secularism as a form of religious and social community. Using membership rolls from various congregations, the chapter explores why Free Religion was particularly attractive to members of the lower-middle class and the upper cusp of the working class. Free Religious dissent allowed these social segments articulate direct opposition to opponents in the state and churches, as well indirect opposition to the liberal upper middle class. Chapter 4 examines the close affinity between secularism and the communitarian ethos found on the political left. It reconstructs the linkages between Free Religion and the three political branches that emerged out of the Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei) of the 1860s: left liberalism, radical republicanism, and Social Democracy. Even after the waning of the republican option, secularists continued to articulate the traditions and projects of radical republicanism within Social Democracy. The next two chapters examine the role of secularism within key confessional conflicts of late nineteenth-century Germany. Chapter 5 challenges prevailing interpretations of the Kulturkampf that have focused almost exclusively on the struggle between Protestant liberals and Catholics. This chapter shows how fear

Methodological Considerations

27

of the growing secularist and Social Democratic opposition to both Protestant and Catholic confessions ultimately undermined the liberal position. This contributed significantly not only to the collapse of the Prussian government’s anticatholic policy, but to the “great turn” in German politics of the years 1878 and 1879, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck broke with the liberals, suppressed the socialists, and set his government on a more conservative course. Secularist responses to the rise of modern German antisemitism in the late 1870s reveal a great deal about the confessionality of organized secularism. Chapter 6 begins by illustrating how antisemites identified Jews with atheism and secularism. It then turns to secularist responses to antisemitism. Most Free Religionists and Freethinkers believed that acceptance of monist worldview offered liberal Jews an honest and honorable means of abandoning their confessional difference; and implicitly they expected Jews to take this step. By contrast, Jewish (and some non-Jewish) liberals in the Berlin Freethought Association and German Society for Ethical Culture sought a way out of the confessional quandary by proposing a supraconfessional system of ethics that did not require “conversion” to religion or worldview. Yet, as the chapter concludes, ethics too remained trapped in the formative contradiction of anticonfessionalism. Because nineteenth-century Germans almost invariably sought to overcome confessional division by superceding it with a new form of spiritual unity, they ended up heightening rather than easing religious antagonisms. The final chapter surveys the development of organized secularism throughout the Wilhelmine period. It compares the general trends of late Kaiserreich with those of the earlier period, allowing for a summary of the book’s findings and a discussion of secularism’s long-term continuities and its discontinuities. The Epilogue looks forward to the First World War and its aftermath to ask how the concept of “fourth confession” might contribute toward our understanding of the role of confession in the Weimar Republic and beyond. The “Fourth Confession” as Seen from 1930 I am not the first observer to employ the “fourth confession” as a heuristic for evaluating German secularism. The term appeared in a report penned in September 1930 by the Protestant professor of theology Helmuth Schreiner. A top official of the Apologetic Central, the church body charged with leading the Protestant struggle against sects, völkisch groups, and atheists, Schreiner was considered a foremost expert on Germany’s worldview movements of the right and the left.71 At the time of his writing, Germany and, indeed much of Europe, was witnessing the most intense conflict between secularist and antisecularist forces 71

Kurt Nowak, “Helmuth Schreiner als Theologe im Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus,” in Die theologische Fakultät Rostock unter zwei Diktaturen: Studien zur Geschichte 1933–1989, ed. Heinrich Holze (Münster: Lit, 2004), 61–66.

28

Introduction

in history. With over half a million organized socialist Freethinkers in Germany and reports of the demolition of churches in Russia, Protestant and Catholic church officials released decrees warning of the “storm waves of Godlessness” threatening Germany.72 A thoughtful theologian, Schreiner identified among the various currents that made up contemporary Freethought a radical humanism with roots stretching back to nineteenth-century Free Religion. This type of Freethought, Schreiner wrote, “one could nearly refer to as a fourth ‘confession.’”73 In the end, however, Schreiner concluded that organized Freethought had been compromised by its interpenetration with the forces of socialist revolution. This, he concluded: One can only regret from a purely intellectual-historical evaluation of the situation. The development of a structure, something like a “Freethinkers’ Church” with a clear spiritual foundation, might have a salutary effect on the contemporary cultural-political situation. The opposition of this “confession” to the other confessions would be a pure opposition. In a peaceful competition, this new confession could take its place among the others.74

Schreiner floated the “fourth confession” as a counterfactual hypothesis. Faced with the alarming developments of 1930, he imagined a “pure” secularist movement separate from political anticlericalism in order to conclude that the interpentration of the two precluded Freethought from consideration as a confession. Schreiner’s reflections return us to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter: was secularism principally worldly or spiritual, political or religious? The answers to such questions are, to an extent, bound by the categories themselves. Normative understandings of each allow little alternative to seeing in secularism either a religion posing as politics or politics posing as a religion. This book seeks a way around this conundrum by showing secularism as a phenomenon that not only bridged this dichotomy but was, in fact, constituted by the interaction of its parts. This interaction only becomes apparent in the study of the concrete social conditions, legal frameworks, and conflicts in which anticlerical dissent and immanent worldview appeared. Secularism is best understood not from the perspective of the secularization it advocated but from that of its participant position within prolonged religious and political struggles.

72

73

74

Ulrich Kaiser, Realpolitik oder antibolschewistischer Kreuzzug? Zum Zusammenhang von Rußlandbild und Rußlandpolitik der deutschen Zentrumspartei 1917–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 190–191. Helmuth Schreiner, “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand und die geistige Struktur der FreidenkerBewegung,” Sept. 13, 1930, EZA 1 / A2 /464/1, p. 138. Schreiner, “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand.” Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 293–294.

1 Dissidence and Confession, 1845 to 1847

In January 1845, word reached the Prussian court of disturbing developments in the state churches – developments that would have far-reaching consequences for the history of secularism and religion in Prussia and Germany. First, a petition sent by 100 prominent citizens of Magdeburg to the local synod of the Protestant Church came to the attention of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his ministers. The petitioners requested the right to a “purely scientific exegesis of the Holy Scripture,” the omission of the Apostolic Confession from baptism and confirmation, and the introduction of a presbyterial constitution that devolved power from the royal consistory to the local congregations.1 Then, on January 12, the recently excommunicated Catholic Kaplan, Johannes Ronge, founded a “General Christian Church” in Breslau. Soon known collectively as Deutschkatholiken or German Catholics, Ronge’s followers set up dissident congregations in numerous towns and cities across Prussia. In February, the newly established Berlin congregation petitioned the king to “protect their church services and grant them the same rights as the tolerated church congregations of the country.”2 The king had no intention of assuming the role of protector of the Deutschkatholiken or of reforming his own Protestant Church in accordance with rationalist, democratic principles. Instead, on March 5, the king charged his ministers with the task of redressing this “sorry state of affairs” by drafting legislation that would allow individuals to formally quit the state churches without injury to their civic rights, as long as this act was not against state interests.3 When finally decreed two years later, the preamble to the “Patent regarding the formation of new religious societies” reaffirmed the two pillars of 1 2 3

On the Magdeburg petition of December 31, 1844, see Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 29. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1, XIV, no. 160, p. 5. GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, tit. 416, no. 38 vol. 1, p. 1, 19. Memorandum from the Minister of Church and Educational Affairs Eichhorn to Interior Minister von Arnim, March 14, 1845, p. 38.

29

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Dissidence and Confession

Prussian religious tradition: the corporate rights of the established confessions and the individual right to freedom of conscience: We are resolved, on the one hand, to extend Our strongest sovereign protection to the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches privileged historically and through state treaty and to allow them to retain the enjoyment of their particular rights; it is, on the other hand, equally Our unshakable will to maintain unabridged the freedom of belief and conscience for Our subjects laid down in the General Law [Allgemeinen Landrecht], and to permit them the freedom to associate for a common faith and religious worship according to the stipulations of the general laws of the state.4

The main provision of the decree was to allow Prussian citizens to leave the state churches without entering another state church or tolerated religious society. On the surface, the decree appeared to create a mechanism for dissidents to form new religious associations and hence became widely known as the “Tolerance Edict” or “Dissidents’ Law.” This appeared to put Prussia on the same course of constitutional secularization as the other great Protestant power, Britain, which had seen the repeal of the Test and Corporations Act in 1828 and the passage of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829. As supplemental guidelines published in April 1847 made clear, however, the Prussian law was not tolerant at all.5 Only those new religious communities whose teaching and faith were in “essential agreement” with the confessional formulae recognized in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia were granted similar rights. Given that rejection of positive dogma was the very heart of Protestant and Catholic rationalism, those dissenters who had given rise to legislation in the first place could not expect to receive state recognition as a church or tolerated religious society. Their congregations were reduced to the status of secular clubs and subjected to the rigorous law of association. The true aim of the “Tolerance Edict” of 1847 was thus the re-entrenchment rather than the liberalization of the confessional order of Prussia. The individual dissident’s right to belief or disbelief was subordinated to the corporate rights of the state churches and the interests of the “Christian State.” Yet, to defend the confessional order, the decree recast it. By allowing “confessionlessness” the Prussian state created a legal space of dissent into which it sought to banish radical elements from the churches. Henceforth the term “dissident” would no longer be primarily identified with the Protestant sects, but with rationalism, humanism, and secularism. By following the confrontation between rationalist dissenters, church conservatives, and state officials in the years between 1845 and 1847, this chapter 4

5

“Patent, die Bildung neuer Religionsgesellschaften betreffend,” March 30, 1847, in Werner Schubert, ed., Gesetzrevision (1825–1848), II. Abteilung, Öffentliches Recht, Zivilrecht und Zivilprozeßrecht, vol. 6, Familienrecht II, Halbband 1 (Vaduz: Topos, 1987): 1267–1268. “Denkschrift, den Erlaß einer Verordnung wegen der bürgerlichen Begläubigung von Geburten, Heirathen und Sterbefällen bei blos geduldeten Religionsgesellschaften betreffend,” in Gesetzrevision, 1276–1281.

The Confessional Order prior to 1845

31

demonstrates how the forces of religious dissent were shaped by but also helped reshape Prussia’s confessional laws and practices. It focuses on the importance of the state practice and law in the construction of confession and argues that precisely through the denial of confessional status secularism was integrated into what was emerging as a quadriconfessional system. The patterns set down at this time continued to frame secularism in Prussia and later united Germany for the next seventy years and even beyond.

the confessional order prior to 1845 The rationalist dissenting sects that would become Free Religion were born out of ongoing conflicts between state, church, and lay actors over the shape of the confessional system and over the very definition of “confession” itself. These conflicts were premised on the confessional structures inherited from the early modern religious wars and their settlement, but they clearly bore the stamp of the nineteenth century. Prussia entered the period of the French Revolution with a hierarchical confessional system. At the top there were, strictly speaking, only three confessions, comprising the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Churches. These were “privileged” religious societies, whose rights and dispensations had been anchored in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Despite Prussia’s earned reputation as one of the most tolerant of European powers, the confessions were not equal, for the electors and (as of 1701) kings of Prussia were not impartial. According to Protestant theology and the terms of the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the prince was the highest religious authority in the land. In Prussia, he headed both Protestant confessions as summus episcopus. Thus the monarch wore two hats, or rather a crown and a mitre. He was the secular protector of the churches, charged with maintaining the religious peace, and, at the same time, he was responsible for ensuring the interests and extension of the Protestant faith. The actions taken by the Minister of Culture Karl Friedrich Eichhorn in early 1845 provide an example of the resulting uneven treatment of the confessions in the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Eichhorn censored a Catholic journal because its “church polemics” had exceeded the boundaries of “learned theological” dispute and overheated confessional passions, but only two months later he defended a Protestant newspaper funded by the Prussian state from similar charges. Although it may have offended even moderate “non-ultramontane Catholics,” Eichhorn agreed with the editor’s position that “the Protestant church of Germany is the center of gravity of the Prussian state.”6 6

The journals in question were Joseph Görres’s Historisch-Politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland and the Rheinische Beobachter. Letters from Eichhorn to Arnim, January 18, 1845, and March 27, 1845, in Joseph Hansen, ed., Rheinische Briefe und Akten zur Geschichte der politischen Bewegung 1830–1850, vol. 1 (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1967): 721–722 and 851– 856, quotation 855.

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Dissidence and Confession

Beneath the privileged religions were the “tolerated” religious societies such as the Mennonites, Bohemian Brethren, and Greek Catholics, as well as religious groups that did not receive official sanction. Their rights varied historically according to the accommodation each reached with the Prussian state. Some were allowed to hold public services; some had to meet in private. The Jewish congregations were also “tolerated” religious societies, yet their special legal status put them on the margins of the confessional system. Like the members of the more dissident Protestant sects, Jews had fewer rights. By and large, Prussian Jews could neither perform state acts nor hold high state office.7 As was outlined in the introduction, the term “Konfession” only became widely used in the early nineteenth century, when significant alterations to the confessional system were undertaken by the German states. As well as subjecting the churches to more uniform legal categories, the Prussian state also sought to rationalize and centralize the Protestant churches. In 1807, the consistories of the two Protestant confessions were fused, and in 1817, King Friedrich Wilhelm III announced his wish that Lutheran and Reformed congregations should unite into a single evangelisch confession. In 1821, a new liturgy and confessional formula for the “Union” was issued.8 Some Lutherans balked at what they saw as a compromise of their faith. Confrontation with the state led to their exodus from the Union and the formation of separatist congregations of “Old Lutherans.” Until 1840 they were subject to often harsh repression and only become “tolerated” congregations in 1845, under changed circumstances that we will describe.9 Following the French Revolution, the Vatican centralized its operations and streamlined the church’s teaching in line with the orthodox position of the pope. Pope Gregory XVI, elected in 1830, took a more militant stand on state encroachment in church affairs, and damned liberal ideas in his encyclicals of 1832 “Mirari vos” and 1834 “Singulari nos.”10 German and other northern European opponents of the impulses going out from Rome bemoaned “ultramontanism” as an essentially foreign imposition on local Catholic traditions. In the 1830s, the resurgent Catholic Church conflicted with the expanding bureaucracy of the Prussian state in its newly acquired regions of the Rhineland, precipitating the first large confessional conflict in nineteenth-century Prussia. The issue that sparked the “Cologne Troubles,” as the conflict became known, 7

8

9

10

Christopher Clark, “German Jews,” in Liedtke and Wendehorst, eds., The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, 122–147. In his postwar indictment of the Protestant Church, Fritz Fischer claimed that Friedrich Wilhelm III “made the Church entirely into an instrument of state authority.” Fritz Fischer, “Der deutsche Protestantismus und die Politik im 19. Jahrhundert,” Historischer Zeitschrift 171, no. 3 (1951): 473–518, 481. Martin Friedrich, Die preußische Landeskirche im Vormärz: Evangelische Kirchenpolitik unter dem Ministerium Eichhorn (1840–1848) (Waltrop: Hartmut Spener, 1994), 41–51. Axel Schildt, Konservatismus in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1998), 56.

The Confessional Order prior to 1845

33

was the mixed marriages of Protestants and Catholics. Until the 1830s, Catholic clergy had generally followed Prussian law, which provided that the sons of mixed marriages be raised in the faith of the father and girls in that of the mother. In the newly appointed archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August von DrosteVischering, however, the Vatican found a champion of its policy that all children be raised Catholic. At stake in this dispute was the role of parents, state, and church in determining the confessional identity of future citizens. The conflict was brought to a head in 1837 when Droste-Vischering was arrested.11 The “Cologne Troubles” spilled into the popular sphere and pitted Catholic against Protestant. The Prussian state found particular support among Protestant liberals, who saw the Vatican as the greatest hindrance to their aspirations for a united Germany. Nationalist sentiments were further stirred in 1840 in response to the saber rattling of the French state, which claimed the Rhine as the natural boundary of France. In these conflicts, confessional prejudice and national struggle against purported Catholic enemies became fused. Intraconfessional Tensions within Prussian Protestantism The second front of confessional conflict in the Vormärz ran between the liberal and conservative wings of the churches. Given that Konfession had come to designate the legal category of state churches, its application to internal church conflicts may seem inappropriate. However, Lucian Hölscher’s study of the past usage of the term teaches otherwise. In the first half of the nineteenth century, those Protestant conservatives who defended the confessional formulae of the Reformation came to be called “Konfessionalisten” (confessionalists). This applied in the first instance to Lutherans who opposed the Prussian state’s drive to fuse the Reformed and Lutheran churches in the Union of 1817.12 Increasingly, however, the term was applied to those who defended the Augsburg Confession (1530) against theological rationalists, who denied the literal truth of scripture and questioned dogmatic conceptions such as virgin birth and the trinity. Rationalist clergy sought dispensation to either interpret the Augsburg Confession according to the operations of reason or to leave it out of their religious services altogether. Conservatives insisted on the inviolability of this symbol. They saw the Augsburg Confession, like the Apostolic Creed, as a dam that was preventing the church from dissolving into the world. Insistence on this confession and the literal truth of biblical revelation made theirs a “positive” Christianity.13 11

12 13

Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848– 1849 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 82–86. Hölscher, “Konfessionspolitik.” On the conflict over the Apostolic Creed, see Carl Bernhard Hundeshagen, Der deutsche Protestantismus, seine Vergangenheit und seine heutigen Lebensfragen im Zusammenhang der gesammten Rationalentwicklung beleuchtet von einem deutschen Theologen (Frankfurt am Main: Brönner, 1847), 278–289.

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Dissidence and Confession

In the mouths of religious liberals, the term “konfessionell” was meant to lump the Protestant orthodoxy together with Catholicism as narrow-minded, dogmatic forms of Christianity. The “Konfessionalisten” betrayed the Enlightenment and “Protestant Freedom” through an unthinking obedience to the “dead letter” of the Bible and to ecclesiastical authority. Confession has a second synonym in German: Bekenntnis. Whereas the Latinate Konfession accumulated negative connotations for liberals, they saw the ability of the free individual conscience to confess (sich bekennen) to a higher spiritual ideal as an integral part of liberal subjectivity. Liberals supported the notion of an inner religion, compatible with historical change and the findings of modern philosophy and science. Bekenntnis was commonly used to describe a liberal’s relationship to politics, Weltanschauung, humanity, or Kultur. A Bekenntnis held in common was seen as the basis for a free community.14 Thus, for German liberals, the synonyms Konfession and Bekenntnis had become antonyms that defined the principles for which two opposing armies entered the spiritual battle of modernity. To liberate the true religion residing in free Bekenntnis from the calcifying effects of Konfession, the latter would have to be subdued if not destroyed. Because liberals identified the theological dogmatism and religious intolerance of the Protestant neoorthodoxy and ultramontane Catholicism as key factors in the division of German society, anticonfessionalism became an integral part in the liberal agenda for national unity. Germany was to be united through a struggle against Konfession and the collective conversion to a modern, supraconfessional, nondogmatic Bekenntnis. The fact that this fight led to the reconfessionalization rather than the deconfessionalization of German society was an irony lost on most mid-century liberals. For conservatives, meanwhile, maintaining the identity of Konfession and Bekenntnis was the only way to oppose the insidious influence of disbelief that they perceived at the heart of liberalism and Christian rationalism. A milestone in the organization of conservative Protestantism was the founding of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung in Berlin in 1827 by the brothers Ludwig, Leopold, and Otto von Gerlach. Under the aegis of its vituperative editor, the Berlin theology professor Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, the paper attacked pastors for neglecting all or part of the Apostolic Creed from their services.15 The paper played a key role in major church controversies, such as in 1830 when it denounced the theological rationalism taught at the University of Halle, and again in 1840 when it polemicized against Magdeburg pastor Wilhelm Franz

14

15

Lucian Hölscher, “The Religious Divide: Piety in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Smith, Protestants, Catholics and Jews, 35–36. Marjorie Lamberti, “Lutheran Orthodoxy and the Beginning of Conservative Party Organization in Prussia,” Church History 37, no. 4 (1968): 439–453; Friedrich, Landeskirche, 55; David Barclay, Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

The Confessional Order prior to 1845

35

Sintenis, who had claimed that the worship of the cross was idolatrous. On that occasion, the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung promised that “the struggle will not be ended until the evil consequences of rationalism, liberal Zeitgeist, the spirit of revolt and freethought (Freigeisterei) are destroyed.”16 It would be incorrect to assume that all Protestant conservatives were defenders of the status quo. Many believed that Protestantism had a historical mission to unite Germany, and ascribed to philosopher F. W. J. Schelling’s contention that because the territorial fragmentation of the German Reich provided “no external band” to hold the nation together, “only an inner [band], a ruling religion or philosophy could resurrect the old national character.”17 Friedrich Wilhelm IV and Protestant Dissent from 1840 to 1845 A crucial figure in promoting a conservative version of cultural nationalism that aimed to overcome religious difference through true confession was Prussian King Friedrich Wilhem IV. Soon after ascending the Prussian throne, he undertook a number of measures to strengthen connections between German culture and Christianity, such as the appointment of the elderly Schelling from Munich to Berlin in 1841. Key elements of the political and religious agenda that King Friedrich Wilhelm IV sought to implement after 1840 can be traced back to events of 1813 to 1817. Like many Prussian aristocrats of his generation, the crown prince had been swept up by the elation at the victorious military “crusade” against French occupation. The disappointment caused by the dissolution of this patriotic unity after 1815 contributed to Friedrich Wilhelm’s embrace of the neo-pietistic Awakening.18 As part of a Pietistic circle in Berlin, he shared deeply emotional religious community with young officers, many of whom would become lifelong friends and advisors. So great was his passion for religious affairs that the king repeatedly intervened in church affairs and took an active part in the formulation of state policy on religious dissent.19 With its emphasis on inner religious experience, the Awakening opened the door to reconciliation with similarly Awakened Catholics, giving conservatism of the 1830s a supraconfessional character.20 Early on, the king committed 16

17

18

19

20

Quoted in Robert Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 78. I have altered Bigler’s translation of “Freigeisterei” as “freethinking Godlessness.” Quoted in Ferdinand Kampe, Geschichte der religiösen Bewegung der neueren Zeit, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Otto Wigand [vols. 1 and 2] Franz Wagner [vols. 3 and 4], 1852–1860), vol. 1, 167 fn; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 54. John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43. According to David Barclay, “for Frederick William Christianity always took precedence over the state.” Barclay, Frederick William IV, quotations 39 and 85; on the king’s socialization, 26–37. Schildt, Konservatismus, 55–56.

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himself to completing the construction of the Cologne Cathedral begun in 1248. His marriage to a Catholic princess of Bavaria in 1823 caused a stir, because the crown prince did not require her prior conversion. Instead, he allowed her to take Protestant instruction with the aim of conversion from inner conviction. Such overtures to Catholics made some Protestants see in Friedrich Wilhelm a crypto-Catholic who sought a reestablishment of the medieval church. Rather, the king dreamed of a reuniting of the German confessions in a return to the apostolic constitution of Early Christianity. According to Eduard Baltzer,21 later to become one of the first Free Religious preachers, the king told a group of clergy at a visit in Rügen in 1842 that he wished to use the ideas of St. Peter to unite the Protestant and Catholic churches.22 The apostolic church offered the king a “German Christian” alternative to the liberal plan for national unification. He also hoped it would undo the centralization and bureaucratization of the Protestant Church by the Prussian Reformers. The king’s religious ideals contributed to his weakness as a political leader. He did not wish to decree constitutional changes to the ecclesiastical structure, such as his father had done in creating the Union in 1817. As an Awakened Christian, he dreamed of reform emerging out of inner spiritual neccessity. The result was that he invited some degree of popular involvement in clerical and political reform, yet when reform took a liberal direction, he angrily withdrew his support, causing public affront.23 The new king’s favor decidedly tipped the scales in the ongoing struggle within the Prussian Church between rationalists and the circle of neo-Pietists around the Gerlach brothers. Although the latter had called for greater church independence from the state in the 1830s, they now found themselves in a position to exert influence on church affairs through the state. Through royal favor they were able to control key university appointments and expand their position within the regional church consistories. This gave them the institutional leverage to force greater liturgical orthodoxy on the rationalists.

21

22

23

Eduard Baltzer (1814–1887), son of a Protestant minister, studied theology in Halle. After serving as a hospital minister and diaconus from 1841 to 1847, he was elected to Halle and Nordhausen ministries, but was rejected by the consistory. He founded the Free Congregation in Nordhausen in January 1847 and was a member of Frankfurt Vorparlament and Berlin Nationalversammlung, where he sat in the constitutional committee. Converted by a Herrnhuter preacher to vegetarianism in 1866, he founded the Verein für natürliche Lebensweise in Nordhausen in 1867. Franz Brümmer, ed., Deutsches Dichter-Lexikon, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Krüll’schen Buchhandlung, 1876), 33. Eduard Baltzer, Erinnerungen: Bilder aus meinem Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag des Deutschen Vegetarier-Bundes, 1907). 51. On the king’s “midsummer’s night dream” of reorganizing the Protestant Church into an apostolic one, see Toews, Becoming Historical, 60–64; and Friedrich, Landeskirche, 65–74. Quoted in Barclay, Frederick William IV, 95.

The Confessional Order prior to 1845

37

The Lichtfreunde The theological faculty of the University of Halle was a center of Protestant rationalism, and it was there and in the surrounding Prussian Province of Saxony that opposition to the neo-Pietist conservatives coalesced. Galvanized by the censorship of Pastor Sintenis by Bishop Dräseke, rationalists met in the town of Gnadau outside of Magdeburg on June 29, 1841, to form a support association. They called themselves “Protestant Friends,” yet became better known by the name their detractors gave them: the “Friends of Light” or Lichtfreunde. According to the retrospective account given by the group’s acknowledged leader, Pastor Leberecht Uhlich (1799–1872), the public involvement of the king and his Minister of Culture Eichhorn in the Sintenis case proved there was a “will to cleanse the Protestant Church of its free elements. It was thus time to prepare for struggle.”24 Rationalists argued against any “dogmatic” literalness of biblical exegesis in favor of the freedom of interpretation based on reason. The historical literature has often termed this “vulgar rationalism” because of its wide popularity among the Protestant and Catholic laity and its often simple attempts to bring biblical stories in line with the laws of nature. Uhlich was ultimately suspended from his church office for an 1847 Easter sermon in which he explained Jesus’ resurrection as the resuscitation of his “spark of life” following an apparent death through crucifixion. This idea was hardly novel – such rationalist explanations of the miracles had changed little since the eighteenth century.25 What was new was Uhlich’s transformation of rationalism into a popular dissenting movement, a feat that earned him the moniker “the Saxon O’Connell” after the Irish politician whose campaigning had led to the Catholic Emancipation of 1829.26 Under Uhlich’s leadership, the Lichtfreunde published a series of pamphlets and a newspaper that reached a circulation of over 4,000. They hosted twice-yearly meetings in the town of Köthen, which was conveniently located at a railway crossing between Magdeburg and Halle in the non-Prussian Duchy of Anhalt. Lay members (in particular school teachers upset at having to give religious instruction according to neoorthodox prescriptions) soon outnumbered members of the clergy.27 The Lichtfreunde also became a site for the popularization of the more sophisticated and radical religious criticism of Gustav Adolf Wislicenus, a Hallenese preacher, who had gathered a circle of intellectuals that included the young historian Max Duncker (1811–1886) and literary critic Rudolf Haym (1821–1901). This group founded a “scientific association,” which, according to one participant, attracted young theologians and university faculty members 24

25 26 27

Quoted in C. Thierbach, Gustav Adolf Wislicenus: Ein Lebensbild aus der Geschichte der freien, religiösen Bewegung (zu seinem 100jährigen Geburtstag) (Leipzig: Theod. Thomas, 1904), 23. Friedrich, Landeskirche, 429. Rosenberg, “Theologischer Rationalismus.” C. G. Fubel, “Die Protestantische Freunde,” Jahrbücher der Gegenwart 2 (1845): 851–890, 855. Fubel, “Die Protestantische Freunde,” 863; Thierbach, Wislicenus, 25.

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“raised in rationalism, but filled by the deeper challenges of the time, which came from Schleiermacher and Hegel.”28 Wislicenus spoke on natural science and developed a theological critique of the orthodoxy that showed the influence of the Left-Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who had burst onto the intellectual scene in 1841 with his Essence of Christianity, a book that relegated the Bible and with it Christianity to a stage in the development of the spirit toward humanism.29 At the May 1844 meeting in Köthen, attended by some 600 Lichtfreunde, Wislicenus asked his listeners to choose between reason and revelation, in a speech later published as Whether Scripture or Spirit? He pushed them to accept the ultimate conclusions of their own treatment of the Bible. If they rejected the truth content of individual stories of the Bible, “as every rationalist – theologian or non-theologian – does, then we place our own judgment above the authority of scripture, [and] then [scripture] is not the highest authority but rather the spirit of truth that lives within us.”30 Because the Bible was not “revealed truth,” the individual reason that “judges” it “like any other book” was elevated to the supreme authority. Wislicenus’ speech captured the key terms being mobilized simultaneously by liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in battles with their respective theological orthodoxies. “Scripture” was associated with “dead letters,” “formulae,” “authority,” and “belief,” whereas “spirit” was synonymous with “reason,” “freedom,” “truth,” and “progress.” The Lichtfreunde and conservatives squared off over two legacies of the Protestant Reformation and Luther’s conception of conscience. The liberals reiterated the right of each minister and believer to “freedom of teaching and learning [Lehr- und Lernfreiheit]” rooted in the inviolable individual conscience. Following Immanuel Kant, they raised the toleration of heterodoxy into a particularly Prussian and Protestant virtue and never tired of quoting Friedrich the Great’s dictum that every Prussian should be allowed to seek “salvation according to his own façon.” Conservatives meanwhile saw “Protestant freedom” as constrained by a correct understanding of the Gospels and submission to authority. Following Wislicenus’ Köthen speech, Superintendent Carl Büchsel announced to the Berlin Pastoral Conference on June 6, 1844, that the Lichtfreunde had left the church and could no longer be considered brothers in Christ. The Evangelische Kirchenzeitung followed with a sustained campaign against the Wislicenus, which culminated in editor Hengstenberg’s call for readers to follow the example of Old Testament heroes, who killed apostates out of “passion for the law.”31

28 29

30

31

Fubel, “Die Protestantische Freunde,” 860; Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 47. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Elliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989 [German original 1841]) Gustav Adolph Wislicenus, Ob Schrift? Ob Geist? Verantwortung gegen meine Ankläger, 2nd improved ed. (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845), 18. Friedrich, Landeskirche, 134, 135. Thierbach, Wislicenus, 29.

The Deutschkatholiken

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the deutschkatholiken Just as the neo-Pietist course plied by Friedrich Wilhelm IV exacerbated innerconfessional tensions within Prussian Protestants, the ultramontane policies of the Vatican met with the opposition of rationalists within the Catholic clergy and laity. Opposition was particularly strong in the Silesian church, where the long-standing accommodation with Protestant Prussia provided a suitable environment for the survival of the late Josephinist reform tradition. The bishop of Breslau, Count Leopold von Sedlnitzki, backed the Crown’s position in the Cologne mixed marriage conflict – an act of defiance that led the pope to force Sedlnitzki’s resignation in 1840. Angered over the pending appointment of an ultramontane replacement for Sedlnitzki, a young Kaplan Johannes Ronge (1813–1887) published a protest in a liberal Saxon newspaper in 1843. For this he was suspended from office and relegated to teach at a girl’s school in Laurahütte, Silesia. In October 1844, Ronge wrote a public letter to Bishop Arnoldi denouncing his decision to display “Christ’s Robe” in the Rhenish city of Treves (Trier), to which some 500,000 pilgrims had recently traveled.32 Given the competing claims made by several churches across Europe to possess the very same robe, Ronge accused Arnoldi of knowingly manipulating the ignorant Catholic faithful through an “unchristian theater” to promote “Germany’s spiritual and external serfdom” (to Rome) and to fill the church’s coffers. Ronge’s intervention, which was widely circulated in the liberal press and purchased by hundreds of thousands of Germans as a brochure, was generally acknowledged as the event that triggered the Deutschkatholisch movement.33 The rhetorical strategy pursued in the letter reveals Ronge’s clear understanding of the interconfessional and the intraconfessional antagonisms that might allow for a successful Catholic schism. It addressed two audiences and gave each specific tasks. First, he called upon fellow rationalists among the Catholic clergy to resist theological conformity and stand up for the “truth.” Second, his letter asked “German fellow citizens [. . .] whether Catholics or Protestants” to oppose the confessional division of Germany. This group was to bring political pressure to bear on their “city councilors, church wardens, communes and provincial parliaments” in order to “finally and decisively oppose and stop the tyrannical power of the Roman hierarchy.” Ronge invoked the Reformation to further appeal to Protestants. Bishop Arnoldi, he wrote, was the “Tetzel of the nineteenth century” in reference to the friar vilified by Martin Luther for selling papal indulgences in Germany.34 32

33

34

Mass pilgrimages played a role in the mid–nineteenth-century revitalization of Catholicism, and several new sites were established, including the French town of Lourdes and German Marpingen. Blackbourn, Marpingen. Ronge’s letter is reprinted in Adolf Harndt, 75 Jahre: Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde Berlin 1845–1920 (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1920), 7–10. On the wider political dimensions of the pilgrimage, see Schieder, “Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844.” Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 7–10.

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Following Ronge’s excommunication in December 1844, he announced the foundation of a separate “General Christian Church.”35 In February 1845, he established a congregation in Breslau to which he gave the name by which the entire movement would become known, “Deutschkatholisch.” This name was a nod to nationalist sentiment and was duly acknowledged by the liberal Protestant press, which hailed Ronge as the “Reformer of the nineteenth century.” Liberal Protestant historian G. G. Gervinus (1805–1871) penned a book in praise of the “Mission of the Deutsch-Katholiken,” which was to lead Catholics to German unity under Protestant dominance.36 As far away as New York, the Baptist minister John Dowling reported in his anticatholic compendium The History of Romanism (1845) on the “immense sensation that has been created in Europe” by Ronge, whom he called “a second Luther, who has arisen to complete the deliverance of his country from the thralldom of Rome.”37 Liberal Protestants flocked to hear Ronge on his speaking tour across the German lands and often vastly outnumbered his Catholic followers. In overwhelmingly Protestant Königsberg, where some 2,000 Catholics lived among 72,000 Protestants, 25,000 people gathered at a public demonstration for Ronge in July 1845, and some 6,000 persons attended the mass he gave.38 Deutschkatholizismus emerged and thrived primarily in locations of mixed confessionality with Protestant dominance, such as Silesia, Pommerania, Baden, and Saxony (see Map 1). A Catholic Church survey in the diocese of Trier found concentrations of Deutschkatholiken only in districts with Protestant majorities.39 Protection by local Protestant elites allowed dissenting Catholics to survive reprisals from the Catholic hierarchy. In July 1845, for example, the movement’s second leader Johannes Czerski40 stayed as a guest in the house of a Protestant church superintendent in Prussian Posen and was defended by police from angry Catholic crowds for several days running.41 In the Catholic states of Bavaria and Austria, Deutschkatholizismus was initially banned and only began to establish itself during the Revolution of 1848. In the Protestant-dominated 35

36 37

38

39

40

41

Friedrich Heyer, Religion ohne Kirche: Die Bewegung der Freireligiösen (Stuttgart: Quell Verlag, 1979), 149. Gustav Gervinus, Die Mission der Deutsch-Katholiken (Heidelberg: C. J. Winter, 1845). John Dowling, The History of Romanism: From the Earliest Corruptions of Christianity to the Present Time, vol. 4 (New York: E. Walker, 1845), 633, 637. Figures in Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 57; Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 2, 53. Although Graf’s figures appear high, according to Tschirn, Ronge spoke to 8,000 and was later celebrated by 30,000 people. Gustav Tschirn, Zur 60jährigen Geschichte der freireligiösen Bewegung (Gottesberg: Oskar Hensels, 1904/1905), 25. See the table in: Jun Shimoda, Volksreligiosität und Obrigkeit im neuzeitlichen Deutschland: Wallfahrten oder Deutschkatholizismus (Tokyo: Ozarasha, 2004), 276–277. Johannes Czerski (1813–1893) was born to Polish peasants in 1813. Two years after his ordination as a Catholic priest in 1842, Czerski was suspended for having had intimate relations with a woman. He left the church and founded the “Christian Apostolic Catholic Congregation” in West Prussian Schneidemühl in October 1844. Tschirn, Geschichte, 32. Other examples in Holzem, Kirchenreform.

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map 1: Free Religion on the eve of the Revolution of 1848. Locations of the larger Deutschkatholisch (May 1847) and Free Protestant Congregations (February 1848).

German states, with the exception of Kurhessen, most rulers took a wait-and-see attitude.42 Of the 173 Deutschkatholisch congregations that had been founded in Germany by the end of August 1845, a full 118 were in Prussia. The rest were located in Saxony (twenty-two), Mecklenburg (seven), Hessen (fifteen), Nassau (two), Baden (three), Württemberg (two), as well as Frankfurt am Main, Bremen, Braunschweig, and Lübeck (one each).43 The mingling of Catholics and Protestants through urban migration often heightened confessional tensions, but in many towns it also had the opposite effect. Particularly in Protestant-dominated areas, interconfessional intimacy led many Catholics to oppose the ultramontane push for confessional division. Two indicators of such intimacy are conversion and intermarriage. Prussian statistics from 1845 show that rates of Catholic conversion to Protestantism were much higher in Silesia, long under Prussian rule, than in the more recently acquired Rhineland. Breslau, a traditionally Protestant city that was becoming 42

43

Against the judgement of his interior minister, the regent of Kurhessen suppressed the Deutschkatholisch Gemeinden in Hanau and Marburg in 1845 and the Free Congregation in Marburg in 1847. Paul Lieberknecht, Geschichte Des Deutschkatholizismus in Kurhessen (Marburg: Elwert, 1915), 35–36, 77. “Deutschkatholizismus” in Meyers Konversationslexikon, 4th ed. (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1885–1892), 798–800, 799.

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fig. 1: Nineteenth-century leaders of the Berlin Deutschkatholisch/Free Religious Congregation (courtesy: Humanistischer Verband Deutschland, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde Berlin 1845–1945, Dortmund: Humanitas, 1981).

The Deutschkatholiken

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increasingly Catholic in the nineteenth century, showed the highest rates of conversion to Protestantism and of confessional intermarriage (one in three Catholic marriages in 1867).44 Breslau also became the epicenter of the Deutschkatholisch movement with 7,000 members by the end of the first year.45 In the Brandenburg town of Nauen, resistance to church interference with marriage and childrearing appears to have been one of the main reasons so many of the town’s 196 Catholics left to form a Deutschkatholisch congregation in 1845. Twenty of the congregation’s twenty-five adult male members were married to Protestant women.46 With its scant Catholic population and substantial number of liberal Protestants, Berlin proved a supportive environment for the formation of a Deutschkatholisch congregation. Within two weeks of Ronge’s call for the formation of separatist congregations, some 2,000 Berliners signed a declaration of support. This figure contrasts starkly to the handful of actual Catholic dissenters who appeared at initial meetings to found a Berlin Deutschkatholisch congregation. At the second meeting in the home of Referendar Anton Mauritius Müller, this group was confronted by members of Berlin’s Catholic milieu bent on defending the integrity of the Roman Catholic Church. According to Ferdinand Kampe, who was both a Deutschkatholisch preacher and the movement’s first historian, a crowd led by “a former, but still pugnacious sergeant” forced its way into the house. They “cursed Ronge’s and Czerski’s names, [. . .] threatened Müller with a noose,” and called for attacks on “‘the press’ (a very unpopular expression in such mouths!)” Two days later the young congregation of fifty members petitioned the Police President for protection.47 The membership of the congregation rose quickly, reaching ca. 1,400 by May 1845 and 2,264 in March 1846. It is likely that roughly 10 percent of Berlin’s Catholic population joined the dissenters prior to 1850.48 However, the mass conversion of Catholics to 44

45

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47 48

In 1845, 340 Silesian Catholics converted to Protestantism as compared to only 76 Rhinelanders. Catholic conversion was concentrated in the Silesian cities of Breslau (154) and Liegnitz (125), where the Deutschkatholiken were particularly strong. The low level of Protestant conversion to Catholicism in those two cities (twelve and thirty-eight persons, respectively) indicates a Protestant cultural hegemony. The Protestant Consistory of Silesia reported that one in seven Silesian marriages in 1867 was interconfessional (Protestant–Catholic). In Breslau, the ratio was one to three. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, Sekt. 1, Abt. XIV, no. 77, vols. 2 and 5, undat. and unpag. George Kertesz, “A Rationalist Heresy as a Political Model: The Deutschkatholiken of the 1840s, the Democratic Movement and the Moderate Liberals,” Journal of Religious History 13 (1985): 355–369, 359. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, Sekt. 12, Abt. XVII, no. 71, vol 1. In 1853, the total population of Nauen was 5,257. Quoted in Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 1, 130; GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1. XIV, no. 160, p. 5. In 1852, there were 423,864 inhabitants in Berlin, of whom 396,605 were Protestant, 13,372 Catholic, 1,975 Deutschkatholisch (down from 2,857 in 1848), and 11,835 Jewish. Jahresbericht des statistischen Amtes im königl. Polizei-Präsidio zu Berlin für das Jahr 1852 (Leipzig: Heinrich Huebner, 1853).

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the dissenting camp in Berlin was essentially a onetime development. From the 1850s onward, police records show that the majority of new adherents were Protestants. This suggests that Deutschkatholizismus was attractive to nominal Catholics who were already disaffected from the Church, but that this reservoir was quickly exhausted, thus limiting the movement’s growth.49 When Ronge visited Berlin in late March 1845, he was given a hero’s welcome. Large crowds joined him at Friedrich the Great’s tomb in Potsdam; he was feted at a banquet by 300 guests of high rank; and gifts were received from the newly formed “Association for the Support of the Deutschkatholisch Congregation.” Led by the second mayor of Berlin, Franz Christian Naunyn, this association raised 3,000 thaler in donations for the congregation in its fiveyear existence.50 A local landowner donated a parcel of land on the outskirts of the city for a cemetery that would become the congregation’s most important asset. Miss Ida Jochmus organized a women’s support association, which had gathered 1,000 marks by October 1845. As historian Sylvia Palatschek and others have shown, the women’s support organizations that sprang up in many German cities at the urging of Ronge offered largely Protestant, middle-class women a forum for public action in which they could articulate desires for social, religious, national, and proto-feminist emancipation.51 The female author of a brochure published for the benefit of the Berlin Christkatholisch Congregation in 1845 announced that “Emancipation is now the rallying cry that echoes through all circles of public life.” She allotted to women a special role in religious emancipation because “[w]omen and slaves were everywhere the first and most numerous converts to Christianity; wherever a new freedom raises itself up, wherever it comes alive within its boundaries, not outside of them, that is our place, there we must assume our old right through free action.”52 The connections drawn here show that not only Protestants and liberals, but also the advocates of abolitionism and women’s rights were able to think through and publicly articulate their own interests by supporting the rights of dissident Catholics.

49 50

51 52

Holzem, Kirchenreform. See A. T. Wislicenus, Die freireligiöse Bewegung in Deutschland und die freireligiöse Gemeinde in Berlin. Zur Feier des 25jährigen Bestehens der Gemeinde (Berlin: 1870). According to the handwritten account of the history of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation by the owner of a mechanical loom Wilhelm Jordan in March 1870, the amounts received from Naunyn’s organization were 500 marks each in 1845 and 1846, 1,000 marks in 1847, 600 in 1848, and 69 marks paid out in 1849, the year the association disbanded. Adolph Harndt papers, Box 4. Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens, 195. See also Herzog, Intimacy. Anonymous, Offener Brief einer Christin. An ihre Schwester, die Frauen und Jungfrauen der Gegenwart eingeleitet durch ein Vorwort von Anton Mauritius Müller (Berlin: W. Hermes, 1845), 2. The author of this text may well have been Ida Jochmus, whose family later adopted Müller.

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Deutschkatholiken and the Prussian State According to Ferdinand Kampe, while in Berlin on March 30, 1845, Ronge met with Prussian Minister of Culture Eichhorn and Crown Prince Wilhelm, the king’s brother and future German kaiser.53 Ronge reported on his meetings three days later at a banquet held in his honor in Magdeburg on April 2. “You will wish to know whether I bring hopes or whether I bring worries,” he surmised. “Our king, gentlemen, is willing to defend freedom of conscience, the old and the new. Therefore with full throats let us cheer our king!”54 This was a misreading of the position of the crown. Although the king’s ministers repeated their avowals of freedom of conscience, they had steadfastly refused petitions, such as that of the Berlin Deutschkatholiken on February 20, 1845, to grant the dissenters the status of a tolerated church. Responding to the king’s request for clarification, an official in the Ministry of Culture noted on March 9 that if the state were to immediately provide such rights, Prussian Catholics would view this as an aggressive act and “lose their trust in the state.” The population would divide into hostile camps and weaken the monarchy, whose strength rested on its ability to unite all subjects irrespective of confession.55 A similar position was taken by Eichhorn in a letter to the Minister of Justice von Uhden and the Minister of the Interior von Arnim on March 23, which he began by noting the mounting number of complaints of abuse and violence that Catholic bishops and dissident groups were lodging against one another. Eichhorn expressed his desire that the ministries quickly arrive at a clear joint position, and concluded that at present the state must reject a petition for rights, because “[i]n general, the emergence of new religious parties cannot be desirable for the state.” The state, he believed, should only deal with those groups that had proven long-term viability, and the religious beliefs (Glaubensbekenntnisse) of the Deutschkatholiken are “more the products of the moment than the fruit of thorough theological investigation.” Eichhorn worried in particular about the direction some of the congregations were taking. The Breslau congregation “stands almost entirely on the foundation of the shallowest rationalism and is only to be differentiated from the principles of the so-called Lichtfreunde by the weakest of boundaries.” By giving all power to the congregation, “the whole thing breathes a purely democratic spirit.”56

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Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 1, 162. According to Wilhelm Jordan, Crown Prince Wilhelm was registered as a witness to the baptism in the congregation of the son of Eduard Schwarz, a court quartermaster, on April 8, 1845. Wilhelm Jordan memoir, Adolf Harndt papers. At the meeting, the leading Lichtfreund Leberecht Uhlich toasted the recent meeting of the Deutschkatholiken in Leipzig as the first progressive Catholic Council for a thousand years. Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, no. 80, April 7, 1845. This opinion (signed by von Maehly and dated March 9, 1845) is written in the margins of the petition of the Berlin Deutschkatholiken to the king, February 20, 1845. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1, XIV, 160, vol. 1, p. 5. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1. XIV, no. 160, p. 205.

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Eichhorn’s worries were borne out by the name and statutes the dissident Catholics gave their national Church at their first Council in Leipzig on March 23, 1845. In a debate on the name, Ronge championed “Deutschkatholisch,” which clearly stated the opposition to “Roman” Catholicism, while Czerski, whose parents were Polish speakers, preferred “Christkatholisch” as more universal and less secular. One of the Berlin delegates, Dr. Dethier, argued that calling the Church “German” did not necessarily reduce its international validity. Germans could claim to represent the spirit of the new religion, because “opposition to Rome has always manifested itself most energetically in the Germanic element.”57 In the end, the more politically potent name was chosen for the national Church, but “Christkatholisch” was allowed for individual congregations. Ronge’s theological position also proved dominant. The delegates made rationalism the basis of their common “confession” (Bekenntnis). The Bible was declared “the sole source of religious truth,” but “free searching Reason” was “the organ of the subjective acquisition of [its] content [and] no longer fantasy or mere faith.”58 The Berlin congregation had chosen the name “Christkatholisch” and initially followed a confession similar to Czerski’s. However, with the ordination of Robert Brauner, a twenty-nine-year-old Catholic Kaplan from Silesia, in May 1845, the congregation received a preacher associated with Ronge’s faction. On April 30, 1845, the king issued a royal order that formalized the state’s passive position on Catholic dissidence. It prohibited his officials from promoting or hindering the movement. It also reserved for the monarch a future decision on the question of the ultimate confessional status of the new congregations.59 This policy formulation was opaque at best and was immediately interpreted in a fashion that deviated from the court’s intentions. A case in point is provided by the letter sent by the Lord Mayor of Berlin, Heinrich Wilhelm Krausnick, to the king on June 19, 1845. He praised the order of April 30 as an “immortal monument of royal wisdom and justice,” but made clear that the city government (Magistrat) did not see itself bound to the passivity that the king had ordered for his ministries. The city government, Krausnick wrote, had been overjoyed by the arrival of the Deutschkatholiken at a time when the Catholic Church was “sowing dissention and hatred” in the families of mixed marriages and “turning the masses back to superstition and mental slavery.” It felt compelled to aid the new movement in which it “recognized not just its allies in the inevitable spiritual struggle against ultramontane darkness and manipulation, but our Christian brothers in faith, who struggle with us for the arrival of the heavenly kingdom on earth in spirit and in truth.” Krausnick reported that the city had already awarded to the congregation a yearly allowance of 1,000 marks and the use of the Protestant Gymnasium “zum Grauen Kloster” for its religious 57 58 59

Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 1, 162, 167. Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 1, 168–169. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1, XIV, 160, vol. 1, p. 233.

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services.60 It now wished to accede to the dissidents’ request for the use of the church next door, the Klosterkirche. However, in light of the monarch’s unclear position, Krausnick sought authorization from the crown. Like the Berlin city government, across Prussia a wide array of local authorities, from municipal councils to Protestant churches, provided financial, legal, and in-kind support to the Deutschkatholiken. In March, this support still elicited an ambivalent response from Eichhorn and von Arnim. In a letter to the governor (Oberpräsident) of Silesia, the ministers stated their opposition to the Breslau city government’s decision to allow the dissident Catholics use of a prominent church, but then suggested that the governor might quietly “ignore” the discrete use of other Protestant Church buildings. A tougher line was taken in April, when the ministers directed the Police President of Berlin von Meding to intercede with the Berlin city government to cancel the annual stipend it provided to the Christkatholisch congregation.61 On May 17, 1845, Eichhorn and von Arnim issued two new decrees for the regional governors and the Protestant clergy respectively that reveal a shift in state policy toward the dissident Catholics from neutrality to hostility. The first stipulated that state officials were not to use the terms “congregations” or “Catholic” when referring to the dissidents. It prohibited the Deutschkatholiken from using state buildings and forbade the performance of acts of baptism, burial, and marriage. The second decree prohibited Protestant clergy from loaning church buildings to the Catholic dissidents.62 Some local authorities flouted these decrees, and the Berlin congregation continued to enjoy the use of the rooms of the Protestant Gymnasium. Battle Is Joined The Prussian Prime Minister Ludwg Gustav von Thile had initially counseled the king to tolerate Czerski’s congregation in order to encourage Protestant radicals to follow suit and leave the Protestant Church.63 Historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote that the king was initially “delighted” by the appearance of Deutschkatholiken and hoped that by “sloughing off their unbelievers” both confessions might “gain internal energy.”64 Although such pronouncements by the nationalist historian are to be taken with a grain of salt, his essential point is substantiated by archival data, which shows that the court’s response to 60

61

62 63

64

GStA, I.HA, Rep. 76 III, Sekt. 12, Abt. XVII, no. 73, vol. 1. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 17. According to William Jordan, the congregation received the last of five payments of 1,000 marks from the city government in 1849. Jordan Memoir, Adolph Harndt papers. Numerous examples noted in GStA, I.HA, Rep. 76 III, Sekt. 12, Abt. XVII, no. 73, vol. 1, passim; Letter to Oberpräsidenten Merkel, GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1, XIV, 160, p. 24, undat. Decrees of May 17, 1845, GStA, I.HA, Rep. 76 III, Sekt. 12, Abt. XVII, no. 73, vol. 1, unpag. Heinrich von Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, vol. 7 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919 [1894]), 95. Treitschke, History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 7, 95.

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Deutschkatholizismus was shaped by its ongoing struggle with the Protestant Lichtfreunde. The palpable shift in policy toward the Catholic dissidents coincided with developments in Protestant dissent. The ecclesiastical bodies had been relatively mild in censuring the Lichtfreunde until March 1845, when G. A. Wislicenus published his inflammatory speech given at the Köthen meeting the previous year. Oberpräsident von Wedell, who as state governor for the Prussian Province of Saxony was responsible for Halle, counseled that the church must react cautiously to this new provocation to avoid a split. Against this counsel, Eichhorn decided to pick up the gauntlet Wislicenus had tossed down and seek an exemplary punishment. He asked Interior Minister von Arnim to examine the political aspects of the case and issue with him a joint position, “so that a vacillation of the church regime . . . does not become visible and bring with it more extensive [and] highly dubious misunderstandings.” On April 20, he asked von Wedell to inform the Magdeburg Consistory that Wislicenus would be temporarily suspended for his pamphlet and for his omission of the Apostolic Confession in official acts. If he did not recant before an ecclesiastical collegium in Wittenberge on May 14, Wislicenus was to be defrocked.65 Once news of the pending disciplinary sanction reached the public, Wislicenus became a cause célèbre for liberals across Prussia and abroad.66 His case occupied center stage at the largest and last annual Köthen meeting on May 15, 1845, to which 3,000 Lichtfreunde arrived from around Prussia and Saxony. Although Wislicenus’ theological position was decidedly too radical for Uhlich and many of the other rationalist pastors present, 40 of them joined with over 400 laymen to issue a public declaration of their agreement with him in principle.67 As the now-open conflict between the state and the Lichtfreunde escalated, the rhetoric became more inflammatory. An anonymous brochure published “to the memory of the assembly of Protestant Friends in Köthen,” warned: “Protestants, someone wants to touch your holiest treasure! Someone wants to rob you of your freedom of belief and conscience! [. . .] Protestant Jesuits ball their fists and shout: religion is in danger! The church is in danger! . . . What a farce! Look, a few old believers have built a Vatican in the middle of the Protestant Church!”68 Following the Köthen meeting, Uhlich undertook a speaking tour across Prussia, which drew large crowds. According to police reports, 5,000–6,000 persons attended a public meeting in late July in Breslau to hear Uhlich discourse on “the struggle of the new with the old in the field of religion.” Not only did he 65 66

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GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 1, p. 4, 91. See also Friedrich, Landeskirche, 217–218. Letter of Lord Mayor Bertram to Minister von Armin, April 12, 1845, GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 1, p. 89. GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 1, p. 129, 140. GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 2, p. 88.

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call on the listeners to oppose “Lutheran rules,” he laid out a scheme for spreading religious reform that would have sounded subversive to the authorities. Uhlich rejected the four traditional means of propagating ideas: the pulpit because it provided edification but not education; the university chair because it was occupied by servants chosen by the state; the press because it was directed from outside; and scriptural education because it did not suit the great masses. Only “living speech” featured in the public assemblies of the Protestant Friends, he concluded, could provide adequate religious education to the people.69 For state authorities, such open-air meetings raised the specter of popular insurrection.

The Lichtfreunde in Berlin The events of mid-May 1845 reveal how state repression politicized religious dissent. A police agent in Leipzig reported in late April that everyone “angry about the repressive measures of the King and Eichhorn [. . .] is joining the new church, and the Prussian State has created an enemy that can become very dangerous for it.”70 Indeed, at this time new chapters of the Lichtfreunde popped up outside of Prussian Saxony in centers of urban liberalism – Königsberg, Breslau, and Berlin – and were led largely by laymen with a political agenda.71 A local group of self-identified Lichtfreunde first appear in Berlin police reports from the summer of 1845.72 There were no clergymen among them, and only one student of theology, Julius Berends, who had been recently suspended because the Protestant authorities found his inaugural sermon too “communistic.” Nearly all of these men were well-known liberal and democratic leaders, who would play important roles in city politics during the Revolution of 1848. Police identified Dr. Merker, Dr. Woeniger, city councilor Daniel Alexander Benda, private docent Karl Nauwerck, and the educational reformer Adolf Diesterweg. Its principal leaders were thought to be the young city councilor Heinrich Runge and the writer Karl Heinrich Bruggemann.73 For many Germans of this generation such as Rudolf Haym, “church liberalism was the training school for political [liberalism].”74 However, in the case 69

70 71 72

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GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 2, p. 17, 28. On a similar speech given in Eisleben, Leberecht Uhlich, Die Protestantischen Freunde in Eisleben 10. und 11. Juni 1845 (Eisleben: Georg Reichardt, 1845). Quoted in Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 34. Friedrich, Landeskirche, 228. Names found in the police report on the meeting of the Berlin Lichtfreunde on August 1, 1845, in the Dupontschen Zelt in the Tiergarten, GStA, I HA, Rep 77, Abt. I, Tit. 416, no. 34, p. 2. Uhlich had already given a speech in Berlin in March 1845. Bigler, German Protestantism, 217. Rüdiger Hachtmann, Berlin 1848: Eine Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Revolution (Bonn: Dietz, 1997), 930–971. Haym quotation in: Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 38.

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of the Berlin supporters of the Lichtfreunde, actions taken in the summer of 1845 were but the latest iteration of a series of organizational efforts in which religion, politics, and social reform overlapped. According to historian Ludovica Scarpa, this group had ushered in a paradigm shift in city politics with Runge’s successful campaign for city council in 1844. Against the traditional view that communal officials should be “neutral representatives of the entire society” and integrated into a system of deference within the Bürgerschaft, Runge presented himself as the advocate of a political position. He penned a written manifesto entitled My Credo (Mein Glaubensbekenntnis) that polemicized against the conservatives in the Protestant St. Jakobi congregation, published it at his own expense (he had recently inherited his father’s lumber business), and had it delivered to all those in the district eligible to vote in the limited franchise.75 Like many of the other Lichtfreunde, Runge had already been active in the Protestant Gustav Adolf Association, the Berlin Artisans’ Association (Handwerkerverein), and the Citizens’ Association (Bürgerverein). These latter two protopolitical organizations had been founded in 1844 and 1845, respectively, and were the central operating areas of Berlin’s radicals.76 There were also numerous connections to “The Free” (Die Freien), the circle of Berlin Young Hegelians frequented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.77 Public demonstrations in support of the Lichtfreunde occurred across Prussia in July and August of 1845. On July 24, Friedrich Wilhelm IV was accosted in the halls of the University of Halle by city councilors and members of Wislicenus’ congregation. After listening to their expressions of sympathy for Wislicenus’ theological position, the king stated, rather disingenuously, that he hoped that the investigations would demonstrate that Wislicenus had not broken his oath to administer the Apostolic Confession.78 Inspired by the example of Breslau, where over 1,000 prominent citizens signed a declaration of support of the Lichtfreunde, the Berliners called a protest meeting of their own on August 1, 1845, in “den Zelten” (Tents), a locale in the Tiergarten park. A police observation report noted that the audience of some 300 members of different social classes applauded the protest letter read by Dr. Merker. “Freedom of conscience and teaching is the recognized basis of true human education and the only guarantee of its further development,” the letter began. “Against this a certain party pursues [. . .] only hierarchical purposes, unsettles the conscience, promotes a hypocrisy that destroys morality, accuses 75

76

77

78

Ludovica Scarpa, Gemeinwohl und lokale Macht: Honorationen und Armenwesen in der Berliner Luisenstadt im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Saur, 1995), 86. Members of the Bürgerverein included Julius Berends, Gustav Wegschneider, Paul Langerhans, Fr. Körte, Buhl, Franz Duncker, Adolf Diesterweg, Wilhelm Kampffmeyer, and Bürgermeister Naunyn. Scarpa, Gemeinwohl, 78, 87. Among the “Freien” noted by police as supporters of the Lichtfreunde were Karl Nauwerck, Ludwig Buhl, Eduard Meyen, Adolf Rutenberg, and Theodor Mügge. GStA, I HA, Rep 77, Abt. I, Tit. 416, no. 23, August 20, 1845. Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 2, 177. GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 1, 296.

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and persecutes those who think differently and attempts to expel them and treat them as sectarians.” Merker asked those present to raise public pressure by signing the letter, and remarked with pleasure “that in Berlin one finally has the bravery to accomplish something through action and not just make a fist in one’s pocket, as used to be the case.”79 A visit to Berlin by Uhlich slated for August 12, 1845, was thwarted by the king’s supreme order of August 5 prohibiting “any meetings of the Lichtfreunde, as soon as they take on the character of popular assemblies through the class differences of their participants or the place of their meeting.” Private societies of Lichtfreunde operating under any name were also banned.80 On August 12, two police officers and four gendarmes were sent to the Tivoli, the site of Uhlich’s cancelled speech, where they found some 700 to 800 persons assembled, including many known intellectuals and members of the “radical party of the Artisans’ Association (Handwerkerverein).” The demonstrators cheered “Vivat!” to Leberecht Uhlich and their Democratic heroes Johann Adam von Itzstein and Friedrich Hecker and sang Adolf Glassbrenner’s vulgar satire of priestly hypocrisy “Das Muckerlied” before dispersing.81 On the same day, a protest across the Prussian border in the Kingdom of Saxony led to the first serious bloodshed associated with rationalist dissent. Because the Saxon royal family was Catholic, popular opposition to the announced decision to ban the Deutschkatholiken took on confessional overtones. When pious Crown Prince Johann visited Leipzig on August 12, 1845, he was met with a charivari (Katzenmusik) by locals shouting “hail” to Ronge and “out with the Jesuits!” After rocks were thrown through the windows of the hotel where the prince was staying, a military attachment fired into the crowd, killing seven. The prince and military then withdrew and, according to Heinrich Treitschke, for the following four days the Deutschkatholisch leader Robert Blum “ruled the town as dictator, the authorities seemed non-existent.” Blum certainly helped steer protesters from violence, and he and the Protestant dissident and future Free Religious speaker Albert Dulk were central actors at the public funeral for the dead that was attended by 15,000 to 20,000 townspeople.82 On August 15, 1845, the news of the events in Leipzig reached the monarchs and diplomats gathered in Castle Stolzenfels on the Rhein to celebrate the pending completion of the Cologne Cathedral. Friedrich Wilhelm IV sent 79

80 81 82

1,569 Berliners signed the petition. GStA, I HA, Rep 77, Abt. I, Tit. 416, no. 34, p. 2; Kurt Wernicke, “Julius Berends (1814–1891),” in Akteure eines Umbruchs: Männer und Frauen der Revolution von 1848–49, Helmut Bleiber et al. eds. (Berlin: Fides, 2003), 83–138, 98. GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 1, pp. 219, 270. GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 34, pp. 16, 20, 23. Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 112, August 23, 1845. Treitschke, History of Germany, 91. On police fears of violence spreading to Halle, GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 37, vol. 1, p. 301. The revolutionary poet Ferdinand Freilingrath commemorated the events in Leipzig in his poem “Leipzigs Todten!” (1845).

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General von Canitz to ask Prince Metternich how the Austrian court would respond should the king of Saxony ask Prussia to send troops to Leipzig. Metternich replied that the Austrians would uphold their federal obligations, but that he believed that it would not be necessary because the “apostle and theater cashier Robert Blum” would appear as the defender of order. He told the king a few days later that the radicals were holding their fire for now and that the Leipzig events were but the opening skirmish to a coming battle.83 Not only radicals were mobilizing behind the dissidents. On August 15, 1845, a diverse coalition of eighty-seven liberal Protestant Church leaders issued a public “Berlin Declaration” against the orthodox “party” around the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung that was “striving for domination within the church.” The attempt to enforce a binding confession contradicted the Protestant freedom of conscience, and the Declaration warned that “[t]he danger is there that the Protestant Church will explode in many directions.” Because the signatories included two bishops, the Declaration unleashed an acrimonious debate among officials and lay members of the Protestant Church.84 On August 22, 1845, the Berlin city government intervened directly in the conflict around the Lichtfreunde with a new petition to the king, asking him to take action against Hengstenberg’s “party” that was drifting toward the “Catholic worldview.” It appealed to the king as a neutral judge and protector of Protestant freedom. However, because it was well known that the king supported the conservatives, the petition was essentially a challenge to the religious stance of the Prussian monarch himself. This protest function was underlined by the fact that the city government released its petition to the public media even before the king had accepted it. In the petition, the city government embraced a theological liberalism that submitted religion to the laws of historical progress. Christianity was “continually renewing itself in the souls of men,” and that reflected “the development of the human spirit in history through new forms.” The city government claimed that this view was shared by “the overwhelming majority of the educated [Gebildeten] of our people,” thereby presenting the king with the collective displeasure of the city’s elite regarding his church politics. Regarding the popular impact of the religious reform movement, the city government welcomed “a new phase in the spiritual development of our people,” but warned the king that the

83

84

Richard Clemens Lothar von Metternich-Winneburg and Alphons von Klinkowström, eds., Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren, vol. 7, II/5 (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1883), Doc. 1517, pp. 127, 132. The text of the Berlin Declaration found in: Friedrich Julius Stahl, Zwei Sendschreiben an die Unterzeichner der Erklärung vom 15., beziehungsweise 26. August 1845, zugleich als ein Votum in der Augsburgischen Confessions-Frage (Berlin: E. H. Schroeder, 1845), 3, 4. By a prominent Lichtfreund: Julius Berends, Keine Gewissensfreiheit ohne Lehrfreiheit in der Kirche (Berlin: Eduard Krause, 1845).

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public dispute carried out in the newspapers between the church parties was “moving the masses” in a potentially dangerous manner.85 The petition culminated in the request for a new church constitution that ended its status as a state institution: “In order to give this spirit [of Christ] room, the church requires a form and constitution, which would enable its individual parts to become living coworkers on the temple of the Lord in an orderly fashion.”86 Given that the summepiscopate was the lynchpin of the undemocratic church structure, fulfillment of this request would have meant radically curtailing if not removing the king’s powers as highest bishop. Equally alarming for the king, this call for lay control of the church mirrored the demands for a constitution with popular representation that had formed the chief bone of contention between liberals and the state since 1815, when Friedrich Wilhelm III had made his unfulfilled promise of a constitution. After the king refused to accept the petition, a delegation led by Lord Mayor Krausnick delivered it directly during an audience with the king on October 2, 1845. Friedrich Wilhelm IV told the representatives of the city government that the petition was a “misfortune” that “has profoundly aggrieved Me,” and for which “[I] must express to you, gentlemen, My complete disapproval.” Although the petition did not have its ostensibly intended effect, it was experienced by the city’s elite as a moral victory.87 The succession of events in Berlin in August 1845 demonstrated that a broad alliance was forming against the king’s support of the “confessionalists” within the Protestant Church. At the same time some, like the author of a pamphlet supporting the Berlin Declaration of August 15, saw in the erosion of barriers between the confessions the portents of the spiritual unification of the German people: “Our days are witnessing the happy awakening of religious conscience in the womb of all of the religious parties existing in Germany. Among the Jews and Catholics, as much as the Protestants, fresher and more lively spirits are arising against the thoughtless or hypocritical confession [Bekennen] of formulae.” The author hoped that these spirits might unite in Protestantism, not in its “confession” or content, but in its “freedom of conscience and teaching.” The common enemy was the “orthodoxy” backed by those church elites threatened by “mere ‘laymen.’”88 85

86 87

88

D. W. Dietlein, Die Berliner Erklärung vom 15. August 1845 und deren Literatur (Berlin: Friedrich August Herbig, 1846), 4, 6, 9. Dietlein, Die Berliner Erklärung vom 15. August 1845 und deren Literatur, 10. Jürgen Wetzel, “Heinrich Wilhelm Krausnick,” in Stadtoberhäupter: Biographien Berliner Bürgermeister im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Wolfgang Ribbe ed. (Berlin: Stapp Verlag, 1992), 83–106, 90. Treumund Volkart, Zur Verständigung. Aus der Vossischen Zeitung (n.a.: n.a., undat. [1845]), 5. The Prussian authorities confirmed the early tendency of the Free Religious to confessional mixing. Eichhorn’s ministry noted with alarm in April 1845 that two candidates for the Protestant ministry and even one pastor, Theodor Hofferichter, had assumed posts in the Deutschkatholisch movement. By November 1846 a total of nineteen Silesian candidates of

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the “tolerance patent” of march 1847 The summer events in Magdeburg, Berlin, Breslau, and Leipzig led the Prussian court to seek more drastic and permanent measures for combating the religious left. Pointing to the uprising in Leipzig, Prime Minister Thile wrote to the king on August 16 that politics had become cloaked in religious agitation. He praised the monarch’s prior caution in avoiding measures (presumably the expulsion of the rationalists) that might have been interpreted as efforts to split the church. Recent events showed, however, that the dissidents themselves had essentially divided both Catholic and Protestant churches. “It is now high time,” he advised the king, “to actually prove that the recognized churches still have a right and that the Protestant Church, too, is not without a protector [Schutzherrn] nor center of authority [. . .]; it is finally time to open up and smooth out the path for those who no longer want to live under the old church roof [and show them] how they can reach other habitations without pulling down the old building or driving out its inhabitants.”89 Friedrich Wilhelm IV had arrived at the same conclusion and told Metternich during their journey down the Rhine on August 18 that he intended to apply to “Ronge and consorts” the same prohibitions that he envisioned for the “new communistic sects” of the Lichtfreunde.90 Prior to his departure from Stolzenfels, the king told another of his Awakened confidantes, Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, of the need to “aggressively” set about rebuilding the Protestant Church itself.91 In the first instance, he meant to achieve this through the General Synod, which he summoned for three months in 1846 to resolve key problems resulting from the Union of 1817. Friedrich Wilhelm IV had hoped that this body would lead the church at least part of the way toward his dream of an “apostolic” constitution. These hopes were dashed when the Synod incorporated liberal proposals into its recommendations, which were then refused by the king, thereby further alienating many liberal and moderate Protestants. Lasting change to the confessional system came the following year in the two measures contained in the Patent of March 30, 1847. The first allowed Prussian citizens to leave the state churches without having to join a new religion. The second set up a procedure for the admission of new religious movements to the circle of “concessioned” churches. Church-leaving appeared to provide the citizenry equal rights irrespective of religious affiliation or nonaffiliation,

89

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91

theology and one minister had taken up posts in the deutschkatholisch movement, a development that the king had sought to counteract in a cabinet order in June 1846. Reports of Silesian Consistory to Minister Eichhorn, April 26, 1845, January 21, 1846, and November 1846; Kabinetts-Ordre of June 10, 1846, GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, no. 79, unpag. “Denkschrift Thiles für Friedrich Wilhelm IV,” August 16, 1845, reprinted in: Friedrich, Landeskirche, 466–472. Metternich’s summary of a meeting with the King of Prussia in Stolzenfels, August 20, 1845, in Metternich-Winneburg and Klinkowström, Metternich, 132. Bethmann-Hollweg to Eichhorn, August 27, 1845, reprinted in Friedrich, Landeskirche, 472– 476.

The “Tolerance Patent” of March 1847

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whereas “concessioning” offered hope of the end of discrimination against those religious groups at the margins of the confessional system. On the face of it, then, this decree appeared to lead Prussia down the path of secularization by allowing for a nonreligious civic status and by providing equality within the state for all religious societies. Cultivating these expectations, the king and his ministers already referred to the church-leaving law as a “Tolerance Edict” prior to its issuance. Several leading German political and constitutional historians have accepted this as an essentially tolerant solution to mounting religious conflict.92 However, the king made clear that his aim was anything but tolerant in a letter sent to his emissary and close confidant, Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen, shortly before the Patent was issued. Rather than providing freedom of confessional identification, the aim of the “law on dissenters” was to force them from the Protestant Church. This was to be done in a fashion that would curtail their radical potential. If they were thrown out “in a revolutionary fashion,” he warned, the danger existed that dissent could spread “like an old suitcase [that falls] from the baggage carriage and then [. . .] bounces, bursts and scatters its contents.”93 The key to sequestering the rationalist threat was to be found, explained the king, in an inventive interpretation of the Prussian Civil Code of 1794. Between the initial petition for a concession and its final granting, the king proposed a long “interimisticum.” “With the concessioning of a sect, the civil rights and marriages of all sectarians are recognized. But not before, that means that head teachers, magistrates, city councilors, civil servants must resign or lay down their posts until the concession [is granted].” Concessions would, however, only be given to those sects who have a constitution similar to those of the parties of the Westphalian Peace of 1648, that is, those who accepted something like the Apostolic Confession. The king stated, “I will never recognize” the ministries of sects that are “Unitarian, deistic, etc.” Hence, the temporary provisions of the “interimisticum” were intended, in fact, to become permanent restrictions applied to “Czersky’s, Ronge’s, Rupp’s, Balzer’s, Wislicenus’ sects.”94 This was the belt to bind the “old suitcase” of radical dissent. Supplemental guidelines published on April 30, 1847, stipulated some of the prohibitions to be directed at the rationalist dissidents. Because their clergy would not be acknowledged as such, the “public” acts they carried out – that is, baptism, marriage, and burial – were invalid. Marriage was a particularly thorny issue because unsanctified cohabitation was a crime (concubinage), and children born out of wedlock were considered illegitimate. Rather than continue

92

93 94

Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1, 435. Ernst Rudolf Huber and Wolfgang Huber, Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Staatskirchenrechts, vol. 1 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1973), 454. Undecided on the motivations of the “Toleration Edict”: Barclay, Frederick William IV, 94. Friedrich Wilhelm IV to Bunsen, February 12, 1847, in Friedrich, Landeskirche, 483. Friedrich, Landeskirche, 483.

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to force dissidents to find legitimate (Protestant) clergy who would marry them (the policy introduced in 1845 to deal with the Deutschkatholiken), this task was now to be taken over by the state, which would borrow the civil registry of the Code Napoleon used in the left Rhine Provinces and extend it over all of Prussia with one important modification. Whereas the Napoleonic law made the validity of all marriages dependent on their entry into the civil registry, the new stipulations would apply civil marriage only to those not blessed by a religious servant who enjoys “public trust,” that is, by a minister in one of the state churches.95 Further administrative steps assured that the non-concessioned sects would not take many of the Protestant faithful with them. Civil servants, school teachers, and military officers were generally barred from membership. The congregations were subject to the law of association, and thereby subject to police monitoring and harassment. To prevent entire congregations from following their dissenting clergy out of the Protestant Church, as threatened in Magdeburg, the king decreed that churches were not the property of the congregations, thereby forcing dissenters to find private places of worship. Finally, the state established prohibitively high legal fees for the act of leaving the church (Kirchenaustritt), making it unaffordable for most dissidents.96 Eduard Baltzer, preacher of the Free Congregation in the town of Nordhausen, recounted that his followers pooled resources to allow the leadership to officially withdraw from the Protestant Church. The majority of his flock had to remain in the Protestant Church.97 It was clear to most dissidents that the new law held nothing for them. Very few of the Deutschkatholiken or Lichtfreunde were willing to formally leave the church, and many leaders counseled their followers to resist the new law.98 In Breslau, the center of the entire Deutschkatholisch movement, police reported that by 1852 only ninety-four individuals (forty-eight Catholics and forty-six Protestants) had officially left their confessions.99 Already prior to March 1847 the king had recognized the voluntary aspect of the legislation as a “hole in the handling of the matter of the dissidents.” The dissident law applied to those who leave, but not to those who claim the “supposed right of Protestantism” to justify their decision not to leave the church. For these cases, the king asked Thile to direct his ministers to come up with additional measures that would “not

95

96 97 98 99

“Denkschrift, den Erlaß einer Verordnung wegen der bürgerlichen Begläubigung von Geburten, Heirathen und Sterbefällen bei blos geduldeten Religionsgesellschaften betreffend,” in: Schubert, ed., Gesetzrevision, 1276–1281. On the objections of the Protestant clergy to registering Deutschkatholisch marriages, see Friedrich, Landeskirche, 395. Friedrich, Landeskirche, 394. Baltzer, Erinnerungen, 65–66. GStA, I HA, Rep. 76, III, 1, XIV, no. 160, 43, 92. Another fifteen Breslauers had used the decree of March 30, 1847, to join the Baptists and sixteen to become Jews. Extract from weekly summary, Breslau, August 16, 1852, LAB A Pr. Br. 030 C, no.10085, p. 250.

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simply make the revolutionizing of the Protestant church more difficult, but punish it.”100 The “Dissident’s Law” was designed to create a legal space that Prussian Protestants would not want to enter voluntarily, but into which they might be forced. After March 1847, the Prussian state used the Dissidents’ Law in tandem with the ecclesiastical sanctions against dissident clergy to drive the most radical rationalists from the Protestant Church. At that time only three Free Congregations had split from the Prussian Church. Of these, only the Hallenese congregation under G. A. Wislicenus embraced the status of private society. The Königsberg congregation under Julius Rupp and the Nordhausen congregation under Eduard Baltzer maintained their claim to belong to the Protestant Church and were subjected to a police ban and fines for their apostasy. The respective provincial governors directed them to make use of the new church-leaving law. When Baltzer and the leadership of his congregation took this step, police intervention against them lessened. In summer 1847, G. A. Wislicenus’ brother A. T. Wislicenus (1806–1883) formed a fourth Free Congregation in the town of Halberstadt after he was not confirmed in his post by the ecclesiastical authorities. The greatest struggle took place in Magdeburg against Leberecht Uhlich, who had been subject to a series of ecclesiastical investigations and prohibitions. In May 1847, he appealed to the last meeting of the Lichtfreunde for a united front against the royal consistory, but nearly all of his former allies declined out of fear of losing their churches. On October 23, the king himself came to Magdeburg and demanded of the supporters of the now-suspended Uhlich that they either make use of the Patent of March 30 and leave the church or accept the Apostolic Creed, which he referred to as the “last band of unity” in the church. On November 29, 112 Magdeburgers formally left the church and founded the Free Congregation. Uhlich was elected preacher and announced his own churchexit.101 Of those 7,000 dissidents, who were reportedly attending the new congregation by February 1848, only a fraction had actually left the church. As historian Jörg Brederlow rightly concludes, the function of the patent was “to amputate the trouble spot from the church by forcing an alternative on the followers of the religious protest movement, either to exit the church and accept the negative consequences or to act in conformity with the given church order.”102 Intolerable for elites and too expensive for the lower classes, the prohibitions kept the danger of hemorrhage low. Once forced out of the church, a radical such as G. A. Wislicenus lost much of his appeal. According to Rudolf Haym, only a small minority of his educated Hallenese supporters joined the 100

101

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Thile to Bodelschwingh, Eichhorn, Savigny, Uhden and Voss, January 1, 1847, reprinted in Friedrich, Landeskirche, 480. By February 1848, between 7,000 and 12,000 Magdeburgers had joined the congregation, although most without leaving the Protestant Church. Friedrich, Landeskirche, 416–443. Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 55.

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“adventurer” to “make the leap into emptiness.”103 The prospect of losing civil rights led to an exodus of middle-class liberals from the ranks of the dissident congregations. The church-leaving law proved a useful weapon for striking at two targets: church radicals and liberals. The former were isolated, while the latter were cowed into conformity.

“christian state” and “fourth confession” The “Toleration Edict” of 1847 sought to prevent the secularization and the politicization of the Prussian state churches by secularizing and marginalizing rationalist dissent. At the same time, this measure must be understood as a defense of the Christian nature of the Prussian state itself. On April 11, 1847, Friedrich Wilhelm IV gave a speech to the United Provincial Diet that opens a window on his understanding of the religious role of the state. He bluntly told the assembled representatives of the estates to lay aside hopes that the convocation of the Diet might pave the way for a constitutional monarchy with popular representation. To transform the “relationship between Prince and People [. . .] into a conventional, constitutional [one]” would violate the divine origin of the Prussian state, he stated. Never would he allow “a written page to come between our Lord God in heaven and this country, like a second Providence that wriggles in to rule us via [legal] paragraphs and through them replace the old, holy fidelity.” These liberal ideas were spread by the press, where “a dark spirit of perdition rules,” but they were also found, he stated, within the state churches. The king promised to protect his “old, Christian people” from efforts to cheat them of “their holiest refuge, of the belief in their and our heavenly savior, Lord and King.” Citing the Prophet Joshua, he declared: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”104 The members of the Diet did not comply with the king’s wishes, and in July 1847 he dissolved the body. Like the Synod the year before, the attempt to proactively steer elites toward his own desired reforms turned into a major defeat that exposed his religious and political isolation. The interpretive framework through which the king understood the dangers of constitutional rule and religious rationalism had been developed over the prior two decades by the circle of neoorthodox church leaders behind the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung.105 Although presented as a defense of tradition, their concept of the “Christian State” was in fact novel and proactive. It sought to revise the bureaucratic initiatives of the Prussian Reformers and instead “Christianize the state.” If the older Prussian tradition charged the state with protecting Protestant interests and mediating between confessions, the 103 104

105

Rudolf Haym, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1902), 166. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, “Thronrede zur Eröffnung des ersten Vereinigten Landtags, 11. April 1847,” in Politische Reden 1792– 1914, Peter Wende and Inge Schlotzauer, eds. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1990). Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1, 426.

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“Christian State” implied a third confessional role, namely the protection of Christianity against rationalism, secularism, and Jewish emancipation. For this new role to become clear, we need to see how the “Dissidents’ Law” related to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s actions toward other religious minorities – actions that show that he was reconfiguring confessional boundaries. He lessened (but did not undo) discrimination against Catholics and Christian minorities. He granted a general concession to the “Old Lutherans” on July 23, 1845, and told Metternich a month later of his intent to offer greater civic rights to truly Christian dissenters. The one traditional minority group pointedly excluded from this spirit of ecumenism was Prussian Jewry. It is particularly telling that the king himself had entered into a mixed marriage with a Catholic but refused to accept Jewish–Christian marriages without prior conversion.106 This matter was by no means peripheral to the monarch’s thought. Upon learning that the prominent Jewish liberal Ferdinand Falkson (1820–1900) had circumvented Prussian prohibitions by going to England to marry his Christian fiancée, Friedrich Wilhelm IV penned an angry letter to Bunsen, who was living at the time in England. His letter of January 1847 began: “You expect upon opening the letter, dear Bunsen, that [some news of] Krakow, Spain or Palmerston will leap out and – look there! It is just a Jew that leaps at your throat.” He sought Bunsen’s help in aiding “our somewhat too untheological judiciary” by uncovering this “little Jewish ignominy” [Juden-Schandwerk]. The king added in the postscript that he planned to solve the problem of such “mixed, swinish and apostate marriages” through the soon-to-be-published “tolerance measures.” Mixed marriages would be prohibited in synagogues and churches alike, and instead would take place before a judge, just as would happen to all those who leave the state churches.107 The stripping of confessional privileges from mixed couples indicates the proximity in the king’s mind of the threat of Jewish emancipation and rationalism. True to his word, following the “Tolerance Patent” of March 1847, the king prompted the creation of “Registries for Jews and Dissidents” in which civil servants registered the state acts (birth, marriage, death) of those who fell outside the acknowledgment of state churches.108 It was precisely the coincidence of these two forces, rationalist dissent and Jewish emancipation, that provided the context for the clearest articulation of the theory of the “Christian State” in an essay published in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung in 1847. Its author was the Berlin professor of law, Friedrich Julius Stahl, who had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism and was one of the leading theoreticians of Prussian conservatism. Stahl penned the essay, which 106

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Christopher Clark, “The Limits of the Confessional State: Conversions to Judaism in Prussia 1814–1843,” Past and Present, no. 147 (1995): 159–179. Friedrich Wilhelm IV to Bunsen, January 16, 1847, reprinted in Friedrich, Landeskirche, 481–482. GStA VIII. HA, J 1 Juden und Dissidentenregister.

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he entitled “The Christian State and its Relation to Deism and Judaism,” to oppose the calls for Jewish emancipation being made during the meeting of the United Provincial Diet.109 Liberal arguments for the full emancipation of the Jewish “confession” were, Stahl felt, based on the mistaken premise that confession and religion were identical: “Confession consists merely in the different understanding of one and the same revelation, which is jointly believed in; by contrast the difference of religion [consists] in the acceptance of different revelations.” God, Stahl continued, may have planned the division of Catholicism and Protestantism as “complements” in order to later lead them together. Jews and deists, who do not accept Christian revelation, stood outside of sacred history, the completion of which it was the state’s duty to assist. They could not therefore be recognized as confessions.110 Historian Christopher Clark has correctly pointed out the long-term durability of the concept of the Christian State in justifying the continued exclusion of Jews from some realms of the Prussian state even after the formal legal emancipation of the Jews by the North German Union in 1869.111 However, Clark largely neglected the important parallels that Stahl drew between Jews and rationalists. Because the “relationship [of the Jews] to the Christian State is essentially no other than that of declared deist sects,” Stahl contended, “it can give neither the one nor the other political rights,” if it “wants to maintain its Christian quality unblemished.” This, he maintained, was “not against justice, because there is no obligation that an institute [of the state] be sacrificed in order to satisfy the wishes and interests of individuals or conform to their (religious) opinions.”112 In the realm of the state and its activities, in other words, the prerogatives of the state churches took precedence over the individual right to freedom of conscience. This principle found its way into court judgments upholding discrimination against secularists and Jews in the unified German state after 1870.113 Stahl also took on liberal assumptions about the universality of religious rights derived from natural rights law. It was misleading for liberals to claim that their demands for “the equality (rather than freedom) of religion, the separation of church and state” were neutral, “because in religion no one is neutral.” These demands expressed a “positive decision [. . .] for the religion of Reason against Christianity.” In other words, although nominally calling for the

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110 111

112 113

Friedrich Julius Stahl, Der christliche Staat und sein Verhältniß zu Deismus und Judenthum, eine durch die Verhandlungen des vereinigten Landtags hervorgerufene Abhandlung (Berlin: Ludwig Dehmigke, 1847). Stahl, Der christliche Staat, 60–61. Christopher Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State and the ‘Jewish Citizen’ in Nineteenth-Century Prussia,” in Smith, Protestants, Catholics and Jews: 67–93, 80. Stahl, Der christliche Staat, 40, 48. See examples in Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 83–84.

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secularization of the state, the ultimate aim of liberals was, Stahl argued, to refound the state on a religion of humanity. Stahl’s essay contrasts the two rival understanding of “confession” at odds in 1847. Liberals wanted to extend the rights of confession to all citizens and all communities of belief, which would have made the Jews a third and the rationalist deists a fourth confession. Supporters of the Christian State, by contrast, stressed the theological basis for the continued exclusion of these groups from confessional status. In defending the confessional order, Stahl gave it a new grounding in antisecularism. Whereas Prussian ministers had traditionally justified exclusion of the Jews on the basis of their supposed foreign nationality – Eichhorn had reiterated this position in 1845 – Stahl provided a theologicalpolitical argument. Jewish emancipation had to be prevented because it was a roundabout way of secularizing the Christian State. Stahl’s views on the relationship of Jews and dissidents were not idiosyncratic. In the years 1845 to 1848, the demand for religious emancipation of Jews and dissidents crystallized in the formation of liberal political agenda of secularization. In fact, as Dagmar Herzog has shown, Badenese liberals did not come around to supporting Jewish emancipation until Deutschkatholizismus emerged.114 There is also ample evidence that liberal Jews and Christian dissidents made common cause and that Jews experienced a parallel religious upheaval. In May 1845, a group of lay leaders founded the “Society for the Reform of Judaism,” later known as the Berlin Jewish Reform Congregation. This rebellion against “old rabbinical Judaism” had been initiated by largely young, university-trained intellectuals, who had previously published an “Appeal to our German Brothers in Faith.” Echoing the language of the Lichtfreunde and Deutschkatholiken, this manifesto declared “we can no longer sacrifice our holy freedom to the despotism of the dead letter.” Contrary to the Christian dissenters, who framed their dissent as the reassertion of traditional rights threatened by recent conservative repression, the Jewish dissenters argued that their reform was made possible and necessary by the lifting of state repression of Jews. Commitment to Germany, “the fatherland that we adhere to with all bands of love,” required Jews to abandon prayers for a physical return to “Israel,” “the homeland of our ancestors,”115 and take steps to make their 114 115

Herzog, Intimacy. Declaration quoted in Julius Schoeps, “Aaron Bernstein – ein liberaler Volksaufklärer, Schriftsteller und Religionsreformer,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 28 (1976): 223–244, 236, 237, 238. The Berlin Declaration marked “a departure in the history of the Reform movement” according to Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128. Samuel Holdheim, Geschichte der Entstehung und Entwickelung der jüdischen Reformgemeinde in Berlin (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1857), 49–52. On the broad attempt by liberal European Jews to “confessionalize” Judaism, see Jens Neumann-Schliski, Konfession oder Stamm? Konzepte jüdischer Identität bei Redakteuren jüdischer Zeitschriften 1840 bis 1881 im internationalen Vergleich (Bremen: Lumiere, 2011).

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religion compatible with the other confessions, such as adopting Sunday Sabbath and replacing Hebrew with German liturgy. Like the Christian dissenting congregations, the Reform Congregation was not recognized by the Prussian king.116 Parallel to this upheaval within Judaism, some Jews also became involved in the nominally Christian dissident movements. From the beginning, police noted with suspicion Jewish participation in the meetings of the Deutschkatholiken and Lichtfreunde. At the meeting of the Berlin Lichtfreunde on August 1, 1845, Julius Berends welcomed the Jewish signatures on the protest petition as a sign of the “advance of the spirit.”117 Ferdinand Falkson, who had made such a public issue out of his interfaith marriage, collaborated closely with Julius Rupp, the leader of the first Protestant dissident congregation. Falkson wrote a book at that time praising the early modern monist Giordano Bruno and stated that he, like his fellow Jewish radical Johann Jacoby (1805–1877), would have joined the Königsberg dissidents had they not felt morally obliged to remain with their oppressed people.118 Free Religious dissidents likewise sought out contact to Jewish liberals. The Deutschkatholisch preacher Carl Scholl made a point of consciously cultivating friendships with Jews, to the point of taking the “final and conclusive step in this direction” by choosing “a life partner precisely out of the ranks of those oppressed by centuries of prejudice and accusations.” In his inaugural sermon in the Mannheim Deutschkatholisch Congregation in January 1846, he called for the “reunification of the brothers divided 300 years ago and the brothers divided 1800 years ago!” To ease the way for Jews to join the congregation he advocated doing away with baptism, and as a result became known locally as the “Jew priest [Judenpfarrer].” In September 1847, Scholl took part in a meeting in Berlin between the preacher of the Berlin Christkatholisch Congregation Brauner and prominent liberal Jews to discuss creation of an “association of Jews and non-Jews with the exclusive purpose of combating prejudice against Jewry and of creating a more intimate personal and mutual exchange.”119 While liberals understood the joining together of Jews and dissidents as the guarantee of their anticonfessional intentions and the universality of their 116

117 118

119

Much smaller than the Free Religious Congregation, the Berlin Reform Congregation existed until 1939 alongside the recognized majority Jewish Congregation and the Orthodox Congregation formed in the 1870s. Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, vol. 1 (Berlin: J. Guttentag, 1871), 192–193. Simone Ladwig-Winters, Freiheit und Bindung. Zur Geschichte der Jüdischen Reformgemeinde zu Berlin von den Anfängen bis zu ihrem Ende 1939 (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2004). GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 416, no. 34, p. 2. Ferdinand Falkson, ed., Gemischte Ehen zwischen Juden und Christen: Documente, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1847); idem, Giordano Bruno (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1846). On his decision not to join Rupp’s congregation, see Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens, 43. Carl Scholl, Zwei Antisemiten: Ein Freidenker und ein Hofprediger (Nuremberg and Leipzig: Robert Friese, 1890), 5, 2, 3.

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humanism, conservatives saw Jewish emancipation and Christian rationalism as the cracks through which atheism and revolution would seep into Christendom. Stahl also believed that these forces would destroy Judaism, and he warned Jews to resist the temptation to ally themselves with liberalism and thereby join the forces of secularization. Becoming secular Germans meant abandoning their covenant with God and losing their spiritual anchor. Jews were, in Stahl’s eyes, the ultimate victims of secularist liberalism.120 Most other conservatives were less sympathetic to the Jewish plight and reversed this logic, calling liberalism and secularism Jewish strategies for domination. Voices of Protestant orthodoxy, such as Hengstenberg’s, interpreted the Revolution of 1848 as a conspiracy of Jews, secularist atheists, and democrats.121

Conclusion: The Confessional Space of Secularism The rise of rationalist dissent meant that “the modern state had to officially open a door that led out of the church,” as the President of the Union of Free Religious Congregations Gustav Tschirn reflected in 1904. “Admittedly,” he continued, the Prussian state “opened it unhappily and just a crack, so that anyone passing through would be squashed.”122 Squashing the dissenters and thus preventing a hemorrhaging of the major confessions was the intent of Religionspatent of 1847, which used the exclusionary logic of the confessional system to undertake a new division between Christian and non-Christian. Statistically the legislation had little impact on the confessional makeup of Prussia. Only a tiny fraction of the population made use of the church-leaving law prior to the demise of the monarchy in 1918. In Berlin, which saw the greatest exit numbers in the Reich, a scant 0.4 percent of the city’s inhabitants had left the churches by 1905. By 1914, following a major anticlerical agitation campaign by secularists and socialists, only 3 percent had done so. Historians have pointed to this data as proof of the limits of secularization.123 Yet until 1905–1906, when Prussia finally introduced church taxes throughout the province, it was generally more expensive to pay the exit fee required by the state than to remain on the books as a passive member of one’s inherited confession. Behind those few who left the churches there were thousands who actively participated in Free Religion and even more who loaned their support. Although the aim of the legislation of 1847 was to minimize secularism’s impact on the religious order and the Prussian state, it nonetheless altered the 120 121

122 123

Stahl, Der christliche Staat, 43. Hans-Jürgen Gabriel, “Im Namen des Evangeliums gegen den Fortschritt. Zur Rolle der “Evangelischen Kirchenzeitung” unter E. W. Hengstenberg von 1830 bis 1849,” in Beiträge zur Berliner Kirchengeschichte, Günter Wirth ed. (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1987): 154–176, 171–173. Tschirn, Geschichte, 40. Anthony Steinhoff, “Religious Community and the Modern City: Reflections from German Europe,” in Geyer and Hölscher, Presence of God, 115–143, 135.

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confessional system in ways that allow us to speak of the integration of secularism through its exclusion. First, the legal limbo of the secularist dissenters paradoxically tied organized secularism to the state. Because the legislation that excluded them was premised on the right to join “tolerated religious societies,” dissident congregations understood themselves to be disenfranchised churches. The Free Religious Congregations took the rights and privileges of the state churches as the measure of their own aspirations, even as they fought against these rights and privileges. Second, because dissent was interpreted as an act of opposition against the state, joining Free Religion was necessarily a political act. As long as the Prussian state pursued theologico-political ends, so too did secularism. Third, one of the novelties of the Patent of March 1847 was that it explicitly allowed “church-leaving” without conversion to a new church. Yet, churchleaving took on characteristics of a conversion nonetheless. Rather than freeing one from confessional bounds, this act made one into a dissident and allowed the state to mark one as the recipient of a number of onerous restrictions. It also proved to be the Achilles heel of the reformed confessional system, as Ludwig von Gerlach pointed out to the king on the day of the patent’s issue. It allowed “apostate fathers” to leave their children unbaptized “if only to anger and embarrass church and authority.”124 As Chapter 5 reveals, secularists and socialists realized this potential several decades later, when, in the 1870s, they began to use “church-leaving” as a political and anticlerical weapon. Fourth, the exclusion of rationalist dissent had an impact on the other three major players in the confessional system, the two state churches and Judaism. It inoculated the state churches against radical religious and political developments. By linking the confessional discrimination against Jews with that against the secularist dissidents, the Prussian state provided structural support to philosemitism among dissidents and anti-Judaism among Christian conservatives. These patterns played a crucial role in the confessional politics of antisemitism in the 1870s and 1880s, as Chapter 6 will show. Fifth, the ultimate expression of the integration of secularism into the confessional system is found in the history of the term “Dissident.” Until the 1840s, Germans used the term roughly like the English cognates “dissident” or “dissenter,” that is, to designate members of nonconforming Protestant sects. After the rise of Free Religion in the 1840s and as a result of the “Dissidents’ Law” of 1847, the rationalists eclipsed the other sects, and by the 1870s the term “Dissident” in German had come to imply adherence to an immanent conception of God or even atheism. So strong was the identification with secularism that when the National Socialists required a legal term to designate advocates of a non-Christian völkisch worldview, they rejected “Dissident.” In its place, the neologism “gottgläubig” (“believing in God”) was introduced in 1936–1937, a term that signified less an actual belief in God than a rejection of secularism. 124

Quoted in Friedrich, Landeskirche, 410.

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Thus, while state repression hastened the secularization of dissent by forcing it out of the confessional order, repression also turned dissidence into the religious marker for German secularism. The outcome of the early struggle between Free Religion and the Prussian state helps explain the paradoxical nature of secularism in Germany. The Prussian state recognized the individual’s right to secular identity in order to drive proto-secularism, in the form of rationalism, from the churches. The denial of confessional status to radical Christian rationalism accelerated its secularization toward atheism, a development that will concern us in the next chapter. At the same time, it permanently associated secularism with confession and politics. Atheists became dissidents, and church-leaving took on associations of secularist conversion. The confessional system helped keep secularism tied to the patterns of dissent in which it originated and, just as key aspects of the “Christian State” survived the emancipatory steps of 1848, 1869, 1873, and 1918, so too did the confessional qualities of secularism.

2 Free Religious Worldview: From Christian Rationalism to Naturalistic Monism

The restructuring of Germany’s confessional system in the 1919 Weimar Constitution was the result of a compromise between the supporters of the major churches and advocates of secularization. Although it formally separated church and state for the first time in modern German history, the constitution subsequently provided that “religious societies remain corporations of public law, as long as they already were so” and guaranteed the former state churches the retention of most of the traditional privileges and financial support that had structured the confessional field prior to the war. Secularist dissidents remained excluded from these privileges as before, but a further provision offered them hope of future inclusion. Associations that “cultivate a worldview” might petition the state to become corporations of public law. The term “worldview” may seem an odd choice for the definitional criteria to be applied to religious minorities seeking access to the revamped confessional system. Yet, precisely this term was required to accommodate the secularist associations that the socialist and liberal deputies had in mind when they proposed this paragraph to the constitutional assembly.1 By 1919, most Free Religious Congregations no longer believed in a transcendent God, and the new secularist organizations that had emerged after 1880, such as the Freethinkers and the Monists, went further and resolutely refused to identify themselves with the terms “religion” or “faith” at all. Yet these organizations did have a creed, which they referred to most often as a worldview. The secularist conception of worldview proved remarkably stable between the 1870s and 1930s, when most secularists believed themselves to be fighting a struggle in which there were essentially two worldviews: the illusory, dualistic Christian worldview and their own immanent worldview grounded in modern

1

Florian Bohusch, “Verfassungsrechtliche Grundlagen der Glaubensfreiheit: Religionsverfassungsrecht in den deutschen Verfassungsberatungen seit 1848” (Dissertation, Constance, 2002), 165–186.

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natural science. This chapter charts the remarkable emergence of this worldview between 1845 and 1870. The first part examines the transformation of Free Religious theology (I use the word guardedly) in the unfolding process of dissent. It charts the shift from the Christian rationalism of 1845 to monistic concepts of religion by the early 1850s, a process that might be summarized as the immanentization of the divine. The second part looks in greater depth at the monist worldviews of the secularists. Here a second shift is of interest, namely the shift from a rather eclectic monism to a worldview that understood itself to be the extension and summation of modern natural science. Secularist Worldview in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Thought The exploration of the emergence of a secularist worldview in the unfolding of the dynamics of religious and political dissent opens a window onto the relationship of secularism to wider intellectual currents in nineteenth-century religion, philosophy, and natural science. In the historical literature, the terms most often ascribed to the secularist creed are positivism, materialism, or naturalism. “Monism,” however, is the term that best captures its epistemological and cosmological essence, and it is the one that came to be favored by many secularists prior to the First World War. In a narrow sense, the history of monism as a popular philosophy could begin in 1866, the year in which the zoologist Ernst Haeckel first used the term in his General Morphology. He argued that Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided a scientific master theory that made possible a “system of monism” based on “the unity of nature and the unity of science.”2 Not only did Haeckel do most to craft natural scientific monism into a coherent worldview, over the next half century he was also the term’s greatest popularizer. Riding on the heels of the enormous international success of his Welträtsel (1899, translated as Riddle of the Universe 1900), Haeckel founded the German Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund DMB) in 1906. Most historical studies of monism have focused on the period of Haeckel’s activity.3 2 3

Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. 2 (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 450. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald, 1971); Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Gangolf Hübinger, “Die monistische Bewegung. Sozialingenieure und Kulturprediger,” in Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900, Gangolf Hübinger and et al. eds. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 246–259; Monika Fick, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele: der psychophysische Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); Paul Ziche, ed., Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung (Berlin: Verl. für Wiss. und Bildung, 2000); Rosemarie Nöthlich et al., “Weltbild oder Weltanschauung? Die Gründung und Entwicklung des Deutschen Monistenbundes,” in Jahrbuch für Europäische Wissenschaftskultur, Heiko Weber and Maurizio Di Bartolo eds. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008). Among recent Haeckel studies: Sander Gliboff, H. G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Robert Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel

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If one approaches monism in a broader sense as anti-dualistic philosophy that posits a unity of spirit and matter in a single substance, then its history would stretch back to Baruch Spinoza and earlier stoic thinkers and continue forward into the early nineteenth century, when Schelling and Hegel tried in different ways to overcome Kant’s epistemological dualism through monistic systems.4 However, as I have argued elsewhere,5 the history of monism as a worldview should be dated to the mid-nineteenth century, when three related transformations occurred. The first two were identified by Georgi Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism and Lenin’s mentor, who wrote in 1895 that “[i]n the first half of our century philosophy was dominated by idealistic monism. In its second half there triumphed in science – with which meanwhile philosophy had been completely fused – materialistic monism, although far from always consistent and frank monism.”6 In other words, the mid-century saw, first, a shift from monist systems that privileged spirit to ones that privileged matter, and, second, a shift in its disciplinary foundation from philosophy to natural science. The popularity of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy and the rise of natural scientific reductionism in the 1840s speak to this convergence. When Ludwig Feuerbach called in The Essence of Christianity (1841) for a humanist anthropology to replace Christian theology, he not only reversed the predication of God and man, he called for the integration of the sciences of man, including biology, into philosophy. Empirical scientists were also translating their radical epistemological conclusions into philosophical claims. The young physiologist Rudolf Virchow noted in a lecture in Berlin in December 1846: “at a time when philosophy has turned to nature and to life, [. . .] medicine has discarded faith, quashed authority, and banned the hypothesis to domestic inactivity.”7 Although the Berlin physiologists and Left-Hegelians used the term “worldview,” one should not look at academic thought or science as the primary sites of the creation of worldview or the fusion of science and philosophy in naturalistic monism. For this, we need to consider a third transformation that was taking place in Germany between the 1840s and 1850s. At that time philosophical controversies became caught up in social, political, and religious conflicts in new ways.

4

5 6

7

and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For other literature, see Todd H. Weir, “The Riddles of Monism: An Introductory Essay,” in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, Todd H. Weir ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1–44. Frederick Gregory, “Proto-monism in German Philosophy, Theology, and Science, 1800 to 1845,” in Weir, Monism: 45–70. Weir, “The Riddles of Monism.” G. Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History, trans. Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956 [1895]), 15. David Galaty, “The Philosophical Basis of Mid-Nineteenth Century German Reductionism,” Journal of the History of Medicine vol. 29, no. July (1974): 295–316, 300. Virchow, quoted in Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner, Anthropologe, Politiker (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 46.

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With his famous aphorism of 1845 – “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” – Karl Marx called on intellectuals to turn philosophical critique into social action. Yet, the very formulation of this injunction points to the role that social ferment was already playing in the shaping of philosophy. The same conclusion can be reached about a statement issued by the Berlin Deutschkatholiken in 1852: “It is not enough to be allowed to recognize the truth, to research and perhaps teach the essence of philosophy, religion, morality, [and] true humanity, [rather] these should be exercised in practice and realized in social and political life.”8 This demand for the right to turn ideas into social practice reflected the degree to which the social practice of dissent was already shaping the development of ideas. A number of studies have drawn attention to the social context of the emergence of naturalistic worldviews in mid–nineteenth-century Germany. Peter Caldwell has shown how men and women such as Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Gustav von Struve, Richard Wagner, and Ludwig Feuerbach developed their social-utopian visions, immanent religiosity, and life reform projects in the crucible of the revolution of 1848.9 Andreas Daum has drawn attention to popular science as another key site of the production of naturalistic worldviews. He described Free Religion as a key vector for the dissemination of early popular science.10 Considering that the founders of the subsquent secularist organizations, such as Ludwig Büchner (German Union of Freethinkers), Wilhelm Bölsche11 (Giordano Bruno League for Unified Worldview), and Ernst Haeckel (German Monist League), were among Germany’s best-known and most successful science popularizers, one can conclude that commitment to secularism and a monist worldview went to the core of German popular science. Thus, although Free Religion was a “unique resonance chamber” for popular science, as Daum put it, popular science was also a unique field of activity for religious dissent. By examining the appearance of successive versions of monism within Free Religion, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the concrete religious contribution to the fusion of science and philosophy in monism well before

8 9

10

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“Unser Programm,” Der Dissident: Organ für Licht und Wahrheit, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 2, 1852). Peter Caldwell, Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Richard Wagner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998); idem, “Das versöhnende Element in der neuen Weltanschauung: Entwicklungsoptimismus, Naturästhetik und Harmoniedenken im populärwissenschaftlichen Diskurs der Naturkunde um 1900,” in Drehsen and Sparn, Weltbildwandel: 203–216. Wilhelm Bölsche (1861–1939) was one of Germany’s most successful science popularizers. Born in Cologne, where his father was the editor of Kölnische Zeitung, Bölsche dropped out of university and moved to Berlin in the mid-1880s, where he became a leading member of the naturalist writers and met his frequent collaborator, Bruno Wille. Bölsche joined the Berlin FRC in 1889 and was a frequent lecturer there until the First World War. By 1907 he had exited the Protestant confession.

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Haeckel popularized the term. Already in 1852 the Preacher of the Hamburg Free Congregation, Karl Kleinpaul, had described “our monist religion of nature” as the celebration of the manifestations of “the spirit in nature and the spirit in history.”12 This chapter’s investigation of early Free Religion shows how immanent systems of transcendence emerged within the dynamics of religious dissent. By linking these dissenting beliefs to worldview and to monism, it reveals how these important strands of nineteenth-century thought was articulated in and through the quadriconfessional field.

negative work: dissent and secularization The foundational assumption of Christian rationalism was that free use of reason led the individual to the inner truth of biblical revelation. Because reason and scripture were both divine gifts, the “negative” principle of rationalism and the “positive” faith in the supernatural were assumed to be necessary complements in proper exegesis.13 As long as rationalists were under the roof of the established churches, exegetical tradition and ecclesiastical authority reinforced their commitment to harmonize supernaturalism and rationalism.14 Once caught up in the dynamics of dissent in the 1840s, however, this commitment faltered and the presumed harmony between these two principles rapidly collapsed. The rationalist critique that had been applied to the “dogma” of the ecclesiastical establishment was soon turned against the supernaturalism initially ascribed to by most of the Deutschkatholiken and Lichtfreunde. For radical dissenters, the term “Christian rationalism” quickly became an oxymoron. In Berlin, as elsewhere in Prussia, the formulation of a confession (Bekenntnis) for the new Deutschkatholisch congregation proved to be the key issue around which radical and moderate camps formed. The first major doctrinal manifesto of Berlin’s Free Religion, the “Public Confession” of February 25, 1845, began with a refutation of all elements of Catholicism understood to be latter-day interpolations of the Roman Church, including priestly celibacy, confession, pilgrimage, the teaching of purgatory, and the rule of the pope. Like Luther, the Berlin dissidents acknowledged only two sacraments: baptism and communion. The only requirement for membership was adherence to a version of the fourth-century “Apostolic Confession,” which affirmed belief in the 12

13

14

Karl Kleinpaul, “Die philosophische Naturreligion,” Neue Reform, zur Förderung der Religion der Menschlichkeit (1852), 498–515, 514. Thanks to Peter Ramberg for identifying this early usage of “monism” by the Free Religious. On supernaturalism as revelation through the Bible and rationalism as revelation through human reason, see “Grundlinien der Christ-katholischen Dogmatik (Als Vorlage für die nächste allgemeine Kirchenversammlung),” Katholische Kirchenreform (April 1846): 59–63, (May 1846): 101–106. Rosenberg, “Theologischer Rationalismus.”

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trinity, the virgin birth, and resurrection.15 The document’s author was Anton Mauritius Müller, the congregation’s chairman and the editor of Katholische Kirchenreform, the recently launched journal intended to be a national mouthpiece for the new movement. Müller had modeled his creed on the “Schneidemühl Confession” of his friend Johannes Czerski, the Polish-German priest who had founded Germany’s first dissenting congregation in the town of Schneidemühl in Posen the previous October.16 A contrary position emerged around the other principal leader of the Berlin dissenting Catholics, Dr. Philip Anton Dethier, who like Müller, was a layman, writer, and publisher (Dethier ran the transportation journal Der Dampfer).17 Dethier supported the theological position of Johannes Ronge, the new movement’s most popular leader. Whereas Czerski’s “Confession” was only implicitly rationalist, Ronge made the autonomy of reason an explicit part of his own “Breslau Confession,” which stated that “the sole basis and content of the Christian faith is the holy scripture,” but that “[f]ree study and interpretation may be limited by no external authority.”18 At the first Council of the Deutschkatholiken held in Leipzig in March 1845, there was sharp debate over the theological and political implications of each creed. Ronge’s position triumphed in the final wording of the “Leipzig Confession.”19 The supporters of the Leipzig Confession defended its omission of the Apostolic Creed as an acknowledgment of the right of the individual congregations to choose their own confessions in accordance with the principle of religious freedom. Opponents, however, understood this omission to be an intentional erosion of fundamental Christian beliefs. Czerski argued that the Leipzig Confession was theologically so vague that it could be accepted almost anyone, and that even Confucians would be eligible for communion. This

15

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17

18

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Offenes Glaubens-Bekenntnis der deutsch-katholischen Gemeinde in Berlin: Nebst Anhang enthaltend einen Aufruf zur Constituirung eines deutsch-katholischen Kirchenconcils (Berlin: Wilhelm Hermes, 1845). Tschirn, Geschichte, 18. Müller’s brother joined Czerski’s Scheidemühl congregation after having been denied sacrament for the prior three years for having married a Protestant and not promised to raise his children in the Catholic faith. Katholische Kirchenreform (January 1845), 14. Phillip Anton Dethier (1803–1881), Dr. phil., born on Niederrhein to Catholic parents, Jesuit secondary school, student of philosophy (with Hegel and Schleiermacher among others), teacher in various capacities. He published studies of classical antiquity and enjoyed connections to Karabed Daud Oglon, the charge d’affaires of the Turkish embassy and an Armenian Catholic, who witnessed the baptism of his son on March 30, 1845, at the Deutschkatholisch Congregation in Berlin. In 1847, Dethier left Berlin to direct the Austrian school in Constantinople, where he later became director of the royal museum. Jordan manuscript, Harndt papers. Ronge’s draft of the “Breslau Confession” from February 21, 1845, in Lothar Geis, ed., Quellensammlung Freireligiöser Thesen: eine Zusammenstellung programmatischer Leitsätze, Artikel und Gedichte mit thesenhaftem Charakter von 1841 bis 1989 (Mainz: Freireligiöse Gemeinde Mainz, 1989), 46. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde. James Carrington, The German Reformation of the Nineteenth Century (London: Snow, 1846), 146.

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opened the door to unbelief.20 Tensions between the backers of Czerski and Ronge were such that when the Berlin congregation signaled its theological reorientation to Ronge’s more radical position by appointing Robert Brauner, an admitted supporter of the “Leipzig direction,” as its first preacher in May 1845, several members split off from the congregation in protest. In a letter to the Vossische Zeitung, they declared that the Leipzig Confession was leading Deutschkatholizismus away from Christianity because it did not begin with a clear acknowledgement of the divinity of Jesus. Faith in the son, they noted, was the “sharp boundary [. . .], where Christianity, Judaism, and paganism, where belief and unbelief part. Silence on this point in a new Christian confession of faith is – to put it mildly – a failing that must redound as an eternal reproach to a newly forming Christian church.”21 Accordingly, the “apostolic church” founded by Berlin protesters declared in its preamble, “without confession there can be neither true faith, nor a true church of Christ.”22 Both Czerski and Ronge used the term “apostolic” to describe their movement. The idea that Christianity had to return to its early ideals, forms, and spirit was ubiquitous among religious reformers of the 1830s and 1840s and found expression in movements as diverse as Oxford Tractarianism and the Church of Christ in Appalachia.23 In Germany, many Awakened thinkers, including the Prussian king, looked to the apostolic church as a model for ending confessional division and making possible something like a national church. Czerski and Anton Müller had a somewhat similar apostolic vision. By reducing the number of sacraments yet retaining the Apostolic Creed, the “Berlin Confession” brought the Deutschkatholisch congregation in line with the Protestantism of the majority of the Berlin and Prussian population. Accordingly, Anton Müller’s journal carried many articles about developments in British, American, and French liberal Protestantism, and Czerski was courted by English Protestants.24 Ronge, by contrast, argued for the primacy of apostolic spirit over the apostolic confession.25 At the induction ceremony in May for Robert Brauner, the twenty-eight-year-old Silesian priest called to lead the Berlin congregation, 20

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“Foreign and Colonial Intelligence: Germany,” The English Review, vol. IV, no. 7 (Oct. 1845): 243–253. C.W. Schmidt, Denkschrift betreffend die gottesdienstliche Feier der deutschkatholischen Gemeinde in Berlin bei Gelegenheit der Einführung des Pfarrers Brauner am Sonntage nach Pfingsten. Mit sämmtlichen bei der Feier gehaltenen Reden der Herren Ronge, Brauner, Müller und Fleischinger (Berlin: Enslinsche Buchhandlung, 1845). Carrington, German Reformation, 264. Mark Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 95–112 Following an offer to take his movement under the wing of the Anglican Church by a Mr. Smith in September 1845, Czerski traveled to London, where he was rebuffed by the Anglican church, but befriended by dissenters. Eduard Duller, Johannes Ronge und die freie Kirche (Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger, 1849), 70. An anonymous writer in April 1845 argued that the creed or “symbol” for the future “national church” must “never contradict the living spirit or restrict any progress.” “Aphorismen,

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Ronge told critics in the congregation that “faith cannot be measured with words. Christ did not issue a confession of faith, nor did the apostles.” Ronge admonished Brauner: “May the spirit that flowed through the first Christian congregation also flow through you, . . . May a divine love fill your soul and chain you indivisibly to the holy cause and to your congregation, for whom you will work with all strength of will and for whom you will sacrifice yourself if necessary.”26 The charismatic claim to religious authority through the operation of the apostolic spirit was a feature of Deutschkatholisch dissent shared by some contemporary evangelical sects. By making the congregation itself the site of divine action, the vertical dispensation of salvation through the church hierarchy was directly challenged. Yet, unlike evangelical sects, where the outpouring of divine love was connected to renunciation of sin, Ronge interpreted the operation of the Holy Spirit in a clearly democratic and eudemonistic vein. “Rome teaches that God divides people, making one eternally unhappy, the other eternally blessed,” he told the congregation in Berlin. “But a God of love cannot hate, he does not want the damnation of people, he wants all of them to reach blessedness though him, through love. [. . .] The kingdom of God,” he concluded, “is among the believers.”27 Thus, although both competing camps were anticonfessional and antiultramontane, only the religious doctrine of Czerski and Müller was suited to lead to a religious unification of German Catholics under the umbrella of the Protestant Church. Ronge’s theology was deeply anti-ecclesiastical, and he soon extended his critique to Protestantism as well, saying “the Protestants have made a book their pope, [this] book is but a dead letter.”28 His was to be a new Reformation that required a new creed. Ronge saw his natural partners not in the Protestant establishment, although he hoped for toleration from that quarter, but in the Protestant radicals, the Lichtfreunde. For both Ronge and the Lichtfreunde, spirit (Geist) was a fungible concept that expressed a presumed unity among the Holy Spirit, fraternal love, reason, and historical progress. The latter element was expressed in the Leipzig Confession’s injunction that member congregations should independently review and alter their creeds “according to the consciousness of the time and advances in the study of the holy scripture.”29 Reason was leading Christians both back to the truth of original revelation and forward to religious forms that conformed to modern needs and science. In his text “Whether Scripture or Spirit?” published in March 1845, the Protestant dissident G. A. Wislicenus argued that if religious reformers accepted

26 27 28 29

betreffend eine Vereinigung der neu-katholischen und evangelischen Kirche zur deutschen Nationalkirche,” Katholische Kirchenreform, April 1845: 74–81. Schmidt, Denkschrift, 11. Schmidt, Denkschrift, 11. Quoted in Carrington, German Reformation, 288. Geis, Freireligiöses Quellenbuch, vol. 1, 27.

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that spirit revealed itself in history, as was laid out by the historical school of Protestant theology, then reason took precedence over the Bible. By extension the religious developments of the present took precedence over the biblical past. Against his critics in the neo-Pietist Evangelische Kirchenzeitung Wislicenus argued that “Holy Ghost” (Heiliger Geist) and “Zeitgeist” were identical, because the spirit “drives towards ever greater forms, recognizes itself and the world ever more clearly, it is in an eternal development, like the individual person.”30 In this vision, the turning points of Christian sacred time (i.e., creation, fall, resurrection, and last judgment) were reduced to metaphors, and human progress in secular time was raised to a theological principle. Most Protestant and Catholic dissenters were cool to Wislicenus’ radical theology in 1845; however, debates within Deutschkatholizismus in late 1846 reveal that a front was opening up between the adherents of Christian rationalism and those favoring more immanent understandings of divine spirit.31 In October, Ottomar Behnsch, one of the Breslau preachers, published “Twenty One Principles,” which included a declaration that “the Christkatholisch community may not issue a creed as its bond of unity.” Karl Kleinpaul, a student of Protestant theology and adherent of Wislicenus’ group, reported in December 1846 that Ronge had assured him that he based his religion alone on “freedom of the spirit” and rejected any “confession.” Ronge confided that his cautious theological statements on behalf of Deutschkatholizismus had been tactically necessary “to secure its toleration by the governments [of the German states].” Now that this toleration had been achieved, Ronge believed the Deutschkatholiken could abandon caution and unite with the radical Protestants.32 Conflicts sharpened among Berlin Deutschkatholiken as well. Upon assuming editorship of Berlin’s Katholische Kirchenreform from Müller in February 1847, Ignaz Koch declared his intention to wage a two-front battle. His first blow would hit the poison “snake” of Catholic “hierarchy,” but his second blow was aimed at religious radicalism “which places a philosophical fantasy in the place of Christ and does not recognize the holy scripture as the expression of higher inspiration.”33 Steering in the opposite direction, Preacher Brauner lent his support to Behnsch’s Twenty One Principles in a sermon on the second anniversary of the founding of the congregation in Berlin. Just as the early Christians had freed themselves of Judaism to become truly universal, he urged his fellow

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Wislicenus, Ob Schrift? Ob Geist?, 46. Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens, 98. Kleinpaul, “Über das Verhältniß des Herrn Ronge zu den freien Gemeinden,” Kirchliche Reform (December 1846): 26–27. Ronge’s attempt at damage control following Kleinpaul’s revelations are found in Johannes Ronge, Das Wesen der freien christlichen Kirche (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1847), 67–68. “Was wir wollen,” Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 5, no. 1 (1847): 1.

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Deutschkatholiken to abandon remaining elements of Roman Catholicism in order to unite with the new Protestant Free Congregations.34 When the second Council of the Deutschkatholiken met in Berlin in May 1847, debate centered around the questions of confession and the relationship to the Protestant dissidents. Brauner’s used his opening speech to fire the first salvo. “It is up to us,” he told the delegates, “to pick the fruits of experience and science, to tie the transformation of the church to the developments of the present-day. It is up to us to found a community of brothers, in which total freedom of thought and confession (Bekenntnis) reigns and the differences of views and creeds lead to no division in life, where principle and idea count for more than word and doctrine, [. . .] and where above all love is written in fiery gilded script on the banner.”35 In the end, the radicals failed to find a majority for their position and the delegates voted to maintain the existing creed and not to seek unification with the free Protestant congregations. Koch declared the vote a “victory” for Christian rationalism against the essentially alien and marginal religious radicalism of Breslau, which had fallen for the naturalistic “speculations” of botanist Nees von Esenbeck and entered into an alliance with “the free Protestant congregations of the Hegelian Leftists.”36 However, Robert Blum, an important mediating figure in the Deutschkatholisch movement, gave a more accurate analysis: the Berlin Council was a compromise that kept the taut seams of the movement from bursting.37

Dissent and Secularization The new statute adopted by the Berlin Christkatholisch congregation in 1851 showed that the Brauner faction had prevailed in the intervening years. The statute rejected any binding creed “not because we have no religious convictions, but because such a [creed] would limit freedom of thought and conscience,” and revealed a tenuous tie to Christianity. “The source of our religion,” it declared, “is God, as he reveals himself in the laws of nature and of the spirit, through the ideas of wise men, for example Jesus, [and] through the development of the world and humanity.” Like Jesus, the Bible too was reduced to the status of an artifact in the historical unfolding of the spirit: “that which is rational in the

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Robert Brauner, “Predigt gehalten am 28. März 1847,” Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 5, no. 2 (1847): 21–29. Robert Brauner, “Rede bei Eröffnung des deutschkatholischen Concils zu Berlin,” Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 5, no. 3/4 (1847): 21–29. Review of Wilhelm Hieronymi’s book, “Die Gefahren des Deutschkatholicismus” Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 5, no. 3/4 (1847): 77. In February 1847, the journal stated that the Hegelian Left, “had nothing to do” with the creation of Deutschkatholizismus. “Christkatholicismus und kirchlicher Radikalismus,” Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 5, no. 1 (1847): 8–9. Robert Blum, “Das ‘hohe Ziel’: der ‘allgemeine Menschheitsbund,” in Freireligiöses Quellenbuch, 62.

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biblical-Christian tradition we recognize, and to that degree we are based in Christianity.”38 Surveying the state of the Deutschkatholisch movement in 1850, the theologian and preacher Ferdinand Kampe accounted for its rapid secularization as the action of the self-conscious spirit “peeling away the transcendent hull.” Deutschkatholicism had arisen when “the spirit, the actual man in the house” sought to overthrow “the dishonorable, insufferable pettycoat government [Pantoffelregiment der Frau]” of religion. Kampe understood the Christian rationalism of the Leipzig and Berlin Councils to have been the last phase of weakness, when the spirit, still exhausted from its long “serfdom and imprisonment,” had “thrown itself in the arms” of religion and succumbed to compromise.39 By 1850, however, Kampe felt that the tides were beginning to turn, and, if placed in parliamentary order, “conservative rationalism” would sit “sulking” on the right, with “speculative” theology in the Left Center, leaving “the humane current” “on the Left [. . .] with ranks closed around the unity of its unconcealed, strong principle.”40 Kampe was, as might be surmised, a proponent of the latter “religion of humanity,” a post-Christian, monistic humanism that Kampe believed was the theological expression of the fully autonomous and selfconscious spirit. Andreas Holzem, like other recent historians of early Free Religion, accepted Kampe’s tripartite typology of Deutschkatholisch theology; however, he rightly challenged Kampe’s characterization of the inexorable nature of its secularization. Many of the Southwest German congregations studied by Holzem remained steadfast in their adherence to Christian rationalism, a stark contrast to the rapid secularization that seized the dissenting congregations in cities such as Breslau, Berlin, and Leipzig.41 Such regional differences draw our attention to local balances of forces to explain where religious dissent embraced secularization. The case that attracted the most attention early on was Breslau, home to Germany’s largest Deutschkatholisch congregation, where some leaders began to preach socialism and immanent religiosity in 1846. A key role was played by the lay preaching of Christian Gottfried Nees von Esenbeck (1776–1856), a septuagenarian botanist whose natural and speculative philosophy drew heavily on Schelling.42 For Nees pantheism entailed humanism. As a self-conscious being, “man is a living spirit; living and as spirit he gives himself to the whole 38

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“Verfassung der Christ-katholischen Gemeinde zu Berlin” approved October 6, 1851. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15033, no. 48, Ferdinand Kampe, Das Wesen des Deutschkatholizismus, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf sein Verhältniß zur Politik (Tübingen: Ludwig Fues, 1850), 36. Kampe, Das Wesen des Deutschkatholizismus, 72–73. Holzem, Kirchenreform, 380–384. Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 2, 103–104. On Nees, the best investigation is Leesch, Deutschkatholizismus, 45–84; see also Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 79–89; Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 504.

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[of nature and humanity].”43 Practically, this translated into an ethical obligation to democracy and social reform, which Nees sought to realize in a number of endeavors including the formation in 1846 of a “Du-Verein,” which made the informal “Thou” the common mode of address among members in order to foster egalitarian community. Under Nees’s influence, Theodor Hofferichter, a former Protestant minister, abandoned theism for pantheism and began preaching on the affinities between early Christianity and socialism. These developments sparked a political–theological power struggle in late 1846 that was decided in favor of the radicals by the influx of new, more plebian members drawn to Nees’s theology and politics. After Nees was elected chairman, the previous officeholder quit the congregation on December 30, 1846, with the declaration that “the association has been led out of Christian territory and into the desert of communism.”44 Overall, as a well-informed Scottish observer in Prussia noted in 1846, the rising social and political unrest of the period favored the more radical positions.45 As long as Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s policy toward the Catholic dissenters remained publicly ambivalent, this had a moderating influence on their theology. In May 1847, Koch still extolled the “dissidents’ patent” of March as a gift from “Germany’s most enlightened ruler.” However, it soon became clear to the Berliners that the patent was, in Brauner’s words, “a death sentence, a banishment decree for the newly forming congregations.”46 In the summer of 1847, the rival Berlin congregation of “Protestkatholiken,” which was submitting its own petition to the state for recognition under the term of the patent, announced that it would separate from the Deutschkatholisch movement because it had become “unchristian.”47 The Revolution of 1848 The revolution that came to Berlin in March 1848 reduced discrimination and censorship and allowed for a normalization of Free Religious practice. In Berlin, the Deutschkatholiken received use of the Protestant Klosterkirche for their services. A Protestant, the veterinarian Friedrich Ludwig Urban (1806–1879), who had achieved revolutionary fame as a commander of one of the Berlin barricades, was finally able to overcome earlier state resistance and found the “Free Berlin Congregation of the Original Christian Covenant.” This 43 44 45

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Quoted in Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 81. Quoted in Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 2, 112. Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 88. As a supporter of Czerski, James Carrington feared that a “mobocracy” would organize around the radical position and push the Deutschkatholiken away from Christianity. Carrington, German Reformation, 334. Ignaz Koch, “Römisch oder Deutsch? Offenes Sendschreiben,” Die Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 4, no. III and IV, 1847, 41–43. Robert Brauner, Todtenfeier für die am 18. und 19. März 1848 Gefallenen. Rede von Robert Brauner (Berlin: Reuter & Stargardt, 1849), 12. Die Katholische Kirchenreform, vol. 4, no. 6 (1847), 118.

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association had ca. 210 members, and its meetings drew crowds of up to 500 persons between 1848 and 1851, when it presumably fell victim to political reaction. Urban later joined the Free Religious Congregation.48 A significant number of Free Religious preachers and lay leaders were elected to the revolutionary parliaments. Six Prussian Deutschkatholiken were sent to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main, including the Saxons Robert Blum, Emil Rossmässler, and Franz Wigand. The Prussian National Assembly in Berlin included ten leading members of the Protestant Free Congregations of Silesia and Province Saxony and seven Deutschkatholisch leaders, including Nees von Esenbeck and Behnsch. Particularly galling for conservative Christians, the Berlin Commission on Religion and Church included two prominent Lichtfreunde (Leberecht Uhlich and Eduard Baltzer) and two Deutschkatholisch preachers from Silesia.49 This confirmed the conservative view that secularism was to blame for the revolution. In June 1848, the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung wrote that the “radicals had desecrated all of Germany by ripping it from the Christian Church and enslaving it under the rule of the Jews, Deutschkatholiken, pantheists and atheists, under the rule of the Vorparlament and the [commission of] fifty in Frankfurt.”50 For their part, the Free Religious saw politics as a means of exporting their congregations’ fraternal structures and humanist teachings into German society as a whole. Nees von Esenbeck told his supporters back in Breslau that he had accepted his election to Prussian parliament in 1848 and to the presidency of the Workers Congress in 1849 as “a Christkatholisch missionary.”51 The revolution revealed strong correlations between theological and political positions within Free Religion. The central figure in the more conservative rationalist wing of Deutschkatholismus was the Darmstadt preacher Wilhelm Hieronymi, a political moderate who turned from the revolution as it radicalized in 1849, claiming that it had failed to maintain the “proper center” between “reaction and revolution.” The Magdeburg preacher and leader of the Lichtfreunde Leberecht Uhlich was another supporter of Christian rationalism. He joined the moderate “Center Left” as a delegate in the Prussian Parliament. Robert Blum, who occupied a similar mediating position in the Deutschkatholisch movement, initially supported constitutional monarchy in the Frankfurt Parliament. He later shifted toward a more radical position and

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LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 13830 and 15515. Christoph Hamann, “‘Herr Urban ist kein Robespierre’: Friedrich Ludwig Urban – ‘Barrikadenheld’ und ‘Volkstribun’ 1848 in Berlin,” Der Bär von Berlin. Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins (1996): 7–24. Christkatholisches Ressourcen-Blatt, vol. I, no. 18 (September 1, 1848): 69–70; Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 86; Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 121; Leberecht Uhlich, Leberecht Uhlich in Magdeburg. Sein Leben von ihm selbst geschrieben, 2nd ed. (Gera: Paul Strebel, 1872), 47. Gabriel, “Evangelischen Kirchenzeitung,” 171. “Nees von Esenbeck’s Geburtstag” and “Antwort unseres Nees,” Christkatholisches RessourcenBlatt, vol. 1, no. 42 (February 23, 1849): 171–172.

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became the revolution’s greatest martyr after he was captured and summarily executed in October 1848 for his participation in fighting in Vienna.52 Most notable, however, was the strong identification of Free Religious leaders with the radical Democratic movement. A Prussian police report of 1858 found that during the revolution, “everywhere the term Deutschkatholik coincided with that of Democrat.”53 Free Religious preachers and laity took many leadership positions in newly formed extraparliamentary democratic associations and workers’ clubs, some of which advocated armed insurrection against the monarchies. Leading dissidents were elected to head major Democratic Congresses that met in 1848 and 1849.54 Some Deutschkatholiken, such as Robert Blum, saw these democratic associations as auxillaries to parliamentary work. Others, such as Johannes Ronge and the Badenese Lawyer Gustav von Struve (1805–1870), saw in them the true bearers of the revolution and wanted them to supplant the Frankfurt Parliament, particularly after it came under the domination of the right-center faction.55

Immanence and Revolution During the revolution, Robert Blum reportedly called Deutschkatholizismus a “school for Democracy,” yet revolutionary Democracy was also a school for theological innovation.56 Important steps toward a religion of immanence had already occurred, for example in the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, but it was during the revolution and its aftermath that post-Christian, immanent forms of religious life were forged. With the weakening of censorship at the start of the revolution in 1848, Free Religious radicals were able to publicly elaborate the connections they saw between political and religious anti-authoritarianism. Hofferichter and Kampe founded a new journal, For Free Religious Life, in which they fought “the battle against the transcendent God.”57 Kampe defined “transcendence” as “the worldview that opposes to the really existing, sensually preceptible world, a

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On Blum’s religious and political activities, see Ralf Zerback, Robert Blum: Eine Biographie (Leipzig: Lehmstedt, 2007), 167–189. “Protokoll der 13. Polizeikonferenz vom 14. bis 17. Juni 1858 in Karlsruhe,” in Die Polizeikonferenzen deutscher Staaten 1851–1866: Präliminardokumente, Protokolle und Anlagen, Friedrich Beck and Walter Schmidt eds. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1993): 405–411, quotation 410. A police informer reported overhearing Bräutigam, the chairman of the Berlin congregation, say: “Dissident and Democrat are indivisible! A Democrat who is not a dissident is an absurdity. It is also an absurdity if a dissident is not a Democrat.” Police extract, January 19, 1854, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030 C, no. 10085. Holzem, Kirchenreform, 415; Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 93. Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 132. Zerback, Blum,175. Kampe, Wesen des Deutschkatholizismus, 48.

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world of the Beyond (Beyond: above the stars), a world of spirits, of selfconscious imperceptible beings and a lord over these beings.”58 The interconnection between immanence and revolution can be studied in the changing meanings of the term “Beyond” (Jenseits). As I have shown elsewhere, when this neologism – a noun created from the phrase “beyond the grave” – became widely circulated in Germany in the 1830s, it still had competing theological definitions.59 Christian rationalists emphasized the unknowability of the afterlife, whereas the rising spiritualist movement understood the “Beyond” to coexist with the physical world as another dimension of spirit. However, during the revolutionary period of the 1840s and 1850s the secularist usage of “the Beyond” as an illusion came to predominate in public discourse. Whereas Free Religionists retained positive definitions of the terms “God,” “Christ,” and “Holy Spirit,” radicals in 1847 and 1848 invoked the term Jenseits to sever any ties between immanent and transcendent viewpoints. The categorical pair Diesseits and Jenseits was invoked to describe two camps – one allied with this world and reality and another committed to redemption in the afterlife. On the issue of transcendence, radical dissidents identified their Christian rationalist colleagues as allies of the orthodoxy. Sundering compromising positions in religion and politics was the message of a poem published in a September 1848 issue of For Free Religious Life; it was by Phillip Krebs, a student of theology and later Deutschkatholisch preacher. This poem was ironically entitled “Reconciliation”: Diesseits and Jenseits! Away with any bridge! We need no bridge more, nor ferry! ‘Whole!’ is the slogan! ‘Whole! Of a single piece!’ And all half measures be now discarded! [. . .] Diesseits and Jenseits! – let the pact be torn, Let the weak be made strong and the strong weak! Each now stands on his own feet, And each names his, what he has achieved!60

This demand for the active elimination of the Beyond appeared during the autumn crisis of 1848 when the revolution entered a more violent, divisive phase. It was at this time that radicals, including many Free Religious leaders, decisively broke ranks with the liberal-dominated Parliament in Frankfurt that favored constitutional monarchy. Unwilling to make concessions to the old regime, the Democrats moved toward revolutionary violence. The metaphor of 58

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Ferdinand Kampe, “Luther und der Bauernkrieg,” Für freies religiöses Leben: Materialien zur Geschichte und Fortbildung der freien Gemeinden, insbesondere der freien katholischen, vol. 1, no. 5 (August 4, 1848): 34. Todd Weir, “The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Church History vol. 77, no. 3 (2008). Für freies religiöses Leben, vol. 1, no. 10 (September 8, 1848): 78.

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the demolished bridge between Jenseits and Diesseits stood for the complete theological separation of immanent spirituality from Christian rationalism as well as the political break between radicals and liberals. The centrality of immanent humanism to German revolutionaries was a peculiarity that struck foreign observers.61 Reaction For insight into how political dissent continued to drive the theological radicalization of Free Religion, even after the collapse of the revolution, we can turn to Berlin in the first half of the 1850s. The definitive end of the revolutionary era in Germany came when the Prussian crown agreed to the Punctation of Olmütz in November 1850 and relented from its bid for paramountcy over the German states. No longer concerned with currying the favor of liberals in the event of a possible national war with Bavaria and Austria, Prussia’s new minister president Otto von Manteuffel announced to the parliament in January 1851 his intention to “break decisively with the revolution.”62 At this time the policy of prosecuting individual religious dissidents for their political activities gave way to a general and systematic repression of the entire Free Religious movement. Across Germany many Free Religious congregations were forcibly disbanded and their preachers jailed or forced into exile in England, Switzerland, or America. Membership in the congregations dropped precipitously as a consequence of the repression of the years 1851–1859 and the movement never recovered its strength. Berlin preacher Robert Brauner was the target of particularly sharp persecution. In September 1851, he was exiled from the city without a criminal charge having been brought against him and, although he held a Prussian passport, driven from Breslau and Halberstadt as well. He petitioned the Prussian Diet for redress, and in a lengthy and raucous debate on the floor of the Prussian Diet on January 26, 1852, a state commissar justified the actions of the Ministry of the Interior by quoting extensively from recent documents penned by Brauner that demonstrated he was both an atheist and a revolutionary.63 These documents and police records indicate that, as state repression increased over the course of 1851, Brauner and the congregation responded by further radicalizing their political and theological positions. In his New Year’s address to the congregation in 1851, which Brauner had published as a 61

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Anon. “German Socialism,” in The North British Review, vol. XI, no. 22 (1849): 406–435. E.R., “Les Historiens Critiques de Jésus,” in La Liberté de Penser, vol. 13 (1849): 437–470. Quoted in Karl-Ernst Jeismann, “Die ‘Stiehlische Regulative’. Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Politik und Pädagogik während der Reaktionszeit in Preußen,” in Schule und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Ulrich Herrmann ed. (Weinheim, Basel: Beltz, 1977): 137–161, 139. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der durch die Allerhöchste Verordnung vom 4. November 1851 einberufenen Kammern, vol. 1 (Zweite Kammer) (Berlin: Deckersche Geheime Ober-Hofbuchdruckerei), 795–818.

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brochure, he gave vent to frustration at state meddling in religious affairs when he cited “practical reasons” that prevented him from discarding his clerical robes, which he felt every member of the congregation had the right to wear.64 He lashed out at the Prussian state’s foreign policy, stating that the “German Fatherland had been handed over to Austria, its priests and court aristocrats,” which was a thinly veiled reference to the “Disgrace of Olmütz.” In February, Brauner called for the elimination of the monarch (Landesvater) from the congregation’s prayers. In response, the chairman and two other leading members of the congregation resigned. They were replaced by men identified by the police as former members of the revolutionary democratic Volkspartei.65 The political dimension of the congregation’s crisis was the main subject of a further piece of incriminating evidence brought against Brauner. In March, police intercepted a letter he had sent to the congregation’s former vice chairman, Dr. Dethier, now a teacher at the Austrian School in Constantinople. The revolution, he reported, had “lastingly damaged our congregation.” Only one in ten founding members was still active, and several leaders had returned to the lap of the Catholic Church. Most active members had joined since the revolution, and nearly all were members of the Democratic party. State pressure made it nearly impossible for civil servants to remain in the congregation and the entire network of communal support had disappeared, leaving only the women’s support organization. “If the congregations do not want to fall between the stools,” he concluded, “they must, in my opinion, join up with the Volkspartei. Mind you, there are practical problems [with this].” Those who supported this course were growing, while those who followed a safer path were shrinking in number.66 Repression in Berlin deepened in June 1851 when the Protestant authorities declared the dissidents to no longer be Christian. Three days later, use of the Klosterkirche was taken from them. On August 11, the Ministry of the Interior charged the Free Congregations with pursuing political ends “under the cloak” of purportedly religious aims.67 While congregations in Königsberg, Stettin, and many towns across Prussia were disbanded, the Berlin Christkatholisch congregation survived, but it was subject to repeated police efforts to undermine its activities. A battery of further repressive measures followed over the 64

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Robert Brauner, Was Wir Wünschen. Rede, gehalten am Neujahrstage 1851 (Berlin: author’s edition 1851), 4–5. A police analysis of February 1851 found that unlike those who resigned (the merchant Franz Reschke and the carpenter master Fleischinger) all other members of the leadership of the Christkatholische Congregation of Berlin were former members of the revolutionary Volkspartei. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15033, pp. 29, 96, 118, 125, 128. Letter from Brauner to Dethier, March 26, 1851. Cited during the debate of the Prussian Diet, Second Chamber, 13th session, on January 26, 1852, Stenographische Berichte, 166–188. “Verordung, das Verbot der sogenannten freien Gemeinden betreffend, vom 11. Aug. 1851,” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030 C, no. 10085, p. 27. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 19, 21.

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next three years: previously celebrated Free Religious marriages between Jews and Christian were annulled, baptisms were declared invalid, and state officials and military officers were prohibited from even attending Free Religious services. In October 1852, the police began to dissolve meetings. Brauner, whose harried life in exile had exacerbated his tuberculosis, was allowed to return to Berlin in 1854 to die. The congregation’s second preacher Erdmann had died the prior year, and every effort to gain a replacement for the two men was thwarted by the police, who even intercepted one candidate on the train and sent him home. In 1854, the congregation was prohibited from taking any collections, and in 1855 the congregation was declared a political organization, which meant that women and children were prevented from attending services.68 It was in the midst of sharpening police persecution, on October 10, 1851, that the congregation approved the new statute of principles mentioned earlier, which announced that baptism and communion were regarded “as mere symbolic rituals,” a final renunciation of sacramental rites that anyway were denied legal sanction by the police. Three years later, at the deepest point of repression, when the congregation had no formal preacher and was forced to meet in a factory loft called the “Wollboden,” board member Bartels gave a speech on the subject of immortality. Now that the congregation had overcome the faith in the personal God and supernatural Christ, he stated, it was mature enough to give up the childhood faith in the Beyond.69 The developments in Berlin between 1851 and 1854 demonstrate that secularization continued to be driven forward by the interactions of the confessional state and radicals. Fears expressed by court officials and Protestant conservatives in 1845 about the linkage of pantheism and antimonarchical democracy had been borne out by the course of the revolution.70 In order to root out the possibility of future revolution, the official Prussian policy – as stated at a police conference of the German states in 1858 – was to divide religion from politics. Because the state considered pantheism not religious at all, it deemed Free Religion one of the “most popular masks for political endeavors.” Hence rather than demanding that Free Religion depoliticize (i.e., restrict itself to the religious sphere), the Prussian police urged their counterparts in the other German states to join in a concerted and “unrelenting” effort to “strip from [this movement] its supposedly religious character in front of the whole world.”71

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The persecutions are enumerated in Petition des Vorstandes der christkatholischen Gemeinde zu Berlin an das Haus der Abgeordneten, vom 30. Dezember 1855 (Berlin, Pormetter, 1856) and Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 4, 343. Police report of Nov. 19, 1854, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030 C, no. 10085, no. 380. Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 3, 253. “Protokoll der 13. Polizeikonferenz vom 14. bis 17. Juni 1858 in Karlsruhe,” 410.

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positive work: monist worldview around 1850 Having now examined the importance of the forces of dissent and revolution to the radicalization of religious critique, it is time to look in greater depth at the immanent worldviews developed by Free Religious leaders. The need for such a positive doctrine was expressed at the conference of the Free Congregations of former Protestants in Halberstadt in November 1849, where delegates asked themselves whether it was time “to reject the dualistic world principle” and “establish a formula based on immanence as the point of unity.” Attending as a guest of the Deutschkatholisch movement, Breslau preacher Theodor Hofferichter noted the change from the prior conference in Nordhausen in 1847, where unity was sought in the “negation of old churchdom, in the autonomy of the congregation and the spiritual freedom of the individual.”72 Among radical Deutschkatholiken, too, an apparent reversal was taking place, whereby those who had most adamantly opposed the creation of a creed began to announce that the time was ripe to shift from “negative” to “positive” work. The timing of these calls for a systematization of a new philosophy based on an immanent conception of the divine points again to the importance of the revolutionary context. As we have seen, the emergence of a Democratic insurrectionist alternative to the liberal parliamentary revolution had pushed many Free Religionists to break completely with key elements of Christianity. Yet this split between Democrats and liberals in 1848 contributed decisively to the failure of the revolution the following year, a development that led many Free Religious radicals to rethink their strategy. As often occurs following revolutionary upheavals, faith in the spontaneous action of the masses gave way to culturalist projects for their reeducation. One Free Religionist writing in early 1849 found that the universal call for unity and freedom that had ignited the revolution had been too external. It had lacked a proper grounding in the people’s consciousness, which “in general is still too underdeveloped.” He offered his own monist blueprint for a “temple of unity” as a foundation to fill this educational void.73 Calls for a new foundation, a new worldview, became even more pronounced in the 1850s.

Robert Brauner’s Pantheistic Monism In 1851, the Berlin preacher Robert Brauner published his Theology for the Free, which was one of the many manifestoes penned by Free Religious leaders at that time that documented a clear shift from Christian dualism to an immanent 72

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“Meine Sendung zur Conferenz der freien Gemeinden in Halberstadt,” Christkatholisches Ressourcen-Blatt no. 27 (November 2, 1849): 105–107. K.B. [most likely the suspended philosophy professor and leader of the Marburg Free Congregation Karl Bayrhoffer], “Der Tempel der Einheit,” Für freies religiöses Leben vol. 2, no. 6 (February 9, 1849): 37–41.

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monism. When Ferdinand Kampe later categorized these manifestoes, he placed them in a developmental order with his own humanism at the end, implicitly suggesting that the rest would find their way to his position. He considered Brauner’s theology, like that of Eduard Baltzer and Nees von Esenbeck, the product of a self-educated and “eclectic” mind, and detailed its logical flaws. Kampe was certainly one of the most sophisticated thinkers of the Free Religious movement, and corresponded with Feuerbach.74 However, Brauner’s Theology proved closer to the direction that Free Religion would take. As important as the philosophy of a master thinker such as Feuerbach was, it did not provide a worldview prêt a porter. The new theology of immanent divinity, now increasingly called a “worldview,” was produced through an eclectic reading of various texts in philosophy, science, and religion that were assembled according to the needs of dissent. Brauner’s text is important to our story not for its influence, but for its typicality.75 In the introduction, Brauner stated his modest intent to pull the “main results of the new God- and worldview” from works written in a “strictly scientific” fashion and to communicate them to the common public in a “lively” and “clear” (anschaulich) style suitable for untutored readers.76 In catechistic form, the work consists of a series of dialogues between a naive Christian, who airs his doubts about church teachings, and a wise teacher, who first negates key elements of Christian theology and then demonstrates how his “new worldview” of monistic pantheism fulfills the religious functions of the old faith. In the section “Concerning God,” the student asks whether one “can one reject the blind faith in principles that one does not understand, if one acknowledges the transcendence of God?” No, the teacher answers, one can only drop the falsehood of supposed revelation “if one acknowledges the immanence (being in the world) of God.”77 The immanence of God is the central premise of Brauner’s monism. God is the living element that binds together the universe, “which can be seen as the unfolding of only one life, one basic idea in the endless progression [Stufenriehe] of all formations and manifestations.” God is coextensive with the infinity of the universe that knows no separate temporality or spatiality. This pantheism, he argued, was opposed to materialism and atheism, because “without God there would be no world and without the world no God. They penetrate 74

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The son of a Catholic policeman, Kampe had studied Protestant theology at the university and employed a precise philosophical vocabulary. Brauner, by contrast, had had to read the Romantics and Feuerbach against the grain of Catholic theology he had studied at the University of Breslau in the 1830s. Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 64; on Brauner, Helmut Bleiber, Robert Brauner: (1816–1854). Erster Prediger der deutsch-katholischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. Ein Lebensbild nebst der 1849 gehaltenen Todtenrede Brauners auf die Märzgefallenen. (Berlin: Pro Business, 2008). Robert Brauner, Religionslehre für Freie, in kathechistischer Form (Berlin: Seelhaar, 1851). Brauner, Religionslehre, III–IV. Brauner, Religionslehre, 14–15.

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and determine one another, they are not a duality, but a unity.”78 The common ground to both spirit and world is the “originary substance [Ursubstanz].” Following Spinoza’s philosophy, most likely as received by Schelling and Nees von Esenbeck, Brauner claimed that this substance “is God.”79 The statement that “God relates to the universe approximately as the soul to the body in the individual human” shows Brauner to have been an idealistic monist, who privileged spirit. He understood God to be the spirit that expresses ideas through matter: “All organic formations, large and small, plant and animal, are realized ideas.” Quoting the other great early modern monist, Giordano Bruno, he calls God “an inner artist, a force that shapes nature from the inside.”80 Later naturalistic monists, such as Haeckel, would sharply oppose such vitalistic understandings of a creative spirit and propose instead a mechanistic monism based on Darwinian selection.81 Yet, despite their different epistemological assumptions, Brauner and Haeckel took similar approaches to the key questions that both felt monism had to answer, in particular: What were the origins of life, of the human species, and of consciousness? Both men sought to solve these “world riddles,” as Haeckel termed them, through a developmental history of all matter. Brauner observed in the multiplicity of natural phenomena the progression of ideas ever upward through time, in what might be called a great chain of becoming. As for later monists, the key points of interest in this chain were the transitions from the inorganic to the organic and the animal to the human. Like Haeckel, Brauner saw in the organization of the crystal a “pre-form [Vorbild] of organic formation” and proof of the striving of matter toward life. And just as the animal represents a stage above the plant, apes “have been placed alongside the lowest standing human tribes by various natural scientists of the previous and the present century.”82 Brauner understood human culture and consciousness to be further aspects of natural development. He contended that the past millennia had seen no new species develop. Instead “creation has continued in the human spirit, whereby the power, the intelligence, the genius of formation that moves the heart of Nature has opened the eye of self-consciousness. The spirit creates an empire of ideas in its interior, it continually spawns thoughts and ideas, which are expressed in part in mental systems, in part in works of art and in part in the laws and social forms of society.” This faith that all phenomena were organized in a single order that encompasses the inorganic, the biological, and the cultural and expresses itself through historical progress would remain a hallmark of later 78 79 80 81

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Brauner, Religionslehre, 20, 51, 18. Brauner, Religionslehre, 24, 112. Brauner, Religionslehre, 23. Sander Gliboff, “Monism and Morphology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Weir, Monism: 188–222. Brauner, Religionslehre, 40. Haeckel’s last theoretical work on monism focused on crystals as a transitional form that showed the spiritual yearning of matter for organization in life. Haeckel, Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben, (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1917).

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monist thought: “God is the tree of life and the creatures are its branches and leaves,” while “humans are the blossoms.”83 The problem of cognition was another of Haeckel’s riddles that Brauner tackled. Whereas Kant proposed a cognitive model in which mind and world were essentially divided, Brauner, like most monists, believed that cognition was based on the ultimate identity of human spirit with the world it perceives. Individual reason was intimately connected to global reason (Allvernunft) by which Brauner meant the laws of nature. As part of nature, the human mind is predisposed to comprehend its laws, just as “[f]ire only jumps to something inside of which fuel lies already bundled. Only those [things] identical and related in their essence reach to one another.” This assumption also formed Brauner’s understanding of the organs of cognition. Light and sound did not cause the eye or ear to grow, but “they are there for each other,” they “have a common purpose.”84 Such assumptions guided Gustav Fechner, a pioneer of experimental psychology, who in Elements of Psychophysics (1860) developed the theory of psychophysical parallelism.85 Monists believed that the human predisposition to recognize the living unity of all phenomena meant that science itself would ultimately organize into a single, noncontradictory system or worldview. Disparate thoughts and views “appear to have nothing to do with each other and yet still build a whole,” wrote Brauner. However, unlike the later naturalistic monists such as Haeckel, Brauner did not believe that empirical observation alone could lead to a complete understanding of the universe. Although it is possible to know and feel God’s “revelation and appearance in our own being and in nature,” Brauner wrote that people cannot fully comprehend God, because of “his pure interiority,” on the one hand, and the infinitude of his manifestations, on the otherhand.86 Nees von Esenbeck likewise criticized rationalists for seeking salvation through thought alone. The reintegration of the individual into the totality, which Nees felt to be the mission of Deutschkatholizismus, had to be achieved in life, through the love expressed in reproduction and solidarity, and through mystical experience. This letter tendency correponded to Nees’s turn to spritualism in the 1850s.87 Like his fellow Free Religious radicals, Brauner rejected belief in the Beyond and the immortality of the individual soul. In his New Year’s lecture of 1851, Brauner tried to console the mothers who had lost their children over the past year by telling them that “the fleeting existence of the beloved dead has merely 83 84

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Brauner, Religionslehre, 44. Brauner, Religionslehre, 56, 42. Similar statements in Ferdinand Kampe, Wesen des Deutschkatholizismus, 98; and Leberecht Uhlich, “Die Religion der Tatsachen,” in Geis, Freireligiöses Quellenbuch, vol. 1, 150–162, 161. Katherine Arens, Structures of Knowing: Psychologies of the Nineteenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 105–131. See also Fick, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele. Brauner, Religionslehre, 21, 24. Leesch, Deutschkatholizismus, 45–84.

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dissolved into the infinite divine life [Allleben], [. . .] it has only ceased to feel as a separate [entity], it has only reached an end as an individual appearance, not however in its contents; it is like a wave that has melted back into its maternal sea and no longer exists as a wave, but still [exists] as water.” Although bitter to some, this image of the afterlife was, he wrote, a staff given to us by reason, and not a straw offered by faith.88 The denial of an individual afterlife required a new ethics of life. “Whereas those religions, which declare social imbalances and evils for divine plan and pretend to bring man help first in the Beyond,” true religion, according to Brauner, aims beyond politics and socialism to the “complete liberation” of the “whole essence of man.” On an individual level, the new ethical imperative was “to develop and realize his entire spiritual capacity [Anlage].” This is achieved not by suppressing the natural drives, but by acknowledging them and harmonizing them with reason. “Salvation lies in the harmony of our actions with our inner nature. If the conscience is not misled by an inverted moral system [that is] hostile to sensuality, but is instead guided by a healthy, truly human morality that accounts for the inalienable rights of Nature, then it will not only not disturb happiness, but quite to the contrary, first make inner, unperverted joy possible.”89 Free Religious leaders pioneered practical applications of natural ethics, such as clothing reform, nudism, anti-immunization, and temperance.90 In particular, the Free Religious had a decisive influence on the German vegetarian movement, whose “founding father” was the Nordhausen preacher Eduard Baltzer. According to Baltzer, health was the “harmony of all world-eternal relations” applied to the individual. Whereas meat eating disrupted cosmic harmony and caused disease, vegetarianism was self-healing or “the conscious fulfillment of our life conditions with the aim of achieving complete harmony of life.”91 Another vegetarian activist was the former Deutschkatholik Gustav von Struve. Upon returning to Germany in 1863 from a long post-revolutionary exile that included a stint as a Union officer in the Civil War, Struve published his Vegetarianism, the Foundation of a New Worldview. Against the consumption of meat and alcohol as forms of “materialism in eating and drinking” that sacrificed bodily and spiritual health to the pleasure of taste, Struve called the 88 89 90

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Brauner, Was Wir Wünschen, 4–5. Brauner, Religionslehre, 2, 106. Wolfgang Krabbe, Gesellschaftsveränderung durch Lebensreform: Strukturmerkmale einer sozialreformerischen Bewegung im Deutschland der Industrialisierungsperiode (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 93–94 and weaker: Eva Barlösius, Naturgemässe Lebensführung: Zur Geschichte der Lebensreform um die Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997), 255–273. Reulecke and Kerbs, Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen; Florentine Fritzen, Gesunder Leben: Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006). Quoted in Krabbe, Lebensreform, 80–81, who places life reform in the “intellectual context of monism.”

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vegetarian diet a monistic union of “idealism and materialism.”92 Baltzer, Struve, and other Free Religionists also demonstrated the social dimension of their ethics through involvement in adult education, the Kindergarten movement, women’s emancipation, cooperatives, and pacifism. Monism, Materialism, and Popular Science in the 1850s Ferdinand Kampe bemoaned the uncritical adaptation by Free Religious leaders of the popular scientific texts of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Vogt in the early 1850s.93 Nonetheless, here too it was Brauner’s mixture of scientific naturalism and philosophical eclecticism rather than Kampe’s Feuerbachian humanism that lay in the mainstream of the development of secularism. In the 1850s, supporters of the “religion of humanity” increasingly looked to natural science for a replacement for Christian theology. Shortly before police banished the second preacher Weber from Berlin in March 1851, he told the Christkatholisch Congregation that “Nature and Spirit have been entirely squeezed out of the old religion. Only instruction in the natural sciences, not the memorization of many biblical quotations, can lead the child to God and to [becoming] a human.”94 Religious dissidents flocked to the growing field of popular science in the 1850s, where they laid out empirical science as worldview. Several Free Religious preachers, in particular Heribert Rau, Theodor Hofferichter, and Eduard Baltzer, became well-known science popularizers, while some scientists became Free Religious preachers. Emil Adolf Rossmässler and Nees von Esenbeck were both professors of botany who joined the Deutschkatholiken in 1845. While leading the Leipzig congregation in the 1850s, Rossmässler became one of Germany’s most active science popularizers, inspiring laymen to acquire microscopes and aquariums for the individual study of their local natural world.95 In 1852, the Protestant dissident Otto Ule won Rossmässler’s cooperation in launching the first major popular science journal in Germany, Die Natur. Another religious reformer and revolutionary who became involved in popular science was Aaron Bernstein (1812–1884), a driving force in the formation of the Berlin Society for the Reform of Judaism in 1845. Bernstein was an amateur scientist; he set up an early photographic laboratory and published the hugely successful series Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbücher in twenty-one

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Gustav Struve, Pflanzenkost, die Grundlage einer neuen Weltanschauung (Stuttgart: author’s edition, 1869), 47. Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 4, 88. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 15033, no. 137. Emil Adolf Rossmässler, Mein Leben und Streben im Verkehr mit der Natur und dem Volke (Hannover: Carl Rümpler, 1874).

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fig. 2: Leading German secularists, 1845 to 1870. Clockwise from upper left: Emil Rossmässler, Eduard Baltzer, Ernst Haeckel and Ludwig Büchner (Courtesy: Bavarian State, Die Gartenlaube, 1867, p 629; 1894, p. 163; 1866, 172; Popular Science Monthly 1874).

volumes between 1853 and 1876 that exerted a strong influence on young Albert Einstein.96 The specific role of religious dissent in worldview construction can be studied in the reception of the much-admired Kosmos of Alexander von 96

Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 475.

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Humboldt. In this work of 1845, Humboldt had claimed that worldview would be provided by the empirical observation and the aesthetic appreciation of the underlying totality of nature. Yet, according to Wilhelm Bölsche, Germany’s most popular science writer of the early twentieth century, Humboldt failed to provide a “unified” worldview, in part because he was afraid of writing in a too popular style and being decried as “a poet and halfscientist [. . .] like Buffon.”97 Humboldt was too much a man of the Prussian court to overtly side with a political or religious party. When, in 1860, posthumously published correspondence revealed that Humboldt had rejected the notion that natural scientific discovery would lead to a new religion, the house organ of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, Der Dissident, objected that this opinion “does not agree with Humboldt’s remarks against popery [Pfaffentum] and above all not with his Kosmos.”98 Kosmos, in other words, would have to be turned against its author if necessary. As Nicolaas Rupke has shown in his history of Humboldt reception, around the revolution of 1848 and increasingly in the 1850s and 1860s, the left largely determined Humboldt’s legacy and fashioned him into the founder of an anticlerical, pantheistic worldview. Ule printed his popular interpretations of Kosmos in 1850 and, like Heribert Rau, wrote one of the early biographies of Humboldt, casting him as a supporter of the aims of the revolution. In 1859, the year of Humboldt’s death, Rossmässler founded a network of Humboldt Associations to popularize science across the German lands.99 Reviewing the developments of the ten years that had followed the failed revolution of 1848, Das Jahrhundert, a leading radical-democratic journal, found that naturalism was one source of hope amid the setbacks of that decade: “We have advanced from the remains of the religious worldview through the philosophical to the cosmic (naturalistic, materialistic) worldview, that is the major accomplishment of our last ten years; hopefully we have been thoroughly ‘restored’ through the clear, fresh drink from the spring of nature.” The claim that science was neutral, the writer continued, was “empty blather,” for “science is itself now a party” that has replaced religion and philosophy and dictates “the laws of natural and human life.”100 The notion that radicals were speaking not

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Wilhelm Bölsche, “Zur Geschichte der volkstümlichen Naturforschung,” in Kaleidoskop. Skizzen und Aufsätze aus Natur und Menschenleben von Prof. Dr. Ludwig Büchner (Gießen: Emil Roth, 1901): I–XXXII, XII–XIII. Der Dissident, no. 51 (December 21, 1860), 4. Nicolaas Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). P., “Die Fortschritte unserer innern Parteienentwickelung in den letzten zehn Jahren,” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 3, no. 38, 39 (1858): 595–598; 616–619, 595, 597, 598.

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from their own interests, but merely relaying the implications of the laws of nature for human society, made natural science attractive and subversive in a decade of political repression. In the mid-1850s, the “materialism controversy” showed another side of natural scientific worldview production. Whereas many of the Free Religious writers promoted cosmic, pantheistic conceptions of nature, the three archmaterialists – physiologist Jacob Moleschott, physician Ludwig Büchner, and geologist and zoologist Carl Vogt – splashed into public notoriety with their antireligious, atheistic claims about the implications of the rapid advances in the empirical sciences. By declaring the material world to be the sole truly scientific object of knowledge, and empiricism to be the sole method of knowledge production, the materialists sought to negate the epistemological basis not only of natural theology, but of philosophical idealism and revealed religion as well. These systems of knowledge that rested on transcendental or metaphysical assumptions were no longer to be considered science. Were the materialists also monists? Brauner and Haeckel both explicitly rejected materialism. However, although materialists discounted whole realms of philosophy and religion as unscientific and hence ephemeral, they recuperated these realms under a natural scientific conception of unified substance. Ludwig Büchner clearly intended such a monist synthesis when he described “Matter in its totality” as “the mother, engendering and receiving again all that exists.”101 He bristled at the widespread public impression that his materialism was nihilistic and told his English readers “[t]here can scarcely be a more ideal conception than the unity of all physical and mental existence” in matter.102 When the term “monism” was later popularized, Büchner himself happily recast his philosophy as monism to avoid the “odium” that had become attached to materialism.103 And although Ernst Haeckel sought to avoid affiliation with rank materialism, his epistemological assumptions were essentially the same as Büchner’s, that is, the spiritual could be explained entirely within the mechanical operations of the laws of nature.104

The Secularization of Free Religious Practice in Berlin The epistemological challenge that natural science would come to pose to Free Religious monism was not a significant matter of debate in the late 1850s, when the principal theological question remained the movement’s relationship to Christianity. Following the political thaw that set in with the de facto end of the 101

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Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter: Empirico-philosophical Studies Intelligibly Rendered (London: Teubner, 1864 [German original 1855]), 30. Büchner, Force and Matter, xiv. Büchner, Force and Matter, 118. Ludwig Büchner, Im Dienste der Wahrheit, Helmut Clos ed. (Ziegelhausen bei Heidelberg: L. Büchner-Verlag, 1956), 441. Gliboff, Origins of German Darwinism, 139.

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reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1858, most of Germany’s surviving dissident congregations sent delegates to the Thuringian town of Gotha in June 1859 to forge a new union that included both former Protestants and Catholics. One of the first to speak at this meeting was Hermann Jacobson, an eminent lawyer and banker who, after his conversion from Judaism to Deutschkatholizismus in 1852, quickly rose to become a leading figure, both in the preacherless Berlin congregation and nationally.105 In keeping with his own commitment to Christianity, Jacobson proposed calling the new umbrella organization the Union of Free Christian Congregations. Although supported by Czerski, and despite the acknowledgment by some present that their congregations were “completely Christian,” the majority agreed with the preacher of the Königsberg Deutschkatholiken Ender, who said that to call all of the congregations “Christian” would be “untrue.”106 Instead they chose the name Union of Free Religious Congregations (UFRC or Bund freireligiöser Gemeinden) and adopted a sole common doctrine: “free self-determination in all religious matters.”107 With the appointment in 1861 of A. T. Wislicenus to the post of preacher, a leading representative of the Lichtfreunde took the spiritual helm of Berlin’s Christkatholisch Congregation. In April 1862, it was renamed the “Free Religious Congregation Berlin” and adopted new statutes that discarded the “closed belief in a particular vision of God” in favor of a “contemporary life in God, whom it finds revealed in the spirit of the true and good and in its worlddominating power.” Religion was defined “not in doctrine, traditions and priesthood, which are to be faithfully obeyed as divine revelation that stands apart from humans; rather it consists of one’s own inner spiritual life that, raising itself to moral dominion, becomes the foundation for human action.”108 105

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Hermann Jacobson, Dr. jur (1801–1890), lawyer, founder of a leading Berlin bank, son of Jewish reformer Israel Jacobson, who headed the Jewish Consistory of the new Kingdom of Westphalen in 1808, and subsequently founded a Reform Congregation in Berlin that was banned by the police in 1823. Hermann Jacobson joined the Berlin FRC in October 1852 and founded the Free Religious Stiftung in Offenbach in 1858. He was a Stadtrat in 1849 and elected to city council in 1850. Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 4, 32; Berthold Grzywatz, Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat im 19. Jahrhundert: Selbstverwaltung, Partizipation und Repräsentation in Berlin und Preußen 1806 bis 1918 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003), 564–565; Arno Herzig, Jüdische Geschichte in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1997), 161; Hartmut Kaelble, Berliner Unternehmer während der frühen Industrialisierung: Herkunft, sozialer Status und politischer Einfluss (Berlin: De Gruyter,1972), 63; Hanns Riessner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975), 64. Verhandlungen bei Schließung des Bundes Freireligiöser Gemeinden. Gotha, 16., 17. Juni 1859, (Ludwigshafen: Humanitas, 1984 [1859]), 9. The Saxon congregations of the Deutschkatholiken had been granted the status of recognized churches in 1848, a status that was then used against them in the 1850s to inhibit any statements or activities, which violated the Leipzig Bekenntnis of 1845. Thus the Saxon Deutschkatholiken were prevented from joining the UFRC in 1859. The UFRC expanded from 54 congregations at the 1859 Gotha congress to 110 at the 1862 congress. Tschirn, Geschichte, 86–101. Quoted in Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 24–25.

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Religious practice was reduced to four elements: “religious-ethical lectures” for the “edification [Erbauung] of spirit and heart,” lectures on science as it relates to religion, religious instruction for children, and “religious celebrations on family occasions” to be performed upon request and following entry into the civil registry.109 Such abandonment of Christian liturgical practices was met with resistance and led to splits in several Free Religious congregations (Mannheim, Breslau, Magdeburg) in the 1860s.110 Nonetheless, the trend over time was toward the further secularization of religious life. By the 1870s, when the congregation again fell under police scrutiny, police observation reports made no mention of baptisms and scant mention of marriage ceremonies. Burial ceremonies, by contrast, attracted state attention because of their public character and capacity to serve as vehicles for protest in times of repression. When preacher Erdmann died in May 1853, police estimated that 2,000 Berliners turned out to accompany the funeral procession of 1,000 mourners and 19 wagons to the cemetery in the Pappelallee.111 During the 1870s and 1880s, the burials of prominent dissidents or socialists in the Free Religious cemetery again drew crowds in the thousands. When the altar and the organ were destroyed in a fire in the meetinghouse around Easter 1862, the congregation decided not to replace them, and a lectern and a harmonium were purchased instead.112 In an even more prosaic setting, the former Protestant minister, Ludwig Würkert, preached to the Leipzig Free Congregation in his restaurant in the Hotel de Saxe (see Fig. 3). By the 1870s the only recognizable element of Christian liturgy besides the sermon/lecture was the singing of Free Religious songs, which were generally based on the tune of traditional church hymns. The following song, “Jugendweihe,” was published in 1852 by Eduard Baltzer, to the tune of “Eins ist Noth” from 1695.113 Noble beacon, sweet virtue Guide this band of children, Guide them to their youth, Protecting them from danger. They are like the surging trees in bright blossom Innocent and happy in spirit, Yet fruit will also be sought on the branch Thus ripen the blossoms to sweet fruits.

109 110 111 112 113

Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 24–25. Tschirn, Geschichte, 108–109. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030 C, No. 10085, pp. 286, 284. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 24. Quoted in Andreas Meier, Struktur und Geschichte der Jugendweihen/Jugendfeiern (Sankt Augustin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2001), 15. According to the author, this is the first usage of the term “Jugendweihe.”

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fig. 3: Leipzig Free Religious preacher Ludwig Würkert in front of his congregation (Courtesy: Bavarian State, Die Gartenlaube, 1864).

Jugendweihe was the name given to the Free Religious confirmation ceremony, which became the single most important ritual of the movement. It stressed conscious entry of the youth into the community upon leaving primary school. This ceremony enjoyed great popularity among urban socialists, and in 1954 was resurrected as a state ritual of the GDR. Its popularity continued after 1989,

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and to this day more East German children take part in the secularist Jugendweihe than in Christian confirmation.114

the confrontation between idealistic and naturalistic monism The police officer sent to observe a Sunday service at the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in June 1878 prefaced his report with the remark that it “didn’t make the impression of a religious service [. . .], but rather that of a meeting gathered to listen to a scientific or philosophical lecture.”115 The lecture was given by Georg Siegfried Schaefer (1824–1904), who had been appointed second preacher of the congregation in 1867 and first preacher two years later.116 Schaefer held this post, which was re-titled “speaker,” until 1887. Following a stint as primary school teacher, Schaefer studied Protestant theology at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin only to be drummed out for unorthodox religious views, a bitter experience that turned him into a lifelong anticlerical firebrand. Schaefer promoted naturalistic monism, atheism, and Freethought in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, a development that was not left unchallenged by A. T. Wislicenus, the congregation’s senior preacher. The dispute between the two men figured into a larger national debate in the years between 1868 and 1870 that erupted over the effort of Schaefer and his allies to make naturalistic monism the binding creed for Free Religion. This chapter will conclude with a closer investigation of this debate, in which important religious and ethical principles were at stake. In the run-up to the fourth congress of the UFRC in Berlin in October 1868, the five-man executive board announced its intent to move forward with a petition raised initially in 1859 by Leberecht Uhlich for a “simple and clear expression” of Free Religion for the wider public. The proposed declaration that “religion is nothing other than the life of the conscience in man himself” was rejected by the preacher of the Free Protestant Congregation in Königsberg, Julius Rupp, who saw in it a “confession” and hence an infringement of the principle of freedom of conscience. More important, Rupp read in it a subordination of the human conscience to biology that was inimical to his own Kantian 114

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Manfred Isemeyer and Klaus Sühl, eds., Feste der Arbeiterbewegung: 100 Jahre Jugendweihe (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1989). LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15052, p. 39. Georg Siegfried Schaefer was a farmer’s son, who trained at a Protestant teacher’s seminar and worked for six years as a schoolteacher. He left teaching out of opposition to religious instruction and became a Gymasiast at a Catholic school. He studied theology and philosophy for three years, “in order to reconcile both. . . But the gap between them grew ever greater and although he was awarded a prize from the theological faculty for an essay, the Royal Consistory in Berlin failed him in his first theological exam due to weakness of faith.” He founded the Humanist Congregation in Berlin in 1887 and was chairman of the Berlin’s Democratic Association in 1888. Bundes-Blätter, no. 125 (July 1904).

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ethics. He warned the delegates in Berlin that if the Free Religious “are ruled by the idea that human life in its entirety is nothing but an extension of the mechanism of nature, then ethical religious communities would be made impossible.”117 The majority of the congress delegates chose to disregard Rupp’s objection and voted to back the executive board and the declaration of principles.118 However, when the congress entrusted its new national journal, Menschenthum (Humanity), to the hands of Fritz Schütz, the young preacher of the Free Religious Congregation of the Thuringian town of Apolda, it sowed the seeds for a more decisive intellectual split in the movement.119 In his programmatic statement of April 1869, Schütz argued that Free Religious humanism had to be anti-Christian and politically republican. Most devisive, however, proved to be his demand for a single creed, to be produced by “gathering the noblest ideas and ambitions of our century into a unified foundational view (Grundanschauung) like a focal point, a harmonious, shining and warming whole, and from this innermost point to attempt to explain, encourage and brighten life in all of its directions.” Only empirical natural science, Schütz argued, could provide this worldview.120 The strongest opposition to Schütz’s proposed course came predictably from those Free Religious congregations that still adhered to Christianity. Darmstadt Preacher Wilhelm Hieronymi ridiculed Schütz for presuming that his views were more modern. Had someone stood up in the 1840s and said “friends, you don’t know what you want, I am bringing you a new ‘religious foundation’,” Hieronymi wrote, “we would have just laughed at him, because we were familiar with all of the ideas driving modernity. [. . .] The ‘religious-moral worldview’ you [Schütz] mention was and is well known to us all, just like the physicalscientific worldview of modernity.” Scientific dogmatism could not unite the

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Verhandlungen bei Schließung des Bundes Freireligiöser Gemeinden, 41; Martin Keibel, Die Religion und ihr Recht gegenüber dem modernen Moralismus: Darstellung und Kritik der ‘ethischen Bewegung’ unserer Zeit (Halle: Pfeiffer, 1891), 35. Rupp quoted in Tschirn, Geschichte, 98. Rupp’s continued adherence to Christianity also made his viewpoint a minority one. Tschirn, Geschichte, 98–101; Evangelische Kirchenchronik, vol 2, no. 1, (1869): 135. Fritz Schütz was born in a town near Heidelberg in 1833, where his father was a Protestant pastor and school director. Schütz studied philosophy with Kuno Fischer and then switched to a “Brotstudium” of philology with which he could become a teacher. After teaching for five years in a school, Schütz fell out with the Protestant authorities in 1866 and quit. He was appointed preacher of the Free Religious Congregation in Apolda, but left for America in 1871, where he pursued a successful career as a leader of various Free Religious Congregations. Fritz Schütz, Unsterblichkeit (Carver, MN: F. Schütz, 1882), IV–VI. Fritz Schütz, “Das Gewissen, die Art seiner Thätigkeit und seine religiös-sittliche Bedeutung,” Menschenthum. Blätter für freies religiöses Leben der Menschheit, vol. 1 (1869): 3–7; 16–31; 33– 39; 59–79, quotation 79.

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Free Religious, he warned. Unity could only be achieved by ethical deeds and freedom.121 Schütz’s challenge to the pantheistic, idealistic monism subscribed to by Brauner and others became apparent in a debate over the nature of the conscience. Both pantheists and naturalists could agree with the aforementioned declaration that “religion is nothing other than the life of the conscience in man himself.” However, they arrived at different conclusions regarding the autonomy of the conscience depending on whether they conceived of the human as essentially spiritual or as essentially biological. According to Schütz, it was false to conceive of conscience “as. . . an inner voice, for which we are not obliged to give account.” Instead “our entire private and public life should be guided by the conscience” understood as “science and knowledge [Erkenntnis].”122 In other words, conscience was to obey the dictates of a moral system drawn from the laws of natural science. Schütz’s provocation led many of the best-known Free Religious leaders in Germany to defend the inviolability of the individual conscience. They rooted its autonomy in “feeling” (Andreas Reichenbach), in “holiness” (Karl Schrader), in the “unknowability” of the conscience (Eduard Baltzer), or in its independence from the temporal order (Leberecht Uhlich).123 Given the wide acceptance of empiricism, having to ground their convictions in the “unknowable” placed these preachers in an uncomfortable position, and Schütz pushed them hard on this point. If “the capacities and activities of the conscience” were left in the realm of the unexplainable, Schütz claimed that conscience would remain “the seat of habits, superstition, prejudices, egotism and hypocritical considerations, and will not help the world.” If the conscience “has to step into the light of public knowledge and justify itself from there, then it will also create a renewed modern morality through modern science, and, just as it shows the way to salvation [Heil], it will also bring salvation to the peoples in all life spheres. The life path of the Free Religious direction,” he concluded, “can only follow this latter course.124 In short, convinced that modern science could illuminate even the internal landscape of the soul, Schütz demanded that Free Religion restructure itself according to the authority of omnipotent science. At stake in the debate were the Free Religious conceptions of “spirit” and of “freedom.” Christian rationalism, deism, and pantheistic monism had all shared the common assumption that “spirit” was the dynamic and formative vital force that caused progress in spirituality and history. Up until the late 1860s trust in the free action of the spirit had acted as a glue that held together the various theological and philosophical positions of the Free Religious. By shifting authority from reason to natural science, the naturalists challenged the notion of absolute religious freedom that was the sole doctrinal paragraph of the 1859 121 122 123 124

“Meinungsaustausch,” Menschenthum, vol. 1, no.7, 8, 9 (October to December 1869): 91–92. Schütz, “Gewissen,” 79. These summaries of letters to Menschenthum were provided by Schütz in “Gewissen.” Schütz, “Gewissen.”

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charter of the Union of Free Religious Congregations. According to A. T. Wislicenus, the chief accomplishment of Free Religion had been the transformation, for the first time in history, of the promise of “Protestant freedom” into a lived “truth.” Defining the essence of Free Religion as the “interiority of the soul [Gemüth] and the entire freedom of thought,” Wislicenus warned in 1865 against any new “submission to a revelation.”125 Like Wislicenus, most of Schütz’s chief opponents were former Protestant clergymen. Whereas their view of the conscience corresponded to the growing interiorization and privatization of religion characteristic of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants, the turn to naturalistic monism challenged this long-term historical trend.126 The Ethical Implications of Naturalistic Monism The ethical implications of the shift to naturalism became the subject of a second round of debate in Menschenthum in early 1870, in which the two Berlin preachers were the main protagonists. In an essay entitled “Can the Ends Justify the Means?” Schaefer argued that human deeds should not be judged from the perspective of ethical absolutes, but rather according to their impact on the overall aims of human development, which unfolds according to a natural law. Nature itself provided the only absolute and “natural science is an ethical system at its deepest core”: To the question: whether we want to make natural conditions again the yardstick for life? I answer: Certainly! Let us return courageously and decisively back to nature! The idealist still searches for a purely spiritual norm, but he easily goes astray and precisely to the degree that he does not account for natural conditions and relations.127

Correct moral judgments depended on consciousness of the whole system or relations: “From the standpoint of the All-Unity [All-Einheit] or Godhead (universalism or cosmos) [. . .] there cannot be, strictly speaking, a particular, separate, absolute good or evil an sich, [. . .] rather only a relative, relational good or evil.” The only sin, according to Schaefer, was “foolishness or ignorance,” that is, an inability to make the social calculation of whether “the public welfare is helped more than hurt.”128 125

126

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A. T. Wislicenus, Vortrag am Stiftungsfeste der freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Berlin, den 19. März 1865 (Berlin: 1865), 5, 6. Lucian Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 33–48. In a debate on the recently formed liberal Protestantischer Verein, the fronts again formed. The monists mocked the liberal Protestants for their “Halbheit,” while the former Lichtfreunde argued for openness toward liberal Protestantism. See “Die Freireligiöse Richtung und der Protestantenverein” and “Meinungsaustauch” in Menschenthum, vol. 1, no. 6 (September 1869): 82–88; vol. 1., no. 7, 8, 9 (October–December 1869): 89–135. G. S. Schaefer, “Kann der Zweck das Mittel heiligen?,” Menschenthum vol. 2, no. 2–3 (1870): 70–84, 73. Schaefer, “Kann der Zweck das Mittel heiligen?,” 74, 78.

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Schaefer’s naturalistic ethics was to encompass individual interests and drives, but “the commonweal is the absolute, the highest good, the ethical end goal.” The highest ethical aims of “freedom, equality and peace can only be attained by people in community – communistically.” In other words, individual ethics had to become relative if it was to account for social relations, and community ethics required the sacrifice of the individual, if necessary, to social prerogatives. Scientific ethics required the study of social science as well as biology in order to understand the social and not just the physical dimension of human nature. In his lengthy rebuttal of Schaefer’s views, A.T. Wislicenus argued that Schaefer’s utilitarian calculations were an “external treatment of morality.” By not recognizing “the mastery of the spirit or self-mastery” as a “natural fundamental right and [. . .] natural fundamental obligation” and instead by rejecting the autonomy of the conscience and its “rights and obligations to adhere to moral absolutes,” Schaefer came to the conclusion “that good and useful, evil and harmful are one and the same.” Wislicenus evoked the terror of the French Revolution to illustrate the dangers hidden in this means–ends morality. The members of the revolutionary Convent had justified “mass executions and butchery” with the noble aim of liberating humanity from the “craving for power and pleasure on the part of the court, the nobility and the clergy,” but their actions led instead to the destruction of liberty.129 The debate between Schaefer and Wislicenus shows the double-edged nature of granting ultimate epistemological authority to natural science. By making natural science the sole source of ethical judgment, monists felt they had finally established a foundation entirely independent from Christianity, theology, and idealist philosophy. In doing away with the old moral absolutes, however, the value of the individual was eroded and the human sphere given no autonomy from judgments made in the name of humanity according to a utilitarian logic of scientific rationality. Wislicenus’ objections to Schaefer’s moral relativism and means–end rationality would continue to dog naturalistic monism, particularly when monist ethics became disconnected from the ideal of self-governance and became allied with social projects of governing over others after the 1890s. This denouement has led some scholars to call scientific worldview “antihumanist,” a term that is unhelpful given the pointed identification of many of its adherents with humanism.130 In fact, the conflicts in 1869 and 1870 are better described as the clash of two competing humanisms within German secularism.131 129 130

131

Menschenthum (May and June 1870), 44, 45, 55. Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11. Similar arguments are found in: Richard Weikart, “Darwinism and Death: Devaluing Human Life in Germany 1859–1920,” Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 63, no. 2 (2002): 323–344; Jürgen Sandmann, Der Bruch mit der humanitären Tradition: Die Biologisierung der Ethik bei Ernst Haeckel und anderen Darwinisten seiner Zeit (Stuttgart, New York: Gustav Fischer, 1990). Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte (Basel/ Stuttgart: Benno Schwabe, 1963), 137.

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Although observers of the debates of the 1840s sometimes identified the tendency to favor positive doctrine with the Catholic heritage of the Deutschkatholiken, in the debates in Menschenthum, Schaefer, Schütz, and most of the other supporters of a naturalistic creed were former Protestants like their opponents. Although religious tradition proves not to have been a salient factor in differentiating the two camps, the generational and professional differences were pronounced. Schütz’s opponents constituted some of the foremost founders of Free Religion, who had left their sinecures in the Protestant Church for the unsure waters of dissent. He and his supporters were, with the exception of the preachers Carl Scholl and Ludwig Würkert (both former Protestant clergy) and Michael Biron (a former Jesuit who joined Free Religion in 1863), of a younger generation and without theological ordination. The best known were physicians – Karl Boruttau (1837–1873) and T. Stahn – and former school teachers – Schütz (born 1833) and Schaefer (1828–1904). As contemporaries of Ernst Haeckel (born 1834 and also a Protestant), Schütz, Schaefer, and Boruttau became adults in the postrevolutionary period when political parties and Free Religion were suppressed and popular science enjoyed rising credibility as a forum for dissent. Popular natural scientific knowledge gave these young teachers and physicians the authority to challenge the older generation of Free Religious clergy, whose pantheistic humanism was backed by university training in philosophy and historical theology. The adoption of naturalistic monism marked the final epistemological shift of radical Free Religion out of the realm of theology. The movement thereby lost its claim to a privileged role in worldview production, and any remaining boundaries to other science popularizers and secularist endeavors became thoroughly porous. Schütz and his allies participated in the formation of national and international Freethought associations. A German-speaking Union of Freethinkers was founded in New York in 1866 under the leadership of émigré Free Religionists Adolph Douai and Friedrich Schünemann-Pott, and, after Schütz’s departure for America in 1871, the editorship of Menschenthum was assumed by August Specht, who in 1881 cofounded the German Union of Freethinkers together with the materialist Ludwig Büchner.132 The shift to naturalistic monism had a political context as well. Würkert and Boruttau were members of the nascent socialist movement; Boruttau had even demanded at the Berlin congress of the UFRC in 1868 that the Free Religious abandon historical Christianity for the “religious principle of socialism.”133 Scholl was friendly with the socialist movement, whereas the radical Democratic movement Schaefer adhered to in Berlin was developing ties to the 132

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C. F. Huch, “Die freireligiöse Bewegung unter den Deutschamerikanern,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Pionier-Vereins von Philadelphia, vol. 11 (1909): 1–38, 20. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 240. On Boruttau, see Prüfer, “Ethischer Sozialismus vor 1890: Der Arzt und Sozialdemokrat Carl Boruttau (1837–1873),” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung vol. 35, no. 3 (1999): 327–348.

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Leipzig socialists around August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebkencht. Rupp, Uhlich, and A. T. Wislicenus, by contrast, were all supporters of the antisocialist, leftliberal Progressive Party.

Conclusion: Atheism as Religion? The debates in Menschenthum in 1869/1870 show the uneven pattern of acceptance of naturalistic monism within Free Religion. At that time, it prevailed in Berlin but was met with opposition from most major figures in the Free Religious movement elsewhere. Schaefer was not above highlighting his radical position and playing the part of enfant terrible at Free Religious gatherings. When the UFRC voted down his proposal for an essentially atheistic definition of the “concept of God” in May 1883, Schaefer announced his early departure by noting that unlike many people who considered “God” an outmoded idea, he was not going to bid them “a dieu.” Instead, as noted in the observation report of the police, “he wanted to take his leave by calling to the attendees ‘sans dieu’ and with these words he left the room.”134 A corresponding struggle between pantheists and atheists raged in the various formal and informal associations of Freethinkers across Europe between 1850 und 1880.135 In his 1901 study of contemporary Free Religion, the noted Protestant theologian Paul Drews found that in the intervening years the tables had turned. Naturalistic monism now held sway over Germany’s most populous congregations in Berlin, Stettin, Leipzig, and Nuremberg. Pitted against these “realists” and “atheists” were the “idealists” and “theists,” who found support in the more bourgeois Southwest German and East Prussian congregations. Drews, who did not hide his sympathy for this second group, foresaw an extinguishing of the religious “heritage” of the Lichtfreunde as a demographic consequence of “the intrusion of numerous social-democratic elements” into the “radical” congregations. The left, he concluded, “will ultimately succeed in having the Union adopt a ‘confession’ [Bekenntnis], i.e., it will take as its motto complete negation, pure natural-scientific monism and atheism.”136 Drews found it particularly irksome that these advocates of monism still retained the word “religious” to describe their congregations. In his eyes, this 134

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Protocol sent from the Leipzig police to the Berlin police on May 22, 1883. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15045, unpag. Georges Minois, Geschichte des Atheismus: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Weimar: Böhlau, 2000), 507. Drews cites statistical information from the 1899 meeting of the national Union of Free Religious Congregations, which gives an idea of the relative size of the Berlin congregation. There were 24 Gemeinden with 17,000 “souls,” of which the largest were Berlin 11,000, Mannheim 1,396, Offenbach 1,386, and Magdeburg 1,256. Another 24 congregations had an estimated total of 5,000. The Saxon Deutschkatholiken had ca. 2,200 members in 1900, of which ca. 1,250 were organized in the Leipzig congregation. Paul Drews, “Die freien religiösen Gemeinden der Gegenwart,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 11 (1901): 484–527, quotation 526.

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led to a dangerous muddying of categories, “for a religion that wants to be everything, just not communion with God, not relationship to a transcendent, is a knife without a blade.”137 Drews raises here a central definitional problem that faces any analyst who seeks to study secularism within the framework of religion. Can an immanent philosophy such as naturalistic monism be religious? According to the American sociologists Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, one cannot lump “supernatural and naturalistic faiths under the common term religion,” because “there can be no wholly naturalistic religion; [. . .] a religion lacking supernatural assumptions is no religion at all.”138 In light of these statements, it is fitting to conclude this chapter by asking whether atheism can and did function as a religion. Secularists were by no means of one opinion on this matter. The Free Religious Congregation in Berlin repeatedly wrestled with the title “religious” in its name, and in 1890 appointed a commission to come up with a new name. “Free Congregation,” “Free Scientific Congregation,” “Freethinker Congregation,” even “Atheist Congregation,” were touted as possibilities, but each was rejected in turn.139 Until 1933, the name remained. This ambivalence toward religion was shaped, in part, by confessional forces. While state repression made the radical response of dropping the adjective “religious” attractive, this step would have jeopardized the congregation’s repeated petitions for state recognition as well as residual rights it possessed as an unrecognized de facto religious association, and it would have opened the congregation to greater police repression. In other words, the confessional system itself both encouraged and limited secularization. If the claim to represent a religion (or after 1919 – and until today – a worldview) had been abandoned, the secularists would have dropped out of consideration as a potential tolerated confession. There was however, a deeper, theological dimension to this fence sitting on the question of religion, expressed in the antinomy within Free Religion regarding creed. Between the 1840s and 1870s the movement staunchly opposed any sort of religious dogma and yet repeatedly called for a new creed consonant with contemporary science and philosophy. Thus a figure such as Leberecht Uhlich could first spearhead the organization of the Lichtfreunde in 1841 to oppose the Apostolic Confession, then requested a public declaration of principles in 1859, only to turn a decade later against Schütz’s efforts to enact a binding confession. In theory, the Free Religious understood these two impulses, the negative and positive, to exist in a historical dialectic, whereby the negative criticism of existing creeds based on the observation of the world “out there” would lead to the continual perfection of the worldview. However, in practice, the notion of continual progress was a conceit, for it is not an exaggeration to say that there 137 138

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Drews, “Die freien religiösen Gemeinden der Gegenwart,” 500. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3. Police report of Oct. 13, 1890, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15050, p. 482.

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was almost no development in the naturalistic monism that G. S. Schaefer preached in the Free Religious Congregation in 1870s and what listeners would have heard there in the 1910s or 1920s. Given this, another explanation will be needed for the fact that creed and critique were nearly always expressed together. The key lies in rethinking the function of anticlericalism in worldview. It is striking that almost all secularist creedal statements contain anticlerical barbs and comparisons with the orthodox enemy. Freethinkers understood such critique of religion to be a necessary precursor to the introduction of worldview. As the secretary of the Monist League, Heinrich Schmidt, put it in 1906, “there is no room for both [monism and Christianity] in the thinking of humanity.”140 However, a more satisfying explanation is that the construction of the atheist sacred was dependent to a large extent on the very act of anticlerical negation. Anticlericalism was, in other words, not epiphenomenal to the construction of worldview and the invocation of the sacred. Atheism depended on the inversion of transcendent monotheism in order to achieve its own immanent form of transcendence. The clearest examples of the deep bond between transcendental Christianity and monism are expressed through titles such as David Friedrich Strauss’s bestseller of 1872, The Old Faith and the New, or the series of sermons that the Free Religious preacher Eduard Baltzer began to publish in 1850, The Old and New Worldview.141 If we conclude that the secularist divine was illuminated by the penumbra of Christianity, we do not need to fall back on a functionalist understanding of the divine, which might claim that immanent worldviews necessarily depend on transcendent religion. We can explain the relationship of worldview and anticlericalism historically by underlining the dynamics of dissent out of which naturalistic monism emerged and which continued to frame the articulation of its divine throughout the nineteenth century. To further investigate these dynamics in the formation of the Fourth Confession, we turn now to the social bases of dissent.

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Heinrich Schmidt, Monismus und Christentum, vol. 2, Flugschriften des Deutschen Monistenbundes (Brackwede i. W.: W. Breitenbach, 1906), 30. Eduard Baltzer, Alte und Neue Weltanschauung: Vorträge gehalten in der freien Religionsgemeinde zu Nordhausen, vol. 1 Das Verhältniß der freien Gemeinde zu den alten Religionen, besonders zu dem Christenthume (Nordhausen: Förstemann, 1850).

3 The Sociology of Dissent: Free Religion and Popular Science

Coinciding with the military suppression of the last democratic insurrections in June 1849, preacher Ferdinand Kampe bid farewell to the readers of the final issue of his revolutionary journal Für freies religiöses Leben. “No greater joy” could he and copublisher Theodor Hofferichter have hoped for than if their journal had “succeeded in setting a stone in the beautiful, great cathedral of humanity, which Deutschkatholizismus has been called to build. Our God is the infinite ideal of pure humanity.” Citing Jesus’ admonition to his followers that destruction and strife would be necessary to spread the universal gospel, Kampe concluded: “We are come to send fire on the earth; and what will we, if it be already kindled!”1 Contrary to Kampe’s hopes, Free Religion did not rise from the ashes of the collapsing revolution to complete the “Reformation of the Nineteenth Century” and unite Germany in a new faith of humanity. Instead, like all anticonfessional movements that arose before 1918, Free Religion carved out for itself a circumscribed position in a field of heightened confessional tensions. Although its adherents believed that their worldview was universally valid, Free Religion captured the imaginations of only certain segments of the population in the growing towns and cities of Germany. The same was true of Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. The task of this chapter is to identify these segments of urban society and ask why they, in particular, were attracted to secularism, that is, to its anticlericalism, its radical humanism, its naturalistic knowledge, and its forms of association. In short, what social interests contributed to the confessional articulation of secularism? The first chapter already touched on the sociological dimension of the “fourth confession.” The effectiveness of the exclusions contained in the King’s Patent of 1847 rested on social factors. The intent of this legislation, it will be recalled, was

1

Für freies religiöses Leben, vol. 2, nos. 23–26 (June 15, 1849): 187.

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to drive rationalism out of the Protestant Church by turning it from a dissenting ecclesiola in eclessia into a schismatic sect such as the Deutschkatholiken. It forced rationalists, pantheists, and deists to decide whether to stay in their statesanctioned confessions or jump over the razor’s edge and become sectarians. Individuals varied of course, but overall social position was the best indicator of who would jeopardize their confessional standing and social rights and join Free Religion. By and large, civil servants, academics, and professionals stepped back, whereas tradespeople and artisans often did not. Without losing sight of the conflict with the monarchy and the ecclesiastical authorities, this chapter focuses on the social conflicts and dynamics at play in the formation of secularist associations. It begins in Berlin with a close analysis of the occupations held by members of the Free Religious Congregation, as revealed in two complete lists of dues-paying members sent to the police in the 1870s. Using this information, it asks how the sect gave expression to social conflicts experienced by the members of these professions in the growing industrial metropolis. It then applies the insights gained from the analysis of Free Religion to answer wider questions about the social anchoring and pre-political inflection of natural scientific worldview in the urban population of the 1860s and 1870s. Finally, the chapter looks forward to the other secularist organizations founded after 1880 and compares their social composition to that of Free Religion.

the social profile of a free religious congregation In early 1872, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation saw fit to publish for the first time a directory of all of its 701 dues-paying members, complete with addresses and occupations (Fig. 1). As in the Free Religious Congregations in other German towns and cities, the bulk of the membership comprised lowermiddle-class artisans, handworkers, and merchants.2 Although historians have agreed on the overall predominance of these Kleinbürger, they have disagreed on the social dynamics surrounding this milieu that were reflected in religious radicalism. Historians working from the assumption that Free Religion was a station on the way to the political organization of the working class have emphasized the proletarianization of the traditional trades and the increasing numbers of workers to arrive at the conclusion that the Free Religious congregations attracted the lower classes protesting their growing social exclusion.3 2

3

Sylvia Paletschek found that the following percentages of Bürger, Kleinbürger, and lower class members in the congregations Nuremburg in 1851 (4.7 percent, 72.3 percent, 19.5 percent); Hanau in 1846 (2 percent, 53 percent, 43 percent); Dresden in 1848/49 (17.2 percent, 54.3 percent, 24.3 percent). Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens, 328–330. This is the general interpretation of East German historians Günter Kolbe and Gottfried Krapp, as well as the West German Jörn Brederlow. Kolbe, Geschichte der Deutschkatholiken und freien Gemeinden; Krapp, Die Kämpfe um proletarischen Jugendunterricht und proletarische

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Referencing the 1872 membership list of the Berlin FRC, historian Sebastian Prüfer stated that many congregations recruited “overwhelmingly from the subbourgeois [unterbürgerlich] strata.”4 Although downward shifts in the social anchoring of Free Religion were common in periods of political repression, this was not a continuous process. Indeed statistics from some congregations, such as that of Frankfurt am Main, indicate periods of embourgeoisement.5 In revisiting the 1872 list of the Berlin FRC, I offer another interpretation, one that begins with the findings of Paletschek and Holzem, who identified the relative resilience table 1: Membership structure of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in 1872.6 Occupation/estate

Total (of which masters)

Percentage

Upper classes Civil servants, former military officers, nobility

12

1.7

136 (1) 46 140 (16)

19.4 6.6 20.0

206 (77)

29.4

9 (0) 12 (1) 41 (5)

1.3 1.7 5.8

20 5

2.8 0.7

19 55

2.7 7.8

701 (100)

100

“Old town citizenry” (Altes Stadtbürgertum) Commercial trades and free professions Manufacturers, management, rentiers Trades of the “alte Mittelstand” (plumbers, painters, plasterers, etc.) “Mass trades” (cigarmakers, shoemakers, weavers, etc.) Building trades Printers Metal work/machine-building Workers, agriculture (Unskilled) workers Gardeners, farmers Other Men without profession given Women listed without husbands and without profession given Total

4

5

6

Jugendweihen am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1977); Brederlow, Lichtfreunde. Prüfer rightly stated elsewhere that who gets categorized as “unterbürgerlich” is strongly dependent on the definition of the term. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 225 fn, 228. In the late nineteenth century, the number of artisans in leadership positions in the Frankfurt Deutschkatholisch congregation dropped vis-à-vis educated individuals and merchants. Ralf Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main (München: Oldenbourg, 1996), 404. The figures include both head of household and dues-paying dependents (most dependents did not pay dues). LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag.

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of the middle-class and lower-middle makeup of early Free Religion.7 In 1870s Berlin, I will argue, Free Religion represented the social interests not of the urban poor, but of those subaltern groups at the juncture of the lower and middle classes. There, on the cusp between the dominating and the dominated, religious radicalism gave expression to both social frustration and social ambition. The location of the members of the congregation in the middle of Berlin society is best established by examining those social groups largely excluded from the membership lists. First of all, one notes the absence of state employees. Civil servants, army officers, teachers, and church officials were prohibited from joining by state fiat, and when the police discovered the name of a courtroom official in the 1872 list, they underlined it in red and wrote “Civil Servant!” Such cases usually led to police investigation, and it is not surprising that this particular official’s name did not appear in the 1879 list. Second, the smattering of nobles, estate owners, and other upper-class members (twelve total) speaks of a self-exclusion of the higher circles of society. A corresponding boundary was found below. There were no peasants, few unskilled workers (fourteen with six dependents), and only two artisans listed as journeymen (Gesellen). It can be assumed that some members of the upper and lower classes were represented among the estimated 2,000 to 5,000 “souls” that belonged to the congregation but did not pay dues (the vast majority being, however, dependent family members).8 Individuals of high social status could not risk public affiliation, whereas the poor could not afford it. Most male members of the congregation belonged to traditional trades, which implied some degree of professional training and corporate organization. The largest professional groups consisted of the commercial trades (forty-two merchants or Kaufleute and fifteen dealers or Händler), the traditional crafts of the “Alte Mittelstand” (plumbing, painting, plastering, etc.), and the “mass trades” of furniture making, shoemaking, cigar rolling, and weaving/tailoring. Over one-third of the male members of the FRC belonged to the latter category. As the name suggests, the mass trades produced commodities in mass (i.e., for export beyond the immediate community). What made the mass trades different from other industries engaged in mass production in the 1870s, such as metalworking, machine building, and printing, was the general absence of wage labor, mechanization, and large-scale production units. Like the trades of the “Alte Mittelstand,” the mass trades still worked in a relatively decentralized fashion, 7

8

Holzem and Paletschek found that Kleinbürger comprised up to 60 percent of the Deutschkatholisch congregations. While Paletschek found that 10 percent were bourgeois and 30 percent “subbourgeois,” Holzem found that in Southwestern Germany the percentage of bourgeois members was often even higher. Holzem, Kirchenreform, 328–331; Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens, 85–90; Peter Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 196–197. Berlin’s Städtisches Jahrbuch (1875), 143, stated that with 877 dues-paying members, the assumed size of the congregation was at least 3,000 “souls.” By contrast, police in 1874 reported that the number of persons who actually “confessed” to Free Religion was around 2,000. Police report of September. 30, 1874, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag.

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often according to the truck-system. Group work and the need to respond collectively to pressure from suppliers and buyers led to a high degree of proto-union organization and made the mass trades early centers of Social Democracy.9 Within the FRC, the most prominent early socialists belonged to this group, including shoemaker Thomas Metzner,10 cigarmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche,11 and furniture maker Heinrich Peege.12 Social historians have shown that the nominally independent artisans of the mass trades, including masters, were particularly vulnerable to proletarianization in the mid-nineteenth century.13 However, one should question the conclusion of Jörn Brederlow and others that their presence in the membership lists necessarily means that the Free Religious Congregations were gathering spots for groups for whom “the experience of social deprivation was decisive.”14 A high percentage of the Berlin congregation were masters; they represented a full two-thirds of the dues-paying tailors and weavers. Many were entrepreneurs who owned their own workshops and had several employees. Although the list does not reveal income, it is likely that the FRC attracted the more successful, better-established representatives of these trades (of 136 in the mass trades, there

9

10

11

12

13 14

Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 151–158. Even in the growing industrial center of Ludwigshafen, where nearly the entire leadership of the local SPD joined the Free Religious Congregation founded in 1891, membership rolls reveal the dominance of middle and lower-middle-class professions and trades. There were 153 independently employed and 69 artisans but only 40 workers. Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 196–197. Theodor Metzner (1830 –1902), leading socialist in the Berlin FRC in the 1870s, executive of the Lassallean ADAV for Berlin in 1864, left ADAV in 1868 to join VDAV, attended the Zurich conference of the Second International in 1893, was elected to city council in 1892–1895 and again in 1902, and opened a restaurant in Berlin in 1895. Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche (1825–1905), born illegitimate; after six months of primary school began a cigarmaker apprenticeship at nine years; worked in France, Switzerland, and Italy; active in communist-socialist circles in Switzerland; fought as franctireur in Schleswig-Holstein in 1848 and on the barricades in Dresden in 1849; spent one year in prison; in 1858 in Leipzig active in sick fund of the cigarmakers. Member of the Leipzig workers’s education association Vorwärts, Member of the Deutschkatholisch Congregation of Leipzig, member of Berlin FRC until 1880, cofounder and Vice President of ADAV in 1863, and helped form one of the first unions of cigarmakers in 1865. In 1868–1871 was in the Norddeutsche Reichstag (switched allegiance from ADAV to VDAV in 1870) and 1877 to 1881 was the Reichstag delegate for Berlin IV. In 1878 exiled from Berlin; in 1881 emigrated to the United States. Georg Hirth, ed., Deutscher Parlaments-Almanach, vol. 12 (Leipzig: Hirth, 1877), 152–153; Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. 1, Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack, eds. (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachf., 1983); Prüfer, Sozialismus, 234. Gottlieb Heinrich Peege (b. 1850), exited church in 1877, sat on board of directors of Berlin FRC in early twentieth century; treasurer of the illegal Central Committee of the SPD between 1879 and his exile from Berlin. Hachtmann, Berlin 1848, 74–79. Brederlow, Lichtfreunde, 79. The East German historian Gotthold Krapp lumped together “workers and dependent artisans” as “proletarian elements” in his breakdown of the 1872 FRC list. Krapp, Jugendweihen, 75.

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were 51 masters but only one journeyman). In the 1870s, many master artisans enjoyed a social and economic status comparable to that of the congregation’s Fabrikanten (manufacturers).15 Where specified, most of the twenty-four FRC Fabrikanten produced goods made in small, nonmechanized workshops: brushes, paint, stockings, corsets, gloves, and pianos.16 There was also some mobility between Fabrikanten and artisans. One Schirmmacher (umbrella maker) of 1872 called himself a “Schirmfabrikant” in 1879, whereas the daughter of a shoe-polish manufacturer (Wichsfabrikant) worked as a seamstress. A further indication of the relative equality of successful artisans, merchants, and manufacturers is found in the composition of the “patrons” of the FRC, who in 1879 included a Schlosser (locksmith or mechanic), two merchants, a master furniture maker, and a Fabrikant. Although the congregation did accumulate a significant endowment through large gifts by some of its patrons over the years, its annual expenses were met primarily from membership dues. The overall economic strength of the congregation members is expressed by the fact that dues sufficed to allow the full-time preacher, G. S. Schaefer, to travel to different European countries (and in 1876 to the United States) during his annual six-week paid summer vacation. When at a business meeting on May 16, 1882, Thomas Metzner opposed paying Schaefer’s vacation salary, Schaefer appealed somewhat self-pityingly (and successfully) to the assembled congregation elites: “Anyone who has an inkling of my situation, who knows how careful I must be not to step over the boundary of the permitted, he will certainly not have the heart to deny me my sole pleasure – travel, which I anyway undertake in the interests of the congregation.” Schaefer also noted that, unlike the school rector he could have become, he had no pension. Yet, when compared to the average annual salary of 1,998 marks that Berlin primary school teachers received in 1878, Schaefer’s annual salary in 1879 of 3,600 marks, not including additional earnings from religious instruction, appears quite generous.17

The Sociology of a Sect What is the relationship between sect formation and social position? Some of the Marxist literature on early Free Religion might agree with the dictum of sociologist Benton Johnson that a “sect is a religious group that rejects the social 15

16 17

See Thomas Nipperdey, “Aspekte der Verbürgerlichung,” in Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert: Varianten ihres Verhältnisses im europäischen Vergleich, Jürgen Kocka, ed. (Munich: Oldenburg, 1986), 49–52. Grzywatz, Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat, 1124–1126. See Berliner Städtisches Jahrbuch (1875), 177. Report of November 13, 1883, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15045, unpag.; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15046, p. 80; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 12978, p. 65. Hans Müller, Preußische Volksschulzustände: Ein Wort an das Volk und seine Lehrer (Berlin: Verlag der Berliner Arbeiterbibliothek, 1890). G. S. Schaefer, Zehn Wochen in den Vereinigten Staaten NordAmerikas in Veranlassung meiner Abordnung zur Convention der freien Gemeinden NordAmerikas in Philadelphia der 26. und 27. Juni 1876: Ein Reisebericht (Berlin: Rubenow, 1876).

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environment in which it exists.”18 I find a more subtle model for explaining Free Religious dissent in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the religious field. According to Bourdieu, the religious field is produced by the structured inequality between religious actors (priests, laity, churches, and sects) in the production and distribution of religious goods. It is ordered not only by domination of the institutional orthodoxy, but also by the possibilities of resistance and usurpation by sects. Successful sects result when homologous conflicts emerge between the dominant and dominated clergy, on the one hand, and the dominant and dominated laity, on the other hand. These conflicts are never purely religious but always, and especially in the case of the laity, related to conflicts in the social and political fields for which religion plays a symbolic legitimizing function. The specific locations of division around which sects form are historically contingent. However, the groups that tend to become the dominant lay and clerical forces in the sect hold in common an ambivalent relationship of inclusion in and exclusion from the order they rebel against. Bourdieu called them “structurally ambiguous categories and groups, [. . .] occupying places of great structural tension, contradictory or anomalous positions, and Archimedean points.”19 Groups in mediating positions are crucial for sect formation because they most clearly embody the negative and positive attributes of the sect, which are, on the one hand, marginalization and, on the other hand, the conviction that they have the ability to usurp power. According to Bourdieu, sect founders typically come from the lower ranks of the church hierarchy, where they occupy “a dominated position in the system of symbolic domination.”20 The lower clergy can experience contradictory feelings of mastery over church operation and teachings and of frustration at their inferiority within the hierarchy. Indeed, the first generation of Free Religious preachers were marginal members of the clergy: parish ministers, relegated priests, students of theology, and recent seminary graduates. Not one of them was a high-ranking church official, such as a bishop, a superintendent, or a professor of theology. The same can be said mutatis mutandis of the professions of the second- and third-generation intellectual leaders, who were often physicians, journalists, and schoolteachers. Although their formal educations granted them some measure of cultural capital, they were subordinate to the clerical, state, and university elites, who controlled the institutions of learning. Particularly for primary school (Volksschule) teachers, this subordination was rigorous and continuous and sometimes experienced as direct oppression. At a public meeting in favor of school reform in 1868, G. S. Schaefer recalled his frustration at having to enforce orthodox religious instruction in the 1850s and 1860s. He had already begun to rebel in the teacher training in the Protestant seminary, where he and eighteen colleagues staged a protest against 18 19 20

Quoted in Stark and Bainbridge, The Future of Religion, 23. Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 27. Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 27.

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the forced memorization of religious sayings. Having to teach religion twelve hours a week in the classroom finally led him to leave the schools.21 In order to discover the homologous positions of inclusion and exclusion that drew the lay members to participate in the Free Religious sects, it will be necessary to interpret the 1872 FRC membership list within what we know of tensions pulling at the social fabric of nineteenth-century Berlin. For this task we can borrow from the extensive historical literature on the role of the urban middle classes in early political liberalism to show how FRC membership may be understood as an expression of both solidarity with and opposition to the city’s liberal elites.

the free religious as town citizens Social historians have shown that most of the occupational groups represented in the FRC list entered the nineteenth century with a strong sense that they were “town citizens” (Stadtbürger). Town citizenship was an extension of the rights and responsibilities of the myriad of occupational corporations that made up the social network of the early modern town. Town citizenship was first and foremost a prerogative of artisan and commercial groups that have come to be known as the “old middle classes” (Alte Mittelstand). High state officials, aristocrats, peasants, and members of the underclass were all pointedly excluded from this corporate identity. Against those historians such as Mack Walker, who saw in the old middle classes the seedbed for a reactionary petty bourgeois that clung to its restrictive control on urban commerce in the face of economic liberalization,22 Lothar Gall argued that a significant portion of these middle classes identified with modernization. Turning against the guilds, they embraced the dynamics of unfolding capitalism and acted as a modernizing motor within the nineteenth-century German cities. In the process, they did not abandon their corporate identity as Stadtbürger. Instead they translated it into the early liberal utopia of the “classless society of Bürger.”23 In this way, town citizenship was universalized into national citizenship and even membership in the fraternity of humanity. Gall identified commercialization and urbanization as key contributors to the emergence of political liberalism and radicalism. These forces can be found in the social groups present in the 1872 FRC membership list. Merchants, members of the mass trades, and small-scale manufacturers were all subject to pressures and 21

22

23

Neue Preussische Zeitung, November 11, 1868 (hereafter referred to by its more common name Kreuzzeitung). Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648–1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). Lothar Gall, “Vom alten zum neuen Bürgertum. Die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch 1780– 1820,” in Bürgertum, liberale Bewegung und Nation: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Lothar Gall (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996): 22–37, here 37; see also Lothar Gall, Von der ständischen zur bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich: 1993); and Grzywatz, Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat, 21–42; Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum, 65–88.

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opportunities of capitalist commercialization. There was also an enormous turnover of FRC members. Only 50 percent of those listed in 1872 were duespaying members in 1879, and of those over two-thirds had changed their address. This corresponded to the overall mobility of Berliners at this time, the true dimensions of which far exceeded the annual growth rates of 2 to 6 percent maintained throughout the nineteenth century. In 1871, when the population had reached 822,569, a total of 211,452 people either moved into (133,693) or out of (77,759) the city.24 High rates of mobility and urbanization were chief factors in the erosion of traditional corporate structures, thus allowing for the emergence of new associations. Furthermore, the membership list reveals the social heterogeneity of the life world of the old city center. Free Religious congregations, like Social Democratic and left-liberal clubs, functioned as neighborhood associations, in which members of the urban intelligentsia (doctors, journalists, and former teachers) were able to profile themselves as opinion makers and local networkers among the members of the Alte Mittelstand.25 Social dislocation and progressive reorganization were also found in religious life. Just as trade liberalization had weakened the guilds, the mobility of the urban population caused widespread dislocation within traditional church congregations. The Protestant Church, to which the overwhelming majority of Berlin’s inhabitants belonged, showed a marked decline of participation in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1867 and 1875, when the Protestant population of Berlin rose by 20 percent to 889,000 “souls,” the number of church buildings only grew by around 10 percent (57 to 63) and the number of ministers by less than 7 percent (111 to 118). Because rapid urban growth had not been accompanied by a matching expansion of church facilities or personnel, the church was rapidly losing touch with working-class Berlin neighborhoods. Participation reached its nadir in the Heiligen Kreuz Parish, where only 2.9 percent of parishioners took Easter communion in the early 1870s.26 As traditional ties to the parish weakened, individuals gained increased freedom to enter into the religious market. Although the Free Religious Congregation was nineteenth-century Berlin’s largest sect, an increasing number of Anglo-American sects competed for Protestant souls. In the early 1890s, the FRC (with ca. 7,500 souls) vied with three different Lutheran sects (ca. 5,000, 4,000, and 280 souls, respectively), an Apostolic sect with ca. 4,000 souls, two Baptist congregations with roughly 2,000 together, and a smattering of small Methodist, Mennonite, and Humanist congregations.27 Only slowly did the 24 25 26

27

Städtisches Jahrbuch (1872), 94–95, 121. Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 212, 99. Contrary to the low level of church participation among Berlin Protestants, in 1874 the 46,600 Catholic Berliners took communion on average more than once (unclear whether this referred to Easter or the entire year). No statistics were given on the religious observance of the estimated 50,000 Jewish Berliners. See Städtisches Jahrbuch (1875), 138–140. Figures taken from the 1893/1894 annual report of the Royal (Protestant) Consistory for Brandenburg. EZA 7/3450, p. 224.

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Protestant Church begin to respond to the crisis by building more churches and embracing new methods for binding its members to the churches. The Inner Mission, the evangelizing arm of the Protestant Church, sought to reinvigorate urban congregations and win Protestants back from the clutches of secularism, sects, and political radicalism. It took a keen interest in the innovations pioneered in Britain by William Booth and his Salvation Army. Migration to the cities increased urban multi-confessionality. In Berlin, the influx of Jews and Catholics created new surfaces for intraconfessional tension, and the nineteenth century saw the formation of a host of new antagonistic confessional associations, such as the Catholic Bonifatiusverein Association and the Protestant Gustav-Adolf Association and Protestantenverein. At the same time, however, confessional mixing also led to interconfessional alliances among liberals and a new spirit of tolerance.28 There is a clear parallel between the political utopia of a “classless society” and the religious/secular utopia of a “confessionless society.” More than any other religious formation in the city, Berlin’s Free Religious congregation could claim to embody this ideal. In 1865, this formerly Catholic dissenting congregation was led by a former Protestant minister, A.T. Wislicenus, and a former Jew, the physician and editor Guido Weiss.29

Social Protest on Two Fault Lines There are clear parallels between the social basis of Free Religion and that of early urban liberalism. Following the social pattern of town citizenship both tended to exclude the poor below and the state classes above (civil servants, military, clergy). This latter exclusion became the fault line around which political liberalism organized in the Vormärz period. The institutions of the Stadtbürger, in particular the city government and the city council, embodied the tradition of autonomous self-administration (Selbstverwaltung), yet were subordinate locations within the monarchic state. In the buildup to the Revolution of 1848, liberals became aware of this “double life” of city government or “Gemeinde.”30 There was a structural analogy to the Protestant Church congregation, also referred to as a “Gemeinde,” which according to Lutheran 28

29

30

See Ralf Roth, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung, Konfessionsgliederung und Haushaltsanteile,” in Stadt und Bürgertum im Übergang von der traditionellen zur modernen Gesellschaft, Lothar Gall ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 17–50. Guido Weiss (1822–1899), Jewish, affiliated with FRC Berlin since at least 1850, assistant chairman 1863–1865; member of the philosophical club “Die Freien” ca. 1844 with Max Stirner, Edgar Bauer, and Albert Dulk. Editor for Vossische Zeitung (in 1850s), Zeitschrift des CentralVereins in Preußen für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klasse (1858–1862), Berliner Reform (1863– 1866), Die Zukunft (1867–1871), Frankfurter Zeitung (1870s), Die Wage (1873–79). Sat in Prussian Diet 1869–1870 for the Progressives. Höhle, Mehring, 45–49. Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann (1847) quoted in Berthold Grzywatz, Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat, 107.

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doctrine was endowed with the right to self-administration but was obliged to obedience to secular authority (Obrigkeit). Both the city council and the religious congregation were thus ambiguous sites where the semiautonomous city population exercised self-rule, but also experienced its domination by the monarchic state and its bureaucracies. With the politicization of the alte Stadtbürgertum in the Vormärz, these sites became natural locations of rupture within the state. When a Democrat, such as the Berlin professor of pathology Rudolf Virchow, called for the “free Gemeinde” during the Revolution of 1848, his reference to the city community could have had religious undertones for his listeners.31 On one level, then, Free Religion was a form of protest consonant with liberal domination of the city council. As we saw in the first chapter, the Deutschkatholiken and the Lichtfreunde became a cause célèbre for Berlin liberals during the Vormärz precisely because the dissidents embodied the struggle of the freethinking urban polity against the tyranny of church authorities backed by the monarch. On another level, however, Gall’s model of the solidarity of the town citizenry fails to adequately describe the social forces at play in the FRC. It cannot explain why most liberal elites did not take the step to actual membership in the dissenting sect. For this we need to examine the forces of exclusion operating against the social groups belonging to the FRC. A number of historians, most prominently Jürgen Kocka, have objected to Gall’s thesis that town citizenry was really the decisive element in the social formation of nineteenth-century urban liberalism. Kocka saw a greater impetus for transformation extending from the Prussian state and from a new entrepreneurial class, whose identification with the old Stadtbürgertum was weaker than their new class-consciousness as rising elites.32 The deepening class rift between the wealthy and the middle-class town citizens was reflected in a redefinition of the terms “Bürger” and “bürgerlich.” Originally a category of estate, over the course of the nineteenth century “bürgerlich” increasingly became a category of class.33 At one point in their debate, Kocka conceded that his differences with Gall really boiled down to these differing definitions of “Bürger.”34 Whereas Gall’s definition corresponded to the mentality of the Stadtbürger, who saw themselves as burghers or citizens, Kocka understood the Bürger to be principally the bourgeoisie. Rather than choosing between them, we want to maintain the tension between these two competing definitions of Bürger, for precisely this tension holds the key to understanding the social function of the Free Religious 31

32

33 34

Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner, Anthropologe, Politiker (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 64. See Jürgen Kocka, “Kommentar, Sektion 4, Das städtische Bürgertum und der Staat,” in Stadt und Bürgertum: 417–426. Grzywatz, Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat, 40. See Kocka’s comments in “Zusammenfassung der Diskussion,” in Stadt und Bürgertum: 119–129.

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sect. The congregation’s members were included in the old definition of Stadtbürger but excluded from the new elitist conceptions of bürgerlich that were based on educational and economic capital. The interplay of these two forces is revealed by the following contemporary source, which anticipated resistance to the increased income requirements for state citizenry imposed by the Prussian state in 1831: “Whoever knows the value that people place in being called Bürger, the only title that distinguishes independent artisans from journeymen and day laborers, will realize that the City Ordinance of 1831 will find [. . .] little acceptance.”35 We can now situate the Free Religious Congregation within two processes of bifurcation that characterized nineteenth-century urban society. The first occurred along the existing division between the monarch and aristocracy and the town citizenry, the second was the growing class division within the town citizenry itself. Within this double bifurcation of the social field, we find Free Religion as a vehicle for members of intermediary classes who strove for power and autonomy against the church and state, but also against their growing exclusion within urban society. Religious dissenters made demands for civic autonomy and the classless society in the name of all town citizens. However, by forcing these issues to the point of rupture with state and clerical authorities, for example through public renunciation of the sacraments or articles of faith, they created circumstances in which well-situated liberals could not follow them. In this way, the Free Religious Congregation recast the growing class division within the Alte Stadtbürgertum in a manner that allowed middle-class radicals to claim the mantle of leadership from city’s progressive elites in the name of the elite’s own liberal principles. This sociological analysis is not meant to discount the religious motivations that individuals brought to their participation in a sectarian movement. Nor am I suggesting that class and estate membership are the only social factors of salience. Family conflict, professional crisis, mixed marriage, as well as confessional and gender discrimination, all proved to be factors that contributed to individual decisions to join Free Religion. Yet, as is poignantly revealed in a letter received by the Berlin police from a local noblewoman in 1886, social status considerations often trumped other motivations when it came to public religious affiliation in the nineteenth century. She pleaded with the Chief of Police to rescind the decision to bar nonmembers from visiting the Sunday lectures of the Free Religious Congregations. Unable to join the FRC out of regard for her family, she could no longer attend: “Who like me, the daughter of a highly respected civil servant and descendent of a noble family, has been able to experience what a joy and satisfaction it is to have finally found a place where they are endeavoring to construct a new worldview on the basis of scientific [. . .] 35

Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon quoted in Reinhart Koselleck, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1967), 576.

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knowledge for those who can no longer find support in the old faith, that person is fully and completely aware of the healing influence [of Free Religion] and can only deeply regret when it is suddenly cut off.”36

popular natural science as bildung and halbbildung Bourdieu’s field concept can also be brought to bear on the wider social dissemination of the naturalistic worldview favored by, but by no means monopolized by, organized secularists. In his seminal work Distinction, Bourdieu argued that alongside social differentiation according to economic capital came a parallel but not identical differentiation according to educational or cultural capital. Based on extensive empirical research, Bourdieu concluded that elites held a monopoly over educational capital that could not be contested by the lowermiddle and lower classes.37 Whereas the educational field of France in the 1970s was arguably very stable, the same cannot be said of Germany a century earlier. The ninteenth-cntury German concept of education as Bildung was not yet identical with state-authorized educational qualification. It still had religious, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions, which allowed Free Religion to offer itself as a producer of educational capital. And, as popular science displaced theology and liturgy in Sunday meetings, Free Religious preachers increasingly understood their task as an educational one. Furthermore, the definition of Bildung was being contested within the statesanctioned educational institutions themselves. During the period of the Prussian Reforms, the state had taken great strides toward codifying the academic and religious content of Bildung through the classical grammar school or Gymnasium. However, the curriculum of the Gymnasium with its emphasis on the study of Greek and Latin was being challenged by advocates of the natural sciences. The resultant struggle of “two cultures” defined much of the terrain of nineteenth-century intellectual culture and religion. In their opposition to the domination of theology and the humanities inside the university, professors of natural science often ventured out of the ivory tower and sought support in the arena of popular science. Organized secularism took sides with the natural scientists in this wide contestation of the definition of Bildung.38 Free Religionists were key players in the emerging popular science market. As natural scientific Bildung became linked to a monist worldview, anticlericalism, and atheism and, most important, as it was embraced by the urban lower-middle classes, it was subjected to forces of inclusion and exclusion analogous to those operating on Free Religion. The sociology of Free Religious dissent can 36 37

38

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15048, p. 74. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 372–484. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1, 457; Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 55–61.

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thus help illuminate the religious and social background to the debates over materialism and positivism in nineteenth-century modern German thought. A suitable starting point for the investigation of the sociology of natural knowledge is the condemnation of the teachings of the Free Religious made in the 1850s by Wilhelm Ranke, a conservative Protestant Regierungsrat (government councilor) and brother of the famous historian. Free Religion, he wrote, was limited in its appeal to “mill owners, shopkeepers, wine sellers, cotton weavers, village chiefs, village schoolmasters and the whole suburban public,” whose “Halbbildung” (semi-education) emboldened them to criticize Christian religion, the deeper secrets and history of which they were too ignorant to recognize.39 Halbbildung would remain the most persistent sociological explanation (and intellectual disqualification) of secularism and atheism. Writing shortly before the First World War, language philosopher Fritz Mauthner found that Ernst Haeckel was one of those “Halbgebildeten, who are nowhere more horrible than in the field of philosophy.” His monism, which currently held such fascination for the “middle hundred thousand,” would later only invoke laughter.40 As late as 1968 Ernst Bloch found that atheist Freethinkers were “Halbgebildeten, in other words, only half disenchanted [Halbentzauberten].” The Freethinker’s enlightenment proceeded “hastily and so often quite superficially,” leaving him “poorly disenchanted like a man, who only succeeded in gaining half an understanding [Verstand]. And the other half that he has is perhaps also not the finest.”41 Bloch’s characterization reveals a remarkable continuity with Ranke’s judgment a century earlier. Both argued that the “lack of insight into the connections between appearances” left the superficially educated open to irrational suggestion.42 For both, the secularist marriage of science and religion represented something of a false idol. For neither man did Halbbildung represent a rung on the ladder to a proper understanding of the deeper truth of reality, which meant in Ranke’s case Protestant Christianity, and in Bloch’s case his own critical theory. Halbbildung was a dead end. In the same vein, Theodor Adorno called “Halbbildung” simply “the manipulated spirit of the excluded,” which the culture industry had rendered immune to true culture.43 39

40

41

42

43

Quoted in Fr[iedrich] Paulsdorff, “Die Freien Gemeinden und die Handwerker (von einem Handwerker),” in Der Dissident: Organ für Licht und Wahrheit, no. 15 (April 15, 1859): 1–2. The work in question was Die Verirrungen der christlichen Kunst. Fritz Mauthner, “Monismus,” in Wörterbuch der Philosophie: Neue Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1924), 338–357. Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 41, 39. “Halbbildung,” Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 14th ed. (Brockhaus: Leipzig 1893), vol. 8: 664. Theodor Adorno, “Einleitung zur ‘Theorie der Halbbildung,’” in Gesammelte Schriften 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972 [1960]), 574–577, 576.

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The mirth and contempt with which intellectual elites spoke of the Halbbildung of their inferiors for over a century betrayed a social anxiety. Natural knowledge enabled the less-educated to challenge the elite monopoly over Bildung. By combining natural science and worldview, materialistic monism provided its adherents with a systematic understanding of the world replete with moral, aesthetic, historical, and religious dimensions. These were the attributes of true Bildung as defined by neo-humanists. Moreover, the “semieducated” too could make a social argument about the status of their knowledge, which is what the artisan Friedrich Paulsdorff did in a 1859 article in Der Dissident, the official organ of the Berlin FRC. Only those classes at the middle of society who combined manual and mental work, he argued, had the healthy, harmonious development necessary to recognize the truth of Free Religion. By this measure it was the elites such as Ranke and not the artisans who were halfeducated: We believe: without the clear sight and sure step of such so-called semi-educated people [Halbgebildeten] humanity would certainly be more deeply ensnared in the secrets and arrogance of those who possess one-sided learning [Einseitig-Gelehrten], than is the case. [. . .] That religion, which does not feel bound to one book (as much as it values it), but draws its principles from the entire perceptible world and the history of all times and peoples – that accepts the discovered [erkannte] holy world order and wants to develop itself in accordance with this knowledge – that strives to perfect the whole human spirit, the intellect just as much as feeling – this religion is gladly and openly joined by artisans and workers, while a great part of the scholars and the refined do this in quiet, but gaze down fearfully at us [. . .] with age-old mistrust.44

The statements of Ranke, Bloch, and Paulsdorff correspond roughly to the three positions – conservatives, liberal elites, and radical Kleinbürger – that emerged out of the double bifurcation of the social sphere. All three claimed a monopoly on true Bildung. But whereas Bloch and Ranke could define Bildung out of the logic of the educational hierarchy that had produced their own cultural authority, Paulsdorff had to offer an alternative justification for his privileged claim to knowledge. He argued, on the one hand, that artisans have a special aptitude for recognizing the truth offered by empirical knowledge. On the other hand, he claimed that they have the social autonomy necessary to publicly embrace the radical conclusions of this knowledge that the educated could only do “in quiet.” I want to address both of these elements in turn, as they help explain the specific sociological location and function of the natural scientific Weltanschauung embraced by German secularists.

44

Paulsdorff, “Die Freien Gemeinden und die Handwerker.”

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Natural Scientific Worldview as Bildung for the Subaltern classes Why was natural science or, as Paulsdorff put it, knowledge “from the entire perceptible world” so attractive to subaltern urban classes with limited formal education? Leaving aside for a moment its role in political and religious struggles, I would like to briefly consider how natural science was presented by its popularizers. First of all, the materialist claim made by physiologist Jacob Moleschott that “nothing has reality, except what can be perceived through the bodily senses”45 made the physical world the sole object of knowledge and raised empiricism to its sole method of apprehension. By negating the epistemological bases of idealist philosophy and theology, empiricism relieved those seeking education from needing to engage with these difficult subjects. As one of the pioneers of phrenology – another scientific system popular among educated workers – had stated earlier in the century, “I only wish to excite others to lay aside, as I have done, the notions of the old philosophers, to discard all previous opinions and to reason by facts which can be demonstrated.”46 Second, popular scientists presented natural scientific Weltanschauung as a sketch of the total representation of the natural world and human history that empirical research had yet to complete, thereby making it an object of belief rather than of exact knowledge. Instead of detracting from its currency as educational capital, the fact that natural scientific Weltanschauung required faith enhanced its appeal for those without educational expertise. It was not necessary to master modern science in order to receive its blessings. A “confession” of scientific Weltanschauung sufficed to enable the believer to feel that he or she stood on a solid and exclusive intellectual foundation. Paulsdorff’s claim that empirical science was the preferred mode of ambitious urban middle and lower-middle classes is corroborated by numerous sources. Natural science formed the backbone of the educational activities of institutions such as the FRC that served the middle, lower-middle, and lower classes. Between 1861 and 1865 natural science was the most popular lecture subject in the Great Berlin Handwerkerverein, which in its heyday had several thousand members. In 1868, “natural science as related to trade and life” formed the subject of 15 percent of the lectures held at Berlin’s district committees (Bezirksvereine), the grassroots organizations of political liberalism in which the whole spectrum of the Alte Mittelstand participated.47 Although 45

46

47

Quoted in Otto Vogel, “Betrachtungen über die materialistische Weltanschauung, Theil I.,” Jahresbericht über die Louisenstädtische Realschule (1874): 3–39, 17. Quoted in Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 61. Among the 6,066 members of the Bezirksvereine in 1867, 10 percent were educated professionals, 45 percent in the trades or crafts, 18 percent merchants, 15 percent Rentiers and Fabrikanten, 6 percent industrial workers and 6 percent salesmen. Städtisches Jahrbuch (1868), 227–229, 233.

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popular science institutions were politicized and catered to different groups, their audiences were nonetheless concentrated in the nonuniversity-educated middle and lower classes. The city’s largest and longest-running adult education institution was the Humboldt Academy, named after Alexander von Humboldt. Given that its left-liberal director Max Hirsch48 jealously guarded against infiltration by socialists, it is not surprising that only 5 percent of the students enrolled in the first quarter of 1896 were workers or artisans (51). Teachers (239), commercial employees (154 merchants, sales clerks, and bank employees), civil servants (82), and women without professions (403) represented the chief occupational groups. By contrast, the first board of the Social Democratic competition, the Workers Education Association North, in July 1889 consisted of four furniture makers, two carpenters, one furniture polisher, one painter, one tailor, and one worker.49 A larger picture of the social reception of natural science in Berlin is provided by statistics published in the 1870s and 1880s by the public libraries. An examination of a sample year allows a comparative examination of the borrowing habits of various social groups. As Table 2 shows, Berlin library users showed roughly the same order of preference in their borrowing of nonfiction or “Sachliteratur.” Natural science and technology were far more popular than the “idealist” subjects of philosophy or philology among all Berliners, and the ratio of natural science to theology was almost 40:1.50 Given that the libraries were a point of pride for the city’s liberals, it is likely that the more pious inhabitants of the city were underrepresented among their users. Nonetheless, there is a marked contrast between the secular reading habits of these Berliners and those of the inhabitants of the rural Swabian town Laichingen, where one historian found that among the 13,962 book titles to appear on inventories between 1748 and 1820, only a tiny 1.5 percent were nonreligious.51

48

49

50

51

Max Hirsch (1832–1905), Dr. phil., Jewish, studied philosophy, law, and political science in Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin; taught at the Berliner Handwerkerverein in 1861; co-led Magdeburg Workers Education Association 1863–1867, VDAV Berlin in 1862, cofounder of the Hirsch-Dunckerschen unions and the German Antisocialist Workers Congress in 1877, cofounder of the Society for the Propagation of Popular Education in 1871, founder and general secretary of the Humboldt Academy, 1878, founding member of the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing and the DGEK; elected to the Reichstag of the North German Union in 1869 for the Progressive Party. SED, ed., Geschichte der revolutionären Berliner Arbeiterbewegung. vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1987); Karl Birker, Die deutschen Arbeiterbildungsvereine 1840–1870 (Berlin: 1973), 152. See Max Hirsch, Wissenschaftlicher Zentralverein und Humboldt-Akademie: Skizze ihrer Thätigkeit und Entwicklung 1878–1896 (Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1896), 33–34; LAB A. Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 14970, p. 1. Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats zu Berlin pro 1871: Bericht über die Verwaltung der städtischen Volksbibliotheken (Berlin: 1872). Hans Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen, 1650–1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 457.

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table 2: Nonfiction books (Sachliteratur) loaned from Berlin’s public libraries in 1878.52

Theology/Erbauung Philosophy Natural science Technology (Total library users in 1877)

Civil Servants

Commercial Employees/Merchants

Artisans

Workers

53 106 806 226 (1365)

22 88 1258 734 (2584)

40 31 1295 1021 (3075)

5 14 606 265 (1753)

Within these general trends, the table reveals social preferences for different types of knowledge that correspond to levels of educational accomplishment. The highest level of education was presumably found among the civil servants. Then followed the two groups of the Alte Mittelstand: merchants (Kaufleute), whose highest educational rank may have been completion of Realschule, and artisans (Handwerker), more likely to have only completed primary schooling (Volksschule). Finally, there were the workers, who often had only a few years of primary school. The contrast of borrowing in philosophy and natural science is particularly revealing. For every philosophical text borrowed by a worker, forty-three works of natural science were checked out. For civil servants the ratio was 1 to 8. These statistics confirm the correlation between the social bases of Free Religion and popular reception of natural science in urban Germany. The social articulation of popular scientific Bildung replicated in the educational field the social articulation of dissent we have examined in the religious field. Inclusive and Exclusive Politics of Bildung 1848 to 1892 The political valence of natural scientific education shifted over the nineteenth century in a historical trajectory that parallels that taken by rationalist religious dissent and secularism. As erstwhile liberal allies became estranged from lowermiddle-class radicals, the natural scientific worldview, which had previously served as the basis for an inclusive politics, was increasingly subjected to forces of social exclusion and elite disqualification. As Friedrich Engels put it, when the French and German bourgeoisie discovered that their working classes had embraced atheism, they had no choice but “to silently drop their free

52

Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats zu Berlin pro 1878: Bericht über die Verwaltung der städtischen Volksbibliotheken (Berlin: 1878), 8.

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thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly on board.”53 By his own admission, Heinrich Heine had abandoned atheism already by the early 1850s when he “perceived that greasy cobblers and tailors presumed in their blunt mechanics’ speech to deny the existence of God.” Atheism “began to stink of cheese, brandy, and tobacco.”54 This was not yet the opinion of most of Berlin’s left-liberal leaders at the time. They emerged from the repressive era of the 1850s with the popularization of natural science as a central plank of their political agenda. “Science must become popular!” This 1859 slogan of the left-liberal politician Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch found widespread acceptance among both scientific elites and the “halbgebildete” middle and lower-middle classes, who entered into a reciprocal relationship in popular science institutions.55 Liberal professors of natural science authorized popular science as Bildung and, in return, gained leverage in their competition with the members of the theological and philosophical faculties over cultural and institutional power. Politically, popular science became a cornerstone of Progressive Party hegemony in the Berlin of the 1860s and 1870s. In July 1869, Rudolf Virchow, the former Democrat of 1848 and now a Progressive Party councilor, proposed that the city council support the building of a science museum to be named after Alexander von Humboldt. Its aim was to provide “progressive discovery and sound knowledge to the entire population [. . .], which will enable it to approach the middle range of the totality of science and to participate in its developments at regular intervals.” In this vision, semi-education through popular education was a positive aim that provides “a means of equalizing the different classes of the population, which would bear rich fruit from a social perspective.” Finally, the museum would overcome the inability of the “municipal public [Gemeinde]” to determine the “heart of the school curriculum,” which lay in the hands of the oversight institutions dominated by church and crown.56 Another institution championed by liberal promoters of scientific education was the Realgymnasium, a new type of secondary school that, like the classical Gymnasium, authorized its graduates to attend the university. Unlike the Gymnasium, in which the future Bildungsbürger studied Greek and Latin classics in the neo-humanist tradition, the Realgymnasium gave room to the study of natural science – “Realien” – and modern languages. Socially, the Realgymnasium was identified with the ambitious middle classes drawn to practical applications of scientific knowledge and naturalistic humanism. Statistics 53 54

55

56

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), 27–28. Heinrich Heine, “Confessions,” in The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine (London: Walter Scott, 1887), 290–326, 301. Quoted in Werner Conze, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der liberalen Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland. Das Beispiel Schulze-Delitzschs (Heidelberg: 1965), 20; Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung. “Das Humboldt-Museum,” Volkszeitung, no. 156, July 8, 1869.

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table 3: Statistics on the social background of Berlin high school graduates in the period 1882–1886 (per 100 pupils).57 Father’s status University graduate or econ. upper class New Mittelstand Old Mittelstand Lower class Total

Gymnasium Realgymnasium Oberrealschule Total 43.1

19.5

28.5

38.3

18.9 32.7 5.3 100

15.9 38.6 26.0 100

13.3 51.1 6.7 100

18.2 34.3 9.1 100

from the 1880s (Table 3) show that Berlin’s Realgymnasia did effectively merge the social base of the elite Gymnasium with the more plebian clientele of the Realschule. With the acute crisis of liberal rule in the late 1870s, however, the confluence of interests between the educated producers and semi-educated consumers of natural scientific knowledge began to be replaced by disharmonies and realignments. A widely acknowledged turning point came in the “Virchow-Haeckel controversy” that erupted at the September 1877 convention of the Association of German Natural Scientists and Physicians. In his keynote speech, Ernst Haeckel had demanded that Darwinian evolution be made the central organizing theory for modern school education. A few days later Rudolf Virchow took to the podium to oppose Haeckel’s claims, arguing that scientists must delineate clearly between proven fact and theoretical hypothesis, such as Darwinian evolution. Virchow criticized the attempt to “shove our merely theoretical and speculative edifice into the foreground, in order for us to construct the entire remaining Weltanschauung from there.” This was a clear reference to Haeckel’s Darwinian monism, which according to Virchow represented an unscientific “speculative expansion” and was therefore impermissible as a foundation of public schooling.58 Behind differences over scientific method, Virchow’s quarrel with Haeckel concerned the public use of natural science. Virchow made it quite clear that natural science qua Weltanschauung was becoming a threat to liberalism. He warned that revolutionary claims made in the name of science threatened to undermine the “favorable atmosphere in the nation that we currently possess.” He called for “moderation” and “renunciation of fancies [Liebhabereien] and personal opinions” to prevent the “inversion” of this atmosphere. Darwinism threatened to play into the hands of the Social Democrats, who had recently won

57

58

Source: Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics (Providence, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994), 318. Quotations in Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 66, 67.

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a Reichstag seat in Berlin. Virchow urged his Munich listeners to imagine “how the theory of evolution appears in the head of a socialist,” and pointed to the deadly consequence its fusion with socialism had already had in the excesses of the Paris Commune.59 Haeckel countered that because natural selection promotes social inequality, Darwinism was neither democratic nor socialistic, but “aristocratic.”60 Virchow, it turns out, was largely wrong about the Darwinian “hypothesis.” However, as a communal politician in Germany’s largest city, he was politically far more astute than Haeckel when he questioned the provincial Jena professor’s ability to determine the valence of Darwinism in the public sphere. Virchow’s intervention was not aimed at scaling back popular scientific education, for he remained active in this field and continued to see it as a cornerstone of political liberalism. Rather, he wanted tighter control of science in the public sphere by politically and scientifically responsible experts, who would protect this key liberal monopoly from the threat of socialist usurpation.61 It was at this time that the use of the term Halbbildung was becoming virulent in liberal circles. In an essay “Halbbildung and School Reform” in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1879, Karl Hildebrand called for a retreat from traditional liberal support of the expansion of the Realgymnasium. By bringing together the sons of Bildungsbürger and tradesmen for the study of both classical and modern subjects, the new schools had not extended universal Bildung across society. They had produced only “Halbbildung.” The merging of two “educational spheres” had caused alienation in each: “[n]ot only the boy who has received an education above his estate is declassed in life, also the one who has received an education under his estate feels both inwardly and outwardly that he is out of place.” Real Bildung, he argued, was “to measure up everywhere to one’s class and professional sphere [Standes- und Handlungssphäre)” and required the re-separation of the classes.62 Beyond damaging individual boys, Hildebrand thought that Halbbildung was a threat to national culture and to social harmony. By weakening the corporate solidarity of the children of the “class of intellectual labor, or upper middle class,” Halbbildung was responsible for the “inner discord that reigns

59

60

61

62

Rudolf Virchow, Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft im modernen Staat. Rede gehalten in der dritten allgemeinen Sitzung der fünfzigsten Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte zu München am 22. September 1877 (Berlin: Wiegandt, Hempel & Parey, 1877), 7. Ernst Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre. Eine Entgegnung auf Rudolf Virchows Münchner Rede über “Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft im modernen Staat” (Stuttgart: Schweizerbart, 1878), 75. Virchow’s call for political sobriety can be seen as a secularization of his own more utopian and optimistic liberalism of the 1860s, when he had claimed that science had stepped “into the place of the church” and its “transcendent aspirations,” and that “science [. . .] has become religion for us.” Quoted in Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1, 496. Hildebrand, “Halbbildung und Gymnasialreform. Ein Appell an die Unzufriedenen.” Deutsche Rundschau XVIII (1879): 422–451, 436, 439.

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in the part of our nation that in reality should be the bearer of national culture.” According to Hildebrand, those lower down were not well served by this Halbbildung either, as it left them dissatisfied with their place in the “lower middle class or, as Daniel de Foe put it, the upper station of lower life, i.e. the estates that lead the mechanical aspect of national activity.” These “tenants, crofters, petty merchants, foremen, mechanics, non-commissioned officers, subaltern civil servants, innkeepers, etc.,” have their cultural leaders in the “primary school teachers und fine artisans” just as the “first” class orients itself on “the professors, Gymnasium teachers and artists.”63 Writing in 1880, leading Berlin antisemite Otto Glagau (1834–1892) argued that the flooding of the universities and the contamination of high culture by the ambitious urban middle classes were not the main threats of Halbbildung. It was rather the penetration of liberal Halbbildung into the naïve masses, where it would “eat away the foundations” of culture. Glagau saw in the “whole much loved popularization of the sciences, especially natural and political science” a clever marketing strategy that packaged natural scientific “hypotheses” as “products” and distributed them “for mass consumption”: In the artisans’ associations one was above all keen to gather “scientific” education. Their halls were comfortable places, where small spirits could let their light shine. Even some literary, political and parliamentary celebrities, whose only merit is their “liberalism” and their connection to the “liberal” press, made their careers here. One spoke about all possible matters, about things that one might have only learned oneself in the morning. The semi-educated [Halbgebildeten] spread quarter-education [Viertelsbildung].64

In Glagau’s view, the ultimate beneficiaries of this “quarter-education” of the people were the left-liberal politicians. Yet few were the voices in the early 1880s, such as that of Eduard Lasker, who defended Halbbildung as a necessary stage in the process of civilization, through which the liberals must persevere to reach the goal of true Bildung of the masses. He sought to reassure his followers that, like a river that sometimes overflows its banks, Halbbildung would not destroy the broad fields planted by preceeding generation or the “seeds that we ourselves have sown.”65 The Secularist Response The deployment of the trope of Halbbildung by rightward-drifting liberals such as Hildebrand masked the retreat of urban elites from the strategy of integrating the lower-middle classes under the umbrella of liberal educational reform. Radical purveyors of popular science education to the subaltern classes, such 63 64

65

Hildebrand, “Halbbildung und Gymnasialreform, 437. Otto Glagau, “Halbbildung und Viertelsbildung,” Der Kulturkämpfer: Zeitschrift für öffentliche Angelegenheiten 2 (1880): 1–11, quotations 6, 7. Eduard Lasker, “Über Halbbildung” (1881), in Volksbildung in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert, Horst Dräger ed. (Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 1984): 127–131.

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as the Berlin FRC, responded to this growing exclusion in kind. They became increasingly critical of the university, as the chief institution of liberal Bildung. In December 1882, the student Karl Sänger (1861–1901), who later became a Free Religious preacher and leading Democrat in Frankfurt am Main, gave a talk to the Berlin FRC “on universities,” in which he argued that the exclusion of Realschüler and women from German universities “contradicts advanced culture.” The old languages taught in the classical neo-humanist Gymnasium were not needed for most studies and should be “thrown overboard.” Speaker Schaefer, who had not finished his own university studies, concurred. He juxtaposed the progressive nature of technical and craft schools with the “dead sciences at the universities,” where heads are stuffed with “memorization junk.” “What I teach cannot be taught at any university,” claimed Schaefer, and he called for “people’s academies [. . .] that are left to private initiative.”66 In a talk on “the various principles of Weltanschauung” for Berlin stonemasons in January 1884, Schaefer declared that the universities created only civil servants “and those are not free men. [. . .] The workers, especially in Berlin, could easily create their own university, maintain their own professors, and even pay them well.”67 Secularists parried the charge of Halbbildung leveled at their brand of knowledge by claiming that such charges were a subterfuge to counter the deep threat that the popularization of natural science represented to the traditional social order. Waldeck Manasse,68 a lace merchant and university dropout, gave a lecture at the Free Religious Congregation on September 11, 1892, entitled, “Dangerous Truths.” “Every truth,” he told his listeners, has been “persecuted from the start and [. . .] depicted as dangerous by the state powers, by the church institutions and by any other authority.” Manasse clinched his argument about the danger of natural scientific truth by stating that in 1877 Virchow had argued that “belief in creation” was “necessary” for the schools. “He declared scientific research – he, the official representative of science – dangerous for the youth.”69 66 67 68

69

Police protocol of December 3, 1882, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 15045, unpag. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no.12978, 78. Waldeck Manasse (1864–1923) was listed as a baptized Jew by historian Jacob Toury, but this appears to be a misreading of his “conversion” from Judaism to Free Religion (Vorwärts, May 20, 1923). Manasse gave up work as a salesman in the mid-1880s, studied at the Berlin Univeristy for a few semesters before becoming a book printer in 1890; founded the literary association Schiller in 1883 and became an author, selling 30,000 copies of his collection of aphorisms Lebensfragen in 1913; frequent lecturer and graveside speaker at Berlin FRC from 1880s until his death, active international Freethinker, and correspondent with Ernst Haeckel; city councilor for SPD between 1906 and 1920. Jacob Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland. Von Jena bis Weimar (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1966, 196; Brummer: Lexikon der deutschen Dichter und Prosaisten vom Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart. 6th ed, vol. 4, (Leipzig: Reclam, 1913), S. 355. From the summary report on Manasse’s speech in: Lichtstrahlen, Blätter für volksverständliche Wissenschaft und atheistische Weltanschauung. Zugleich ein litterarischer Wegweiser für das Volk, vol. 2, no 25 (1892): 1210.

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In an earlier speech, Manasse had used Virchow’s attack on the teaching of Darwinism in public education as proof of the “double conscience” of liberal scientists. When it comes to scientific research, “[t]heir first conscience does not shrink back from the ultimate consequences.” However, because “they believe that these demoralizing findings are only suitable for the upper ten thousand, they expose the second, the religious side [of their conscience] for the masses,” and seek to limit public access to the “successes of science.”70 In short, Manasse believed that the fear of socialist materialism made liberals such as Virchow betray science and enter into an alliance with their former enemies in the church. Anticlerical reasoning such as Manasse’s was arguably the earliest and most popular form of ideology critique in nineteenth-century Europe. With the advent of materialism and atheism, religion could be portrayed as an elaborate illusion foisted upon the population to hide the material interests of the clergy. This charge of hypocrisy could be extended to any discourse produced by groups believed to be allied with the churches, whether the state, military, or liberal movement. Not just churches, but also schools and universities were branded as “institutes of stupefaction [Verdummungsanstalten].” In this way, anticlericalism drew a protective ring around secularist interpretations of natural science. The critique of liberal Bildung deepened as the FRC fell under the permanent sway of the Social Democratic Party in the late 1880s. A new generation of speakers emerged who understood their historical calling to be the provision of materialist-monist natural scientific education for the workers’ movement. One of these speakers was Carl Pinn (b. 1861), a university dropout who also taught at the newly founded SPD Workers’ Education School in Berlin. Pinn wrote a pamphlet in 1892 entitled The Educational Monopoly of Contemporary Society, in which he argued that “true” education would help the ambitious yet excluded workers break the “bourgeois” monopoly on education: Far from being dulled to the knowledge that means power, the broad, striving working masses are ruled by a ravenous hunger, a veritable thirst for education, not for the education that corresponds to the tastes and the interests of the bourgeoisie, that has received high official permission and been given the appropriate stamp of approval before being served out. Rather [the masses desire] true, pure and unadulterated education, that rock of the future, on which the power of the upper ten thousand will once shatter into 1000 pieces.71

Between the elitist philistinism of “bourgeois” Bildung and the deadening “mechanical drill system” of the state primary schools, Pinn believed that natural science was a knowledge of the real world that demanded “clarity of perspective [Anschauung] and observation.”72 Studies of the reading habits of 70

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Manasse’s speech “Religion und Wissenschaft,” summarized in: Lichtstrahlen, vol. 2, no. 24 (1892): 1117. Carl Pinn, Das Bildungsmonopol der heutigen Gesellschaft (Berlin: Verlag der “Lichtstrahlen”, 1892), 3. Pinn, Das Bildungsmonopol der heutigen Gesellschaft, 13.

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socialist workers have confirmed the claims of Pinn and Paulsdorff. Rather than Marxist historical materialism, natural scientific materialism formed the preliminary educational foundation of most early working-class radicals.73 Conclusion and Comparison The examination of Free Religion corroborates other studies that have identified the urban middle, lower-middle, and upper working classes as the key societal segments in the emergence of modern radical movements.74 Anarchism, antisemitism, republicanism, and socialism all drew their most active elements from the lower-middle and not from the bottom of society. This urban milieu represented what historians have identified as a “crisis class” or “crisis stratum.”75 However, the findings of this chapter challenge the still-prevalent Marxist interpretation of petty bourgeois radicalism as the response of a “doomed” class whose irrational ideologies reflected the choice between reactionary identification with the dominant order or utopian flight from reality. The process of class-formation certainly informed nineteenth-century sectarian movements, however, the FRC membership was not, as a whole, downwardly mobile. Overall, the ethical rigor, self-education, and personal autonomy preached by Free Religion correspond to economic ambition, and, as in the following cases, success. Among members of the Berlin congregation, Gustav Thölde rose from being an apprentice in the 1840s to bank director by 1872; Heinrich Peege, who in 1888 had returned to Berlin from forced exile under the Socialist Laws, employed nine journeymen in his furniture-making workshop by 1903; The wallpaperer Adolf Harndt became the leader of the Berlin Kulturkartell around 1918, and his son, Ewald, became a dentist and later rector of the Free University in Berlin. Rather than long-term class trajectory, positionality provides a better key to understanding middle-class radicalism. The Free Religious sect gave expression to the ambition and the resentment of those who occupied intermediary positions in a variety of hierarchies. The bifurcation of the social field along class lines marginalized the urban middle classes from the ruling liberal circles. At the same time, it opened up a new vista for ambitious Kleinbürger – social leadership over the growing working class. The same applies to the university dropouts, autodidacts, and independent Literaten of the “academic proletariat,” who 73

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See, for example, Hans-Josef Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie. Zur Ideologie der Partei vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschichte, 1967), 140–142. Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science. On the “crisis stratum” of upwardly and downwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie in the PanGerman League, see Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 130.

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found eager audiences in the wide range of adult education institutions that catered to the semi-educated. These institutions, like the Free Religious Congregations, enabled intermediary groups to challenge their domination by urban elites and organize for political, religious, and educational autonomy.

social change and the differentiation of secularism from 1881 to 1914 This chapter will conclude by casting the historical gaze forward from the 1870s and considering briefly the diversification of organized secularism, which began in 1881 with the formation of the German Union of Freethinkers. The new organizations reflected approaches to issues of belief, confession, and politics that were different from Free Religion. However, this functional differentiation of secularism was underpinned by important social distinctions. As the solidarity of the Alte Stadtbürgertum continued to disintegrate under the pressures of class formation and urbanization, each new secularist organization tended to recruit from a distinct segment of this group. When mapped onto a city such as Berlin, this process of differentiation takes on a topographical quality. The new organizations followed the dispersal of the town citizenry into the various neighborhoods of the expanding metropolis (see Map 2).

The Berlin Free Religious Congregation In 1872, the bulk of the FRC members lived and worked within the old city districts that bordered the exclusive Dorotheenstadt with its royal palace, museums, villas, and university. To the south of the promenade mile Unter den Linden lay the Luisenstadt district, where the FRC maintained its business offices in the Niederwallstrasse 12, a few minutes from Hausvogteiplatz in the eastern Friedrichstadt, the center of Berlin’s prosperous clothing industry that employed many members of the congregation. Across the Spree River to the north was the Spandauer Vorstadt, where between the 1870s and 1907 the Free Religious Congregation held its Sunday meetings. This was a mixed neighborhood of merchants and artisans, and a block way from the FRC meeting hall in Rosenthalerstrasse 38 was the home of Handwerkerverein. This was also the center of Berlin’s Jewish life, and an imposing new synagogue went up on the Oranienburgerstrasse in 1866. The relative religious harmony of the district was expressed by the moniker given to the nearby Grosse Hamburger Strasse, which was called the “street of tolerance” because a Jewish cemetery and school, a Protestant church, and a Catholic hospital were located on it. When a local estate owner gave the congregation a parcel of land for a cemetery on the Pappel Allee in 1847, it lay in a field ten minutes north of the old city walls. By the 1890s, the fields had been replaced by tenements, and the cemetery was a valuable piece of property in the middle of Prenzlauer Berg, a

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map 2: Secularist organizations in nineteenth-century Berlin.

vibrant neighborhood of artisans, workers, and free professionals. It was here that the congregation finally built its own meeting hall and a home for single mothers in 1907.76 The slow movement of the congregation’s activities from the city center into the more heavily working-class Prenzlauer Berg is indicative of the increasing identification of the FRC with the Social Democratic milieu. It was in the working-class districts of North, East, and South Berlin that the congregation held more and more of its speeches, youth instruction, and discussion evenings.77 Free Religious leaders also made speaking tours of the outlying suburban towns, and in 1890 they were able to establish a satellite congregation in working-class Rixdorf (renamed Neukölln in 1912), which was deemed a

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In 1895, the courts ruled against the efforts of the family to get the cemetery back. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 21, 36. In 1889, the FRC began to hold evening discussion groups in Möckern Str. in South Berlin. In 1891, it held youth instruction in its “Nordschule” in the Rosenthaler Str. and in its “Südschule” in the Dresdner Str. A. Pr. Br. no. 15049, 482.

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political association in 1891 and subject to periodic police closure.78 The election of a board of directors favorable to the SPD in 1886 created the conditions for the rapid expansion of the congregation that began at this time (see Appendix). After little growth in the prior fifteen years, the number of members rose from 1,077 in 1887 to 4,211 in 1899, and the number of souls from 3,251 to 12,590. The Berlin Freethought Association Lessing Those members of the middle classes closely associated with the liberal establishment – merchants and the growing population of white collar workers – were avid consumers of natural science. They made up the main audience for the “bourgeois” popular science institutions of the city, such as the left-liberal Society for the Propagation of Popular Education (Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung) and the Humboldt Academy. And yet the Danish journalist Georg Brandes found there were few well-to-do liberals at the Berlin FRC service he attended in January 1878. Their absence prompted him to make the following comment on the political and sociological factors that led Berlin’s liberals to remain essentially passive Freethinkers: The social segments, whose intellectual life is shaped by first- or second-hand knowledge of science, are generally satisfied with the church policies of the government. For this reason attempts to organize the freethinking forces have thus far not received the merited attention.79

True to Brandes’s analysis, it was only once Bismarck curbed the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in 1878 and broke his coalition with the National Liberals in 1879 that liberal Freethinkers finally organized. The middle-class, liberal profile of the Berlin chapter of the German Union of Freethinkers was established even before the first meeting. The physician, social hygienist, publisher, and writer Dr. Wilhelm Loewenthal80 had sent out expensively printed invitations to attend the constitutional meeting in Stappenbeck’s Hotel on May 21, 1881, at 8 PM to 78

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LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 13949, unpag. Bruno Wille, Die Sozialdemokratie und die freien Gemeinden. Separat-Abdruck aus der ‘Sächsischen Arbeiterzeitung’. Herausgegeben von der Ethischen Gesellschaft Berlin. (Berlin: Adolf Adler, 1890). Letter from Nixdorf Freie Gemeinde to Minister of the Interior, January 26, 1892, GStA, HA I, Rep 77, Abt, 1, Tit 416, no. 32, unpag. Georg Brandes, Berlin als deutsche Reichshauptstadt. Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1877–1883, trans. Peter Urban-Halle (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1989), 35 [italics added]. Wilhelm Loewenthal (1850–1894) wrote Konfessionlose Religion in 1877 and translated Adam Smith as well as several French writers into German; second president at founding of the German Union of Freethinkers, and a leading member of the Progressive Waldeck Verein; edited the Bürgerzeitung and was co-owner of the Berlin Addressbuch; studied under Robert Koch and conducted cholera research in Tonking; left Berlin in 1883 to take up a professorship in Laussane, later traveled to Argentina on behest of Baron Maurice de Hirsch to explore the possibility of erecting a settlement there for Russian Jews; involved in women’s movement and was a docent at the Humboldt Academy. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, March 27, 1894;

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be followed by a “convivial reception.” A police lieutenant conjectured that “apparently we are dealing with the establishment of a type of Jewish Masonic lodge.”81 The significance of the predominance of Jews among the list of the first fiftysix members of the Berlin Freethought Association, which took the name Lessing, will be explored in Chapter 6. Sociologically, the list reveals how deep the division of the Alte Mittelstand had become by 1881. There was not a single worker or artisan. Instead, the list contained the names of twenty-five merchants, five students, six women without occupation, three writers with university degrees, two medical doctors, two bankers, one factory owner, and one Inspektor. Most notable was the presence of seven newspaper editors and a handful of influential liberal politicians.82 For such members of polite society, participation in an anticlerical sect such as the FRC would have been incompatible with their social and confessional identity. Whereas the FRC pressured its members to leave the churches, the Lessing Association (like the national Freethought League) placed no such expectations on its members. Corresponding to its middle-class makeup, Lessing maintained a cultivated atmosphere of intellectual exchange, and eschewed crude displays of anticlericalism. Although incorrect, the police impression that it was a type of Masonic lodge is instructive. Like the Freemasons, one of the Lessing Association’s chief functions was to provide its members with a form of sociability around a common spiritual belief. Loewenthal’s printed invitations set the tone of private polite sociability and effectively excluded those below. And yet exclusivity was contrary to the public political calling of Freethought, and in 1882 it led to a dispute over the acceptance of new members. Against the desire of some to require sponsorship by existing members, it was decided to allow open membership; as a result, there was an influx of artisans and members of the FRC. As these new members began to gain the upper hand, Lessing turned to anticlerical agitation, which brought larger crowds but led to police restriction and its resultant demise in 1887.

The German Society for Ethical Culture Even before the founding of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ethische Kultur (DGEK) in Berlin in October 1892, the sociological profile of its promoters made it the subject of rancorous debate. The Freie Bühne, a secularist cultural journal edited by FRC speaker and science popularizer Wilhelm Bölsche, dismissively referred

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Salomon Wininger, ed., Große jüdische National-Biographie, vol. 4, (1929), 174; Philipp Stauff, Semi-Kürschner oder Literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller, Dichter, Bankiers. jüdischer Rasse und Versippung, die von 1813–1913 in Deutschland tätig und bekannt waren (Berlin: author’s edition, 1913). LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 4, 10. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p.10.

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to ethics as a new “Sport of Berlin W.”83 Berlin West was synonymous with urban aristocracy, higher civil servants, and the rising economic and intellectual bourgeoisie (Besitz- and Bildungsbürger), who were abandoning the mixed communities of the city center and moving into villas being built up along the southern edge of the Tiergarten and in the western suburb of Charlottenburg. Indeed, among the twenty-seven men and six women who signed the founding declaration of the DGEK, there were seven of noble extraction, ten professors, and nine others with doctor’s titles, as well as two factory owners. All men but one had titles of some sort, and there were no artisans or petty merchants.84 Active members of the Free Religious or Freethought movements were conspicuously absent from this list. Julius Türk was probably the only signatory of the declaration who was closely associated with Social Democracy.85 The DGEK represented a new type of secularist organization that meant to influence German society, religion, and politics from the highest echelons. Its members self-consciously stylized themselves as an “aristocracy of the spirit.” Although the DGEK claimed that ethics held the secret to solving the “social question,” its actual membership was constructed around the exclusion of the working classes. This exclusion was masked by the token reservation of one seat on the board for a “worker” – a seat that would remain vacant until the following year. The elitist self-understanding of the group was further underscored at the founding convention when the professor of national economics Ignaz Jastrow requested that his colleagues desist from referring to themselves as “the better classes.”86 The tremendous social distance between the initial generation of Ethicists and the middle- and lower-middle class members of Free Religion and even Freethought was reflected in differences of organizational form and function. Its members were at pains not to replicate church structures and become a “conventicle.” To avoid conflict with the religious ties of its members, meetings were held on Sunday afternoons rather than on Sunday mornings.87 As stated in the Introduction, because it eschewed both anticlericalism and monist worldview the DGEK deliberately placed itself at the periphery of organized

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“Die ethische Bewegung in Deutschland,” Freie Bühne, vol. 3 (1892): 881–888, here 885. “Georg von Gizycki über die ethische Bewegung,” ibid: 996–1000. Among the more famous signatories were the founders Wilhelm Förster and Georg Gyzicki, as well as the philosophers Hermann Cohen and Friedrich Jodl, the bacteriologist Robert Koch, Paul Langerhans, the industrialist Arthur Pfungst (a Freethinker and one of the most prominent exponents of Buddhism in Germany), pacifist Baroness von Suttner, and Ferdinand Tönnies. On the DGEK, see Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject. On Türk, see Siegfried Nestriepke, Geschichte der Volksbühne Berlin, vol. 1 (Berlin: Volksbühnen-Verlags- und Vertriebs-G.m.b.H., 1930), 59–60. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur (hereafter Mitteilungen), vol. 1, no. 1 (November. 20, 1892): 28. Groschopp, Dissidenten, 143.

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secularism. This position at the margins was matched by the position of its initial organizers on the geographic and social margins of the town citizenry. The distance between the FRC and the DGEK shows that by 1892 Berlin secularism had clearly become a “tale of two cities,” East and West.88 Industrialization and urban transformation had broken up the “Alte Stadtbürgertum,” while polarization of the political sphere created a force field that effectively allocated all new secularist organizations to either the left liberal or the socialist camp. In the terminology that became increasingly prevalent after the turn of the century, organizations were called either “proletarian” or “bourgeois,” labels that obscured the significant kleinbürgerlich participation in both camps.

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I would like to thank Peter Burger for suggesting that Berlin Freigeistigkeit be approached as a geographical problem.

4 Politics and Free Religion in the 1860s and 1870s

From its inception Free Religion was closely identified with political radicalism. The struggles between the German monarchies and the Lichtfreunde and Deutschkatholiken were remembered as trigger events in the run-up to the Revolution of 1848, in which the dissidents were overrepresented in the ranks of the revolutionaries.1 Various explanations have been offered over the years for this link. The operative theory of the Prussian state was that the restrictions it placed on political action led radicals to don the mask of religion and hide their political actions under the state’s guarantee of freedom of conscience. Friedrich Engels argued, by contrast, that it was the confessional state itself that deformed German politics and led to the unholy alliance between the left and religious dissent. A third explanation has been offered by historian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, who described Deutschkatholizismus as a secularization of utopian thought from the sphere of religion into the sphere of politics.2 Without discounting the partial validity of each of these explanations, this study takes issue with an assumption common to them all, namely that Free Religion represented a temporary deviation from or a transition to a normal state in which religion and politics were distinctly separate spheres. In fact, once the Prussian state allowed relatively free political organization after 1858, Free Religion did not disappear, but quickly reestablished its intimate ties with leftwing politics. Most of the leading figures of Berlin’s Free Religious Congregation were politically active, and over the next seventy-five years the congregation sent a steady stream of its members to seats on the Berlin city council, the Prussian Diet, and the Reichstag. All subsequent secularist organizations – the 1

2

Wilhelm Blos, Die deutsche Revolution: Geschichte der Deutschen Bewegung von 1848 und 1849 (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz, 1893), 30; Bruno Bauer, Die bürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland seit dem Anfang der deutsch-katholischen Bewegung bis zur Gegenwart. 2nd ed. (Berlin: Gustav Hempel, 1849). Graf, Deutschkatholizismus.

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Freethought associations, the Ethical Culture Society, and Monist League – were, if anything, even more explicitly political in their activities. In other words, the overlap of religious and political dissent remained part of the German political system from the Vormärz to the late Kaiserreich. The previous chapters have examined several pre-political structures that gave the “fourth confession” a discernible form and guaranteed its historical longevity. The Christian State, as it existed up to 1918, allocated all political actors a place in the confessional framework that preformed their political choices: confessional dissent was necessarily political. The monistic worldview disseminated in a broad network of popular science organizations was, like Free Religious dissent, caught up in the struggles of the middle and lower-middle classes for autonomy and recognition against the backdrop of ongoing class formation. To complete our survey of the main dimensions of secularism, this chapter will examine its concrete articulation in the political sphere. Focusing on the two decades following the political thaw of 1858, it will ask about the place and influence of organized secularism in the party formations and the political culture of the Berlin Left. The chapter opens with a discussion of the distinct conceptual framework through which the Free Religious and many on the left viewed the world of politics, which I will call the secularist political imaginary. By following the activities of the leading Free Religious notables in political commissions, neighborhood civic clubs, and educational institutions, I will then draw out the correspondences between this political imaginary and the associational model through which the Progressive Party exercised its political dominance in Berlin between the 1860s and 1870s. Finally the chapter will examine the specific place of Free Religion within each of the three political submilieus that began the 1860s in an uneasy alliance under the Progressive Party: left-liberalism, radical republicanism (known in Germany as Demokratie), and the fledgling movement of Social Democracy.

the secularist political imaginary For an expression of the secularist political imaginary, we turn to Johann Jacoby (1805–1877), who during the 1860s and 1870s was the most influential Democrat in Berlin and the spiritus rector of the generation of leaders who guided the Berlin Free Religious Congregation (FRC) at that time. Trained as a physician, Jacoby made his grand entrance onto the political scene in 1841 with a pamphlet demanding that the new king fulfill his father’s promise for a constitution. An early supporter of the Lichtfreunde, he attended Julius Rupp’s services in Königsberg in 1846 but did not convert from Judaism to Free Religion. His fearlessness in confronting authority during the Revolution of 1848 and his deeply moral approach to politics made Jacoby the object of much admiration, but it also earned him reproach for being self-defeating and doctrinaire. One of his acolytes, the journalist and later socialist Franz

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fig. 4: Two political heroes of the Free Religious: Johann Jacoby and Hermann SchulzeDelitzsch (Courtesy: Bavarian State Government, Die Gartenlaube, 1877, 209; 1859, 720).

Mehring, called Jacoby “the incarnation of Kant’s ethics, which he lived more purely and strictly than the master himself.”3 Six years after his death, Jacoby was remembered in a January 1883 meeting of the Freethought Association Lessing by the Democrat Gustav Kessler4 as “our old master in free and ethical thought.”5 Like many of his generation, Jacoby paired political work with natural scientific research and in 1846 he published a monist treatise, “On Nerve Physics,” that sought to overcome idealistic and materialist explanations of psychic phenomena.6 In 1857, the penultimate year of the reign of the by-then debilitated King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Jacoby was preoccupied with questions of worldview. He wrote to Jacob Moleschott, the Dutch physiologist who had recently achieved notoriety for his part in the materialism controversy, about his desire to overcome Fichte’s conclusion about the “absolute incompatibility” of materialism and idealism. The path to a third, monist position lay in faulting not Fichte’s logic 3

4

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Quoted in Thomas Höhle, Franz Mehring. Sein Weg zum Marxismus 1869–1891, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1958), 296. Gustav Kessler (1832–1904), government architect (Regierungsbaumeister) and Progressive Party member until 1883, soon thereafter joined SPD and became a trade union organizer and editor. Edited Bauhandwerker from 1884 to 1886, was exiled from Berlin in 1886, and “hunted . . . like no one else” from place to place around Germany. Returned to Berlin 1890 and became editor of the SPD Volksblatt für Teltow-Beeskow-Storkow. Defended “localism” in unions and edited journal Einigkeit since 1897. Eduard Bernstein, Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung, vol. 2 (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1907), 357. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 110. “Über Nervenphysik” 1846, in Johann Jacoby, Gesammelte Schriften und Reden, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Otto Meißner, 1872), 404–422.

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but his starting premises, his separation of “thing” and “ego,” “matter” and “spirit,” which, according to Jacoby, resulted in “pure self-deception.”7 A month later, he wrote to Fanny Lewald of the vast political, moral, and religious implications that he believed his work on a monist worldview might have: “If the name were not inappropriate, I would call my task a preliminary sketch Towards the Fulfillment of Time.” It is worth quoting extensively out of Jacoby’s letter, as it lays out clearly the importance that he believed his worldview studies would have for the course of radical politics in Germany.8 Jacoby hoped to accomplish a task identified by Lewald’s husband, Adolf Stahr, some fifteen years earlier, when he stated that “no Copernicus has yet arisen, to determine the paths of culture’s movement from its elements.” In his letter, Jacoby noted that such a synthesis had recently been attempted by Josiah Bunsen, the courtier and scholar, who had earlier inspired Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s dreams of an apostolic renovation of Christianity. Yet Bunsen’s new book, God in History: or the Progress of Faith in a Moral World Order (Gott in der Geschichte: oder der Fortschritt des Glaubens an eine sittliche Weltordnung), failed in Jacoby’s eyes because its author lacked the “necessary physiological knowledge.” Nonetheless, Jacoby conceded, Bunsen got one thing right. Religion and politics are indivisible for the German; the question of God is the most important contemporary question, today as it was in Luther’s days. The year 1848 taught Demokratie a serious lesson: Only out of religious liberty arises the inner conviction [Selbsttreue], the moral force that makes us free citizens [bürgerlich frei]. [. . .] We require a transformation of the entire way of thinking and viewing [the world], a rebirth of conscience. Whoever wants to redeem the Germans from their eternal burden [Erbübel] must take up the cross of philosophy, without becoming a philosopher himself.

The task of philosophy was, Jacoby continued, to be fulfilled in the realms of science and journalism: From what has been said you can deduce the nature of task to be solved. The crucial thing is to understand physiologically the development of the senses and the brain – in other words – the law of mental processes; further, to display historically that one has gained with this knowledge not only the most important element in the path of cultural motion, but the sought after gravitational law itself; finally, to explain journalistically to the Democratic movement, as it has emerged out of the processes of ferment and clarification of the year 1848, that this discovered law is the sole practical foundation for its future efforts.

Ultimately, the last task was the most difficult. The hero of the hour would be the publicist, who shapes the new knowledge into a form that could reach the broad masses: 7

8

Jacoby to Jacob Moleschott, February 6, 1857, in Johann Jacoby Briefwechsel 1850–1877 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1978), 49–52. Jacoby to Fanny Lewald, March 22, 1857, in Johann Jacoby Briefwechsel 1850–1877, 53–56. All emphases in the following quotations are found in the original.

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In him – as in a focal point – is collected the theoretical knowledge of various doctrines, times and countries, in order to radiate out from him as a spiritual light illuminating and igniting in all directions. [. . .] Out of a diffuse and ambiguous metaphorical and conceptual language he must succinctly transmit the core truth in the transparent, practical language of the common man and [he must] articulate clearly and forcefully that the discovered law of culture [is] the condition of conscious progress [and] the watchword of Demokratie. The path of history leads man out of necessity to self-mastery and world mastery! Demokratie has properly recognized this aim. But it must comprehend the law of human mental and cultural action in order to stride from now on with consciousness and free will – in meaningful harmony – towards the goal.

In this letter Jacoby pulled all the registers of the secularist repertoire. He linked each pre-political layer of Free Religion examined in prior chapters and bundled them under the rubric of the Democratic movement. His anticonfessionalism found expression not in a call for the elimination of religion, but for its fulfillment in an individual and collective religious rebirth through a secular worldview. Although inspired philosophically by Kant and Spinoza, Jacoby’s monism was ultimately grounded naturalistically – physiological psychology formed the “gravitational law” for his system of culture. Science education was essential, but only if coupled with worldview and delivered in the language of the semi- and uneducated. Secularist politics finds a succinct summary in Jacoby’s metaphor of the optical system in which science, history, and experience provide the light. The Democratic politician – as publicist – is at once the lens that focuses the knowledge into worldview and the charismatic fire at the combustion point that sends forth light into the masses. The self-conscious Democratic community is created when the masses recognize themselves as reflected individually and collectively in this worldview. The sketch, which was meant as a practical strategy, was at the same time a utopian vision that combined religion, ethics, natural science, popularization, and education. Jacoby was aware of the undue expectations he had for the Democratic genius – the publicist cum scientist, philosopher, and prophet – who was the lynchpin of the whole mechanism. Hence, he asked Lewald and Stahr not to mention the letter to anyone. Private though this particular vision remained, Jacoby and his followers sought to implement aspects of it when it again became possible to undertake political actions with the opening of the “New Era” in 1858. The “New Era” “The grey skies are beginning to clear,” announced the house journal of the Christkatholische congregation in Berlin in April 1859.9 Six months earlier King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the personal nemesis of Johann Jacoby and the bane of religious and political dissidents, had been removed from power because of mental infirmity. He was succeeded by his brother Wilhelm, the later German kaiser, who dismissed the conservative Manteuffel cabinet and appointed one open to some 9

Der Dissident, nos. 13, 14 (April 1 and 8, 1859), 8.

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reconciliation with liberals. The Berlin press celebrated the beginning of a “New Era.” In elections to the Prussian Diet, the number of liberal deputies increased from 36 to 151, while the conservative factions collapsed from 177 to 47 seats.10 The relaxation of restrictions on public life raised liberal and democratic hopes that the new government might accede to some of their most important constitutional demands and ultimately allow for German unification. This opening hastened the transition of many former Democrats from opposition to constructive engagement with the state, a compromise they referred to as “Realpolitik.” Political liberalization was accompanied by a lifting of restrictions on Free Religion. In November 1858, the new minister for church and cultural affairs, Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, had directed police to again allow women to attend services and, in the following year, he returned to dissidents the right to give religious instruction and appoint full-time preachers.11 Government tolerance confronted religious dissidents with a dilemma similar to that faced by former Democrats. Should the dissidents cooperate with the monarchy and depoliticize their religious reform efforts, or should they reassert their ties to the political opposition? These options played a role in the first postrevolutionary schism within the Berlin FRC (at that time still called the Christkatholisch Congregation), which occurred after the residing chairman, the master artisan Oertel, failed to win reelection on January 6, 1859. A police informer in a local pub reported that the more radical FRC members accused Oertel of collaborating with the authorities. On the day of the election he was said to have gone to the police and declared that his followers would believe in anything that the clergy [Pfaffen] wanted from them, in exchange for police support. Using some revealing mixed metaphors, the radicals accused Oertel of having “crawled to the cross” and “betrayed the congregation like Judas Iscariot for 30 silver pieces,” making him a “hypocrite” and a “Jesuit of the highest order.” The congregation preferred a more “republican” leadership, and police confirmed that half of the new board members were former members of the Democratic People’s Party, including one who had taken part in the barricade battles of 1848.12 A small minority of the congregation, predominantly master artisans such as Oertel, seceded to form a new congregation, the ChristianFree Congregation. The breakaway congregation failed to win many adherents outside of its initial membership of forty-nine full members and, like the earlier “Protest congregation” of 1845, it had disappeared by 1871.13 10 11

12 13

Roland Bauer, Berlin: Illustrierte Chronik bis 1870 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1988), 344–345. Volks-Zeitung, December 14, 1858. In a letter to the Educational Administration on April 6, 1859, the Prussian minister of culture, Bethmann-Hollweg, directed the police to cease forcing dissident children into confessional religious instruction in the schools. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 10085/1. In 1858, Max John was appointed as new preacher, followed by Dr. Hetzer in 1860. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 23. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15059, pp. 255, 256. More than half of the original members of the Christlich-freie Gemeinde were master artisans (twenty-six). Others included five simple artisans, one worker, two journeymen, one coachman, and one epaulette maker. There was one Rentier and four owners of factories, including a casting

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The “New Era” allowed many of the nationally known Free Religious preachers who had participated actively in the Revolution to return to Berlin to give guest sermons for the first time in eight or more years. After initial resistance from police, the congregation was able to relocate from the Neue Friedrichstrasse to a more upscale location near Unter den Linden in order to attract a more “refined” audience. With former 1848 Democrats such as Rudolf Virchow being elected to city council, the board members were able to reestablish connections to communal politics.14

The Notables of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation In 1862, the Berlin Christkatholisch Congregation renamed itself the Free Religious Congregation and appointed the former Protestant pastor A. T. Wislicenus as its preacher. In that year, Johann Jacoby’s closest collaborator in Berlin, Guido Weiss, was elected to the board of the FRC and served as its vice chairman from 1864 to 1866. Like Jacoby, he was a physician, journalist, and Democratic politician, but unlike Jacoby, Weiss, who was also Jewish, took the step of formally joining Free Religion.15 His election to the board in 1862 marked the beginning of an influx of a new group of elites into the FRC. For the most part well-known “Jacobyites,” these men would run the congregation until they were ousted by Social Democrats in 1886. During the repressive period of the 1850s, the congregation’s board and patrons comprised successful representatives of the trades and the merchant groups that made up the bulk of the membership. Some members of the new political elite of the 1860s came from this group, such as the FRC’s house printer, W. Rubenow16 and its longtime chairman, Ludwig May, who

14

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16

house and a brick factory. A minority came from commercial trades, including four traders, two merchants, one accountant, and one lottery cashier. Eleven were former Catholics, while thirtyeight were former Protestants. As a sign of the wealth of this group, they were able to support their own preacher. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15060–61. Leberecht Uhlich, Eduard Baltzer, Eugen Vogtherr, Johannes Czerski, and A. T. Wislicenus all spoke in 1859 and 1860. In April 1860, the police informant reported that the FRC board members were receiving advice from Virchow and “Duncker,” which refers either to the Stadtrat Hermann Duncker, or his brother Franz, who was a close political ally of Virchow’s and had several points of contact with the Free Religious. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15059, p. 326. In 1850, the congregation reported the death of Weiss’s infant daughter to the police. The following year a police report noted that Weiss and Brauner supported the planned union of Protestant Free Congregations with Deutschkatholisch congregations. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 15033, nos. 197, 125. Ernest Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1968), 229; Toury, Orientierungen, 155. Rubenow was a “student” of the plattdeutsch writer Fritz Reuter. After encountering Free Religion in Stettin, he moved to Berlin and joined the FRC in the 1850s, later serving as a board member. He left the Lassallean ADAV in 1868 to join the opposition forming under Bebel and Liebknecht. He served as an SPD official in the fourth Berlin district and joined Freethought Association Lessing in January 1884. Geschichte der revolutionären Berliner Arbeiterbewegung, 149; Neues Freireligiöses Sonntagsblatt, vol. 2, no. 23 (June 3, 1888): 183.

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owned a plant nursery in the suburban town of Pankow. Most conspicuous, however, was the arrival of men whose educational and economic capital marked them off from the rest of the congregation. When the Danish journalist Georg Brandes visited the Berlin FRC in 1879, he was surprised to find sitting amid the “more intelligent workers” representatives of some of the richest families in Berlin. “Among the most energetic of the congregation’s members belongs the well-known [Rudolf von] Pringsheim, whose splendid palace in Wilhelmstrasse, decorated with mosaics by Anton von Werner, draws the attention of all passersby. He alone donated 100,000 taler to the congregation.”17 One street away from the home of this Silesian industrialist lay the “Villa Semiramis” owned by another wealthy donor to the congregation, the former army captain Karl van der Leeden. The presence of such social elites in the leadership of radical movements was by no means unusual in the 1860s and 1870s, as witnessed by Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt’s role in Lassalle’s socialist party (ADAV) or by coat factory owner Paul Singer’s commanding position in Berlin Social Democracy. University-educated professionals such as the journalist Georg Dumas18 and physicians Paul Langerhans19 and Adolph Abarbanell20 formed another type of exotic that joined the FRC leadership. Doctors and journalists enjoyed an

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Rudolf Pringsheim (1821–1901) was an industrialist from a Silesian Jewish family who had acquired a country estate and with it the noble title “Rittergutsbesitzer.” He made his donation of 100,000 thaler to the FRC in 1872/3, but formally joined the congregation only in 1877. He was promptly elected to the board only to officially withdraw his membership from the congregation in 1879 for undetermined reasons. Thereafter he appears as a member of the “endowment curatorium” (Hülfsfonds-Curatorium) and in 1883 as the donor of fifty to sixty books on natural science. When the FRC split in 1886 following the election of socialists, Pringsheim refused to pay out the money he had pledged. This led to a legal battle that dragged on until 1895, when a final payout of 20,000 marks was split between the FRC and the breakaway Humanist Congregation. Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 29; Brandes, Reichshauptstadt, 35; Police report of April 10, 1883; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 15045. Georg Dumas (1825–1890), private teacher, former estate owner, editor of Königsberger Verfasssungsfreund and later Vossische Zeitung (1868–1890) and Zukunft. Arrested in 1852 for speaking illegally at the Free Congregation in Königsberg; became a member of Berlin FRC by 1871. Dumas was related by marriage to Democratic Freethinker Robert Schweichel, who spoke at his burial in the FRC cemetery. Member of the Berlin Democratic Association and Progressive Party. Lothar Petry, Die Erste Internationale in der Berliner Arbeiterbewegung (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1975), 359; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 10085. Paul Langerhans (1820–1909), physician, Protestant, dues-paying member of FRC in 1871; cofounder of the Progressive, later Freisinnigen Volkspartei; sat in Prussian Herrenhaus 1862– 1866, Reichstag 1875–1903, Berlin City Council 1875–1907, in his final years, Langerhans served as city council president. Dr. Adolph Abarbanell (1825–1889), physician, Sanitätsrath, Austritt from Jewish congregation in 1870s; joined FRC in 1874, Member of the Hülfskuratorium, left FRC in 1886 and joined the Humanistic Congregation of G. S. Schaefer. Member of Democratic circles in the 1870s; member of Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, as well as the elite Jewish social club Gesellschaft der Freunde.

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economic and legal independence from the state that members of other free professions, such as lawyers, did not. The only Free Religious lawyer of note, Dr. Hermann Jacobson, was also an independently wealthy banker and could thus afford to risk membership. By and large, these exotics appear not to have brought their families into the congregation. Neither do their wives’ names generally appear in the membership rolls nor is mention made of their children having attended the Jugendweihe. These men entered the congregation to lead it. Continuing the pattern established in the early Deutschkatholisch congregations, the board often directed the Berlin congregation in a semi-authoritarian fashion.21 Despite formal democracy, the notables proved to be a self-recruiting group with a strong sense of their own entitlement to lead. As a police report of 1878 shows, a business meeting was held prior to the annual election of the board in January or February to draw up a list of recommended candidates. Only a small fraction of the congregation appeared at these preelections.22 This practice helped sustain the internal cohesiveness of the board, but it also stimulated the occasional division of the congregation into factions, when a group excluded from representation in the preelection would arrive at the general election with its own printed list of opposition candidates. Thus transitions of leadership were often abrupt, as occurred in 1859 and 1886. In both of these cases, the displaced elites accused the winners of having staged a dictatorial “coup” by stacking the election with their supporters. Each warring faction corresponded to a competing political group.23

left-liberalism Like most former Democrats of 1848, Weiss, Dumas, and Langerhans found their way into the German Progressive Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei) that formed in 1861 and is considered the first modern German political party. For a short while it managed to unite all left-wing factions under liberal leadership to become the largest party in the Prussian Diet.24 This dominance ended following Prussia’s successful war against Austria in 1866 when a large group left and formed the National Liberal Party that sought compromise with Chancellor Bismarck in order to achieve national unity under Prussian leadership. Although the party’s fortunes declined on the national level, Berlin remained identified with the Progressive Party (and its successor parties) until the end of the century.25 Berliners returned only Progressive candidates to the Prussian Diet until 1903, which reflects the party’s firm hold over the propertied middle classes 21

22 23 24

25

See discussion of the friction between among board, congregation, and preacher in the early dissenting congregations in: Holzem, Kirchenreform, 351. Police report of Dec. 31, 1878; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag. Berliner Tageblatt, no. 23, January 28, 1886. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1, 755; Gerd Fesser, Linksliberalismus und Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: Akademie, 1976), 11. Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Geschichte Berlins, vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1988), 679.

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privileged in the three-class electoral system. Even with the universal male suffrage of the Reichstag, all six of the Berlin seats went to the Progressives until 1874, and the majority of Berliners voted left-liberal until 1881.26 As James Sheehan has pointed out, communal politics was the first and last bastion of liberalism in Germany, and in Berlin it remained the undisputed domain of the Progressive Party from 1862 until the end of the Kaiserreich.27 For much of this time, the city council was essentially a left-liberal club. The complete dominance of one party enabled councilors to sustain the liberal hubris that communal politics was an “unpolitical” realm where the city practiced selfadministration. The council published a statistical Yearbook that was able to lambaste the Protestant “orthodoxy,” the “clerical party” (i.e., political Catholicism), and the “socialists” without fear of insulting many councilors.28 Social Democrats only managed to break into the ranks of the city council in 1883 with the election of five socialist council members, including the Free Religionist Franz Tutzauer (1852–1908). The Progressive Party had little in the way of a formalized structure. Although the top leadership was subject to a continual process of affirmation and criticism by the network of liberal associations, as a group it was strongly self-recruiting.29 In 1865, the year he left the Progressive Party for the Democratic opposition, the philosopher Friedrich Albert Lange complained that the party was controlled by a “small but influential Berlin clique [. . .] that distinguished itself through Junker-like arrogance.” Berlin’s Lord Mayor Karl Theodor Seydel, who had to struggle with opposition from this group during the mid-1860s, referred to it ironically as the party “Vorsehung,” a term that can be translated as prophesy, providence, or destiny.30 Some members of this group, such as Hans Viktor von Unruh and Karl Twesten, split off to form the National Liberal Party in 1867. However, Franz Duncker, Adalbert Delbrück, Heinrich Eduard Kochhann, Heinrich Runge, Rudolf Virchow, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, Theodor Mommsen, and Paul Langerhans remained the leading voices of the Berlin and German Progressive Party until the end of the century. What was the place of Free Religion under the hegemony of the Progressive Party? The new notables of the FRC represented a similar mixture of educated professionals and economic elites, but the Progressive Party “Vorsehung” with its prominent professors, political insiders, and legal experts stood socially

26 27

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Geschichte Berlins, 771. James Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in 19th Century Germany,” Past and Present 20, no. 51 (1971): 116–137. Städtisches Jahrbuch (1868). Thomas Nipperdey, Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961), 58–59. Lange quoted in Fesser, Linksliberalismus, 23. On this group, see also Goschler, Virchow, 280, 225.

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several notches higher. In terms of religious politics, at least two of the men, Schulze-Delitzsch and Heinrich Runge, had been active supporters of the Lichtfreunde, but like their Hallenese counterparts Rudolf Haym and Max Duncker (now a senior civil servant in Berlin), they did not risk damaging their social and professional status by joining Free Religion. Many continued to offer public or private support for the Free Religious Congregation, but only Paul Langerhans belonged to its leadership. All or nearly all of these men were Protestants, and despite the distance most felt from the Protestant Church, none (including Langerhans) is known to have officially left it. For those active in religious politics, such as Kochhann, the liberal Protestantenverein corresponded more to their social and political outlook in the 1860s than Free Religion. Thus Berlin’s left liberals continued the Vormärz pattern of championing dissident rights without formally becoming dissidents themselves. The party’s founding document – its electoral program of 1861 – demanded the essential legal framework required by Free Religion: “equality of all religious societies,” “obligatory civil marriage,” and “separation of church and state.”31 The FRC was able to rely on Berlin’s left-liberal politicians to argue their case to the city council, Prussian Diet, and Reichstag.32 Support also came through the left-liberal newspapers such as the Volkszeitung and the Vossische Zeitung that reported regularly on events at the congregation and published its announcements.33 The Volkszeitung had the highest run of any daily Berlin paper in the 1860s and 1870s. Historians have sometimes labeled it a “democratic” and sometimes a “liberal” paper.34 To be precise, it was both, but at different times. In its first years, the paper’s editors and owners, Franz Duncker35 and Aaron Bernstein, 31

32

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Electoral program of the German Progressive Party from September 29, 1861. BBAW, NL Virchow, no. 2748. Berlin liberals noted in police reports for aiding the Free Religious Congregation include R. A. Träger, Rudolf Virchow, Franz Duncker, Rudolf Gneist, and Paul Langerhans. In 1872, liberals dominated the press in Berlin. Reckoned to the liberal camp would be Kladderadatsch with 50,000 subscriptions as well as the dailies: Volkszeitung with 35,000, Vossische Zeitung with 17,200, and Berliner Tageblatt with 7,000 subscriptions each. The Gerichtszeitung had 21,000 and the Social Democratic Tribüne 20,000 subscriptions. The conservative Kreuzzeitung ranked tenth with 11,000 and the Catholic Germania had 7,000 subscriptions. Städtisches Jahrbuch (1872), 178. Julius Schoeps called the Volkszeitung the “mouthpiece of liberal-democratic Bürgertum.” Schoeps, “Aaron Bernstein,” 228. Jürgen Fröhlich, Die Berliner Volks-Zeitung 1853 bis 1867: Preußischer Linksliberalismus zwischen Reaktion und Revolution von oben (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 378. Franz Duncker (1822–1888), politician, publisher, union leader; son of a Protestant-Jewish mixed marriage, purchased the Urwählerzeitung from A. Bernstein in 1853 and renamed it Volkszeitung; cofounder of Deutsche Nationalverein (1859) and Deutsche Fortschrittspartei (1861), for which he sat in the Prussian Diet from 1861 and Reichstag (1867–1877); led Handwerkerverein since 1865 and founded Hirsch-Dunckerschen deutschen Gewerkvereine with Max Hirsch and Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch in 1869.

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still orientated themselves on the Democratic People’s Party of the Revolution, but during the 1860s and 1870s they kept the paper firmly within the political horizon of the Progressive Party. Both men are a good example of how some leftliberal elites continued to share the secularist political imaginary, even as they moved to the right of Jacoby and the leadership of the FRC. Duncker directed the Association for School Reform (Verein zur Reform der Schule), an organization dedicated to secularizing primary education in which FRC preacher Schaefer was also a leading figure. Schaefer and Duncker also cooperated in the workers’ education movement. As has already been mentioned, Bernstein went from Jewish Reform activism to popular science, politics, and journalism.36 After Bernstein’s death in 1884, its new chief editor, Adolf Phillips, again took the paper in a more Democratic direction, bringing future socialists Franz Mehring and Georg Ledebour37 onto the editorial staff.38 The Free Religious were by no means excluded from influential positions in the liberal press. Guido Weiss was the editor of the Berliner Reform and Georg Dumas an editor at the Vossische Zeitung. There was also at least one Free Religious editor at the Volkszeitung, Heinrich Sachse,39 a preacher at the FRC Magdeburg and cofounder of the German Union of Freethinkers. Importantly, however, Sachse was a sharp critic of the political leadership of the Berlin FRC for its conciliatory attitude toward Social Democracy. Freethought, as we will see in Chapter 6, proved to be a more suitable form of secularism for the leftliberal elite. A full seven of the early members of the Berlin Freethought Association “Lessing” (1881–1887) were editors or owners of liberal Berlin newspapers, including Rudolf Elcho40 of the Volkszeitung.

36 37

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40

Duncker’s press printed the FRC’s Principles passed out during the weekly meetings in 1879. Georg Ledebour (1850–1947), Protestant; early death of both parents, Realschule and business apprenticeship before becoming a journalist, also in England; editor of Demokratische Blätter in 1885 and later the Volkszeitung; involved in Hirsch-Duncker’schen Gewerksverein and WaldeckVerein; joined the Freethought Association Lessing in 1883 and the Berlin FRC at the end of 1885; elected to the FRC commission to decide the “Sprecher-Fonds” in 1886, but quit FRC the following year after a dispute with Metzner and the Social Democrats; joined SPD and from 1890 to 1898 was journalist and editor of Vorwärts; lover of writer and psychologist Andrea LouSalome, with whom he frequented events of the Friedrichshagener-Dichterkreis. Member of Reichstag in 1912, and founding member of USPD. Ursula Ratz, Georg Ledebour, 1850–1947: Weg und Wirken eines sozialistischen Politikers (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969). Dieter Fricke, ed., Deutsche Demokraten: Die nichtproletarischen demokratischen Kräfte in der deutschen Geschichte 1830 bis 1945 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1981), 91, 102. Heinrich Ernst Sachse (1813–1883), second preacher of the Free Religious Congregation in Magdeburg in the early 1850s, miller during repression of 1850s, a chief editor at the Volkszeitung until 1876, when he left to dedicate himself more fully to the FRC in Magdeburg; strongly antisocialist, Progressive; worked closely with the liberal Hirsch-Dunckersche Unions. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 244; Nipperdey, Parteien, 64; Tschirn, Geschichte, 141. Rudolf Elcho (1839–1923), author and journalist; after abandoning engineering studies, he joined Garibaldi’s militia in 1860 before going to the United States, where he fought in U.S. Civil War and worked as an actor in Kansas; in 1873 joined editorial staff of Volkszeitung, wrote many

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As one moves down from the highest echelons of Progressive Party one encounters the leaders of the FRC among the second tier of notables that led the vast network of social, cultural, and educational associations that constituted the political basis of early German liberalism. The organizational portfolio of Ludwig May in the period around 1869, when he became the chairman of the FRC, offers a typical portrait of the many activities of this type of communal politician. May chaired the 320-member strong District Association (Bezirksverein) for the City Districts 137–141. The stated purpose of these civic associations was the “strengthening of community life (GemeindeLeben), promotion of the material and spiritual welfare of the members of the community through educational and social support.” However, as the police noted, “under the guise of education,” the members of these associations “discuss all events of domestic and international politics, confer on communal matters, elections, petitions, etc. and arrive at resolutions.” These were, in effect, the ward committees of the Progressive Party. Heading one of the city’s twentynine Bezirksvereine (Weiss and Langerhans chaired two others) gave May a neighborhood power base, which played an important role, no doubt, in his election to the city council in 1868. Like most councilmen, he held leadership positions in a number of other civic associations. He served on the 80th Poor Commission and held posts in the administration of District 139. He and his wife ran one of the city’s nine Volksküchen, a low-cost soup kitchen founded on the principle of “Self-Help” by Lina Morgenstern, a future Freethinker.41 Female family members of another Free Religious luminary, Dr. Adolph Abarbanell, ran two other Volksküchen. Similar posts were held by other leading Free Religionists.42 Associations and Liberal Rule: “The Cellular State” Most likely May and his colleagues did not see their extensive committee work as being separate from their leadership of the FRC. Certainly the police identified Free Religion as part of the network of liberal political associations. In a report to the annual meeting of police chiefs of the 1864 Deutsche Bund, the representative of the Berlin police provided an anatomy of the associations in the Prussian capital. He listed for Berlin:

41

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novels. Richard Wrede and Hans von Reinfels, Das geistige Berlin, eine Encyklopädie des geistigen Lebens Berlins, vol. 1 (Berlin: Strom, 1897), 94. Lina Morgenstern (1830–1909), born into a wealthy Jewish family in Breslau, founded numerous reform associations dedicated to education, women, and the poor, including: Association for the Promotion of Fröbel’s Kindergartens (1860), Assoc. of Soup Kitchens (Völksküche) (1866), Academy for the Scientific Advancement of Girls (1869), Female Workers Education Association (1869); board member of the German Peace Society (1895). Städtisches Jahrbuch (1867), 113, 159, 174, 180; (1868), 227–228; (1869), 326–327. Guido Weiss and Paul Langerhans led the liberal Luisenstädtischer Bezirksverein in the 1860s. Scarpa, Gemeinwohl, 283.

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31 Economic cooperatives, including 15 credit, 9 supply and 7 consumer cooperatives The Great Artisans’ Association (Handwerkerverein) and 15 smaller associations with 7–8,000 members, of which 2–3,000 attended lectures 54 Choir associations 43 Gymnastics associations (Turnvereine) 7 Defense associations (Wehr- und Schutzvereine) Workers’ associations (the largest being the Progressive Party’s Berlin Arbeiterverein with 1,700 –1,800 members) 29 District associations (Bezirksvereine) Voters’ associations (Urwählervereine) The National Association (National-Verein) Patriotic associations 5 dissenting religious societies (FRC was the largest, followed by small Baptist and Irvingite congregations, and the two largely defunct breakaway congregations of the FRC)43 Several of these associations, such as the Handwerkerverein, the Arbeitervereine, and the National-Verein, were known to be creations of Progressive leaders, and it can be assumed that most of the Turnvereine, cooperatives, choirs, and civic associations were also controlled by Progressives. Only the patriotic associations were known to be conservative. The police report concluded that this vast network of cultural and social associations was ultimately a ruse to circumvent laws limiting political activity and that “in actual fact,” these are “today’s political movement.”44 Yet, just as with Free Religion, there was much more to these associations than subterfuge. Their network corresponded to the liberal-democratic utopia of urban selfgovernment within a network of self-regulating organizations linking all citizens actively to social, political, and educational life. The pathologist and city councilor Rudolf Virchow used this conception as an analogy in his Cellularpathologie of 1858 to describe the biological organism as a “type of social institution, where a mass of individual existences are oriented towards one another, in such a way so that each element receives a special task from the other, but where the actual achievement is internally produced.”45 Like the “cellular state” of the biological organism, where semiautonomous cells act in harmony and cooperation, Virchow’s ideal democratic polity was also a cellular state made up of semiautonomous individuals, who cooperate in organs of the social body. The central dominant force, whether the state, king, or a political party, was not to inhibit the principle of the self-development of the organs of the society. 43

44 45

“Protokoll der 18. Polizeikonferenz vom 3. bis 5. August 1864 in Karlsruhe,” in Beck and Schmidt, Polizeikonferenzen, 601–617. “Protokoll der 18. Polizeikonferenz vom 3. bis 5. August 1864 in Karlsruhe,” 602. Quoted in Goschler, Virchow, 280.

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Liberals and Democrats alike understood their associations as the rudimentary form of self-administration through which the population developed civil society alongside and ultimately against the monarchic state. Operating within the horizon of Kantian social ethics, liberals believed that as the citizenry grew ethically stronger and self-sufficient, society would require less and less state control, so that the monarchic state could, in a sense, wither away. This was the ethical dimension of the liberal call for a “night watchman state.” It also correlates to the essential ethical program of Free Religion. In Virchow’s personal papers is found a copy of the 1876 statutes of the Berlin FRC that tied the demand for freedom of conscience with the individual obligation to “selflimitation and self-mastery.” The organizational activities of the FRC, such as establishing kindergartens, giving youth ethical instruction, holding popular science lectures, engaging in charitable work, and maintaining its own library, all placed it squarely within the world of Progressive Party associations.46

The Progressive Party and the Workers The hope of developing ethical communities and ethical individuals through free associational life reflected an educational model of politics that was shared by Progressives and secularists alike. Men such as Virchow and Jacoby understood themselves to be teachers and sought to modernize the traditional civic institutions of the Alte Stadtbürgertum and replace older traditions of charity with organizations that would educate the lower classes and bring them into the Progressive Party fold. In 1844, key liberals and democrats had responded to the weavers’ revolt in Silesia by forming the Central Association in Prussia for the Welfare of the Working Classes (Central-Verein in Preussen für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen). Having led a sleepy existence during the years of political reaction, the New Era reinvigorated the Central-Verein. Seeking wider influence on public opinion, the association replaced the irregular Mitteilungen with a monthly Zeitschrift in late 1858 and appointed Guido Weiss as its editor.47 The Central-Verein formed an early point of association for the men who founded the National-Verein (1859) and the Progressive Party.48 The Central-Verein developed left-liberal social policies and created a host of institutions aimed at vertically integrating the poorer members of the Alte Stadtbürgertum and the growing class of industrial workers under liberal leadership. The presence in the Central-Verein of some of the Progressive Party’s top brass, especially Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and Franz Duncker, shows how central these projects were to 46 47

48

See Grundsätze der freireligiösen Gemeinde, undat. (ca. 1876) BBAW, Virchow papers, no. 2701. Zeitschrift des Central-Vereins in Preussen für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen, vol.1, no.1 (1859): 88–89. Eugene N. Anderson, The Social and Political Conflict in Prussia 1858–1864 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954), 327.

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left-liberal rule. These two were active in the reopening of the Berlin Handwerkerverein in 1859 and went on to found the Berlin Arbeiterverein in 1862. Seeking to prevent the erosion of worker support for the Progressive Party – particularly in Berlin – they founded the Verband der deutschen Gewerkvereine (Confederation of German Labor Associations) together with Max Hirsch in September 1868. Based on Hirsch’s studies of English labor associations, the Gewerkvereine, which later became known as the “HirschDuncker’schen” unions, were the left-liberal or “yellow” alternative to the “red” socialist unions and the “black” Catholic workers’ associations.49 In the 1850s and 1860s, Schulze-Delitzsch popularized his gospel of “SelfHelp” (Selbsthülfe) in the pages of the Central-Verein’s Zeitschrift and in public meetings, where he exhorted bourgeois liberals to give up the traditional forms of charity, in which guild, civic, and church communities organized support for their weaker members. “Hand-outs demoralize!” because they maintain the poor in a passive position, he told a large audience that had gathered to hear him speak on April 27, 1859, in Mäder’s Great Hall on Unter den Linden in Berlin. For real moral uplift, the wealthy and educated should support the formation of self-help associations “based on the participants’ own energy and independent action.”50 Now, gentlemen, place the crown atop your efforts; perform for your fellow citizens, for whom you have voluntarily made such sacrifices, the greatest service that you can perform, teach them the way to self help! There is no greater deed that one man can do for another than teaching him to stand on his own feet, bringing him to the point where he no longer needs charity!51

Similar efforts at social reform animated British liberals, and in 1859 the Scottish physician Samuel Smiles published a best seller entitled Self Help that offered working-class readers short biographies of self-made men for emulation.52 Yet, whereas Smiles relied on individual fortitude and the forces of the market, members of the Central-Verein were convinced that collective action was needed to overcome the “shadow sides of the newly developing industrial society.”53 The form of intervention proposed by Schulze-Delitzsch was cooperation 49

50 51 52

53

Hirsch published his “Letters from England” in the Volkszeitung in 1868. See Conze, SchulzeDelitzsch, 24. Zeitschrift des Central-Vereins, vol.1, no.1 (1859) 12, 13. Zeitschrift des Central-Vereins, vol. 2, no. 1(1860): 48–49. Smiles published Self-Help, his collection of inspirational biographies of self-made men in 1859. Schulze-Delitzsch used the term already in 1853 in his Associationsbuch für deutsche Handwerker und Arbeiter (Leipzig: Keil, 1853), 18. Rita Aldenhoff, Schulze-Delitzsch: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Liberalismus zwischen Revolution und Reichsgründung (Baden-Baden: Nomod, 1984), 114. Rudolf von Gneist, Der Central-Verein für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen in 50 jähriger Thätigkeit (1844–1894) (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1894), 4. On social liberalism, see Rüdiger vom Bruch, ed., Weder Kommunismus noch Kapitalismus: Bürgerliche Sozialreform in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Ära Adenauer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985).

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between those who held educational and economic capital and those who did not. Here his thinking was close to that of George Holyoake, who in addition to being Britain’s leading Freethinker was also the chief theorist of the country’s cooperative movement. In front of a crowd of thousands assembled to hear a series of lectures at the Berlin Arbeiterverein in 1863, Schulze-Delitzsch proposed two goals for the new workers’ movement: “education for autonomy” and “economic autonomy.” The numerous workers’ education associations and economic cooperatives that he inspired found the support of the Progressive Party, and in 1869 the Berlin city council’s statistical yearbook proudly listed these organizations under the rubric “Self-Help.”54 The Free Religious were particularly receptive to this form of worker organization, because, as the Social Democratic newspaper Nordstern found in July 1864, “Schulze’s Self-Help is – more precisely defined – the pure humanistreligious morality of the Free Congregations.”55 According to artisan Friedrich Paulsdorff, the workers’ education associations and Free Religion sprang from the same cause, “namely the effort of individual learned men to direct the treasures of the sciences to practical life and [. . .] the thirst for knowledge of those artisans who usually receive such a scant training in school.”56 Historians of the early workers’ movement have found that Free Religious preachers and “freigeistig-humanist” elites formed a key pillar of the leadership of the workers’ education and cooperative associations of the 1860s.57 One such man was Max Hirsch, left-liberal activist who took the secularist political imaginary into the 1870s and 1880s. Like G. S. Schaefer, he represented a generation too young to have participated in the religious conflicts of the Vormärz and the Revolution of 1848. He first appeared in the secularist context in 1861 as a teacher at the Berliner Handwerkerverein. From 1863 to 1867 he co-led the Magdeburg workers’ educational association with the Free Religious preacher Leberecht Uhlich.58 Following their cooperation in the formation of a liberal union movement, Hirsch, Schulze-Delitzsch, and Duncker founded the Society for the Propagation of Popular Education in 1871, which provided part-time employment to many Free Religious preachers and other secularist intellectuals as itinerant science popularizers. In 1878, Hirsch launched the Humboldt-Akademie, Germany’s leading adult continuing education institution, and 1881 he was a founding member of the Freethought Association Lessing. 54

55 56 57

58

Schulze-Delitzsch, Capitel zu einem deutschen Arbeiterkatechismus. Sechs Vorträge vor dem Berliner Arbeiterverein (Leipzig: Keil, 1863), 116, 121, 169. Städtisches Jahrbuch (1869). Quoted in Prüfer, Sozialismus, 245. Paulsdorff, “Die Freien Gemeinden und die Handwerker,” 2. Offermann incorrectly identifies Free Religious leaders as “freikirchlich,” a term more often used for Protestant evangelical sects. Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, 292, 293. Grote, Sozialdemokratie und Religion. Birker, Arbeiterbildungsvereine, 152.

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Throughout his life, Hirsch remained true to the vision of politics as education that was given symbolic form in the image adorning the masthead of Der Volksfreund (The People’s Friend), a newspaper Hirsch edited in 1870 together with other left-liberal leaders Wilhelm Löwe, Eugen Richter, and Moritz Wiggers. It depicted a bearded Bildungsbürger dressed in greatcoat and broadbrimmed hat, who was teaching or preaching to the workers, students, and women gathered about him under the open sky. This idealized self-image of the left-liberal notable as teacher, politician, and evangelist also describes the essential model of politics ascribed to by Free Religion.

the democratic movement The Berliner Reform had been founded in 1863 as a mouthpiece for the local Progressive Party. When editor-in-chief Guido Weiss resigned in April 1866, he cast his decision as a symptom of the collapse of the alliance of Democrats and Liberals that had made the Progressive Party possible. Yet few of the former revolutionaries of 1848 now ensconced as editors of the Volkszeitung or as members of the “Vorsehung” followed his call for “German Demokatie to raise its head again.”59 Their transition to left-liberalism had been a permanent one. The Democratic movement proved to be the smallest and least successful of the various secessionist groups to split away from the Progressive Party. Unhappy with the dominant trend of the party, a small core of dedicated Democrats began to agitate for secession beginning in 1863–1864.60 Steps toward the formation of Democratic People’s Parties were taken in the Southern German states, where there was widespread popular opposition to the pro-Prussian stance of the Progressive Party. In Northern and Eastern Germany, the Democratic movement was marginal and limited to a few cities, in particular Königsberg, Hamburg, and Berlin. There Democrats acted as gadflies within the liberal milieu and issued periodic calls for the resurrection of an independent party. When Democratic parties failed to materialize (as in 1864 or 1879) or were beaten at the polls (as in 1871 and 1887), the Democrats generally retreated to a dissenting status within the Progressive Party, withdrew from politics, or joined Social Democracy.61 Just as Democrats had trouble gaining a profile among German voters, they have also had difficulty being recognized by historians, whose use of the term “democratic” for the period after 1859 has often been quite fuzzy. Some continued to apply it to former Democrats, such as Schulze-Delitzsch or Franz Duncker, who had, in fact, become left-liberals. Alternatively, many historians have chosen to reduce the complexity of the field of German political culture by

59 60 61

Quoted in Fesser, Linksliberalismus, 170. Fesser, Linksliberalismus, 14, 48. Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten.

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subsuming Democrats under the heading “liberal,” or by stressing their commonalities with left-liberals through terms such as “liberal-democratic.”62 In order to understand the political anchoring of the FRC in Berlin, it is necessary to insist on the difference between the political programs and networks of the Democrats and those of their left-liberal and Social Democratic friends and rivals. Unlike most liberals, Prussian Democrats were generally internationalists and pacifists and opposed the wars of German unification. Unlike the socialists, Democrats objected to state control of the economy as well as violent revolution and class struggle.63 The leaders of Berlin’s small Democratic movement were so intimately linked to the leadership of the FRC that it is hardly an overstatement to say that the two were largely identical. This became apparent when Berlin Democrats began to agitate for a movement independent from the Progressive Party. An important first step was the launching of a journal, Die Zukunft (The Future), in early 1867. Jacoby’s key collaborators on this venture were present or future FRC leaders, including Karl van der Leeden and Dr. Paul Langerhans. Guido Weiss became the chief editor.64 When the Berlin Democrats issued a public declaration of the formation of an independent party in 1870, five of the ten signatories were current or former Berlin FRC notables.65 When another attempt to organize a Democratic party in Berlin began following Bismarck’s break with the national liberals in July 1879, all four of the likely organizers noted by a police lieutenant were current or former FRC elites: Weiss, Langerhans, Abarbanell, and Dumas.66 Similarly, Democrats continued to dominate the leading posts of the FRC even after Weiss left the board around 1866. From 1869 to 1886, the congregation was under the chairmanship of the Democratic city assembly member Ludwig May, and its preacher G. S. Schaefer was a Democratic activist well into the 1890s. In the 1870s, May and Schaefer sat on the congregation’s “endowment curatorium” together with two other Democrats – Pringsheim and van den Leeden. The fifth member, C. A. Hirsekorn, was a merchant of undetermined political orientation. The sermons and actions of G. S. Schaefer show most clearly the common Jacobyite link between the two movements in Berlin. In a lecture on “the 62

63

64 65

66

On the tendency of West German historians to elide the difference between Democratic and Liberal, see Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, 26–33. For examples, see Nipperdey, Organisation; Prüfer, Sozialismus; Gagel, Wahlrechtsfrage, 36; Shlomo Na’aman, Demokratische und soziale Impulse in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung der Jahre 1862/63 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1968). Wolfgang Leesch differentiated between two forms of Democratic thought in early Silesian Deutschkatholizismus. On the one side was a radicalization of the liberal individualism in “liberal-democratism,” which he associated with rationalism. On the other side, men such as Theodor Hofferichter and Nees von Esenbeck supported socialism as a form of a “total” or “völkisch” democratism, which was rooted theologically in the ideal of a biological and spiritual unity of humanity. Leesch, Deutschkatholizismus, 39–44. Höhle, Franz Mehring, 37–50. The Free Religious notables were Ludwig May, Guido Weiss, industrialist Rudolf Pringsheim, van den Leeden and bank director Gustav Thölde. Publicist, no. 139, June 18, 1870. Police report of July 9, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 9551, p. 44.

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opposition between the worldviews of the old religion and the Free Religious” before a large crowd gathered at the Arbeiterverein in April 1869, Schaefer cited extensively from Jacoby’s book Der Freie Mensch (The Free Man) and his thoughts on “God and superstition of God” from a Spinozan perspective.67 Schaefer also adhered to Jacoby’s pacifism and, after the German victory over France in 1870, he was among the Berlin signatories of a protest declaration against the annexation of the Alsace initiated by members of the Democratic People’s Party in Königsberg.68 In the following months, Schaefer used his pulpit in the FRC to promote his pacifist position. On December 4, 1870, he gave a talk on the “perpetual peace.” Unlike Immanuel Kant, who believed that a nation would join in an international association of “perpetual peace” only after it had achieved a measure of internal peace and civilization, Schaefer called for the international coordination of pacifist action to undermine militant states such as Prussia and France. “This work of peace can be furthered,” he argued, if “the peoples are brought to consciousness of their right to self-determination – also regarding war and peace – and through deeper education [Bildung] are empowered to go over the heads of their clerical and secular rulers and communicate and associate internationally.”69 Schaefer’s pacifism was in no way exceptional for Free Religion. Between the founding of the first German peace organization as a project of the Königsberg Free Religion Congregation in 1850 and movements opposing the First World War, the German peace movement remained closely intertwined with a network of secularist and Democratic associations.70 Besides the Franco–Prussian war, the other key issue dividing Democrats from left-liberals was the “social question.” A brochure published by the FRC’s house printer in 1871 diagnosed the Democratic quandary. Its author, Carl August Schramm,71 argued that unlike the Progressive Party, which was caving in to the popularity of Prussia’s successful wars, “Democracy has remained true to itself [but it] is also internally divided [. . .]; Self-Help and State-Help are the battle cries that divide and differentiate us.” Schramm praised Jacoby’s “proposed middle path” 67 68

69

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Die Zukunft, no. 104, May 6, 1869. Berlin signatories of the protest declaration of October 16, 1870 included Max Kayser, Boas, Karl van der Leeden, Eduard Sack, Paul Singer, Guido Weiss, Robert Schweichel, and Franz Mehring. Höhle, Franz Mehring, 48. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 12978, pp. 49, 55; G. S. Schaefer, Thesen über Patriotismus und Humanismus, Aufgestellt zur öffentlichen Diskussion im Versammlungssaale der freireligiösen Gemeinde, am 1. Januar 1871 (Berlin, 1871). Leading secularist pacifists were Julius Rupp, Eduard Löwenthal, Max Hirsch, Wilhelm Förster, Hugh Tepper-Laski, Graf Arco, Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Helene Stoecker, and Carl von Ossietsky. Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World without War, 40, 45, 126, 129, 131. Carl August Schramm (1830–1905) was an official in an insurance company who, after joining the SPD in the mid-1870s, became “one of the few Social Democrats to grasp Marx’s theory of value.” During a bitter feud with Kautsky and his former collaborator Eduard Bernstein, Schramm published a booklet Rodbertus, Marx, Lassalle in 1885 in which he admitted his dislike of revolution. Failing to gain support for his views within the party, he quit the SPD in 1886. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878–1890, 171–173.

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of “partnership” [English in original] to overcome the “the division of true Democracy begun by the prejudice of the Progressive Party and expanded through the fanaticism of individual workers’ groups.” “Partnership,” it was hoped, would lead the new Democratic party to a majority in the Reichstag “and render the service of saving the propertied classes from the otherwise inevitable, violent revolution, and saving the workers from the inevitably sad consequence of the same.”72 Two other Democrats, Ludwig Eckardt73 and Ludwig Büchner, had already proposed the reconciliation of “Staatshilfe” and “Selbsthilfe” and sought thereby to win the Social Democrats of the North for their Democratic People’s Party, which was based in Southwest Germany. In Berlin, Guido Weiss announced in 1866, “From now on there will be no Democratic program without a social plank.”74 The effort to balance free markets with socialism, and direct democracy with rule by the educated, was not a transitional phase of the Democratic movement. Rather it marked Democracy’s essential view of society and its point of contact with Free Religion. By bridging the widening gulf between Social Democracy and liberalism, Democrats hoped to be able to maintain the unity of the Alte Bürgerstadt, the original social basis of Free Religion. Yet instead of gaining a profile by launching an autonomous party, the Berlin Democrats were roundly beaten at the polls and essentially eliminated from elected bodies. Jacoby and Weiss lost their seats in the Prussian Diet in November 1870 for their opposition to the war. Schaefer declined a candidacy in one of the Berlin districts for the first Reichstag elections of the following March out of deference to Jacoby, who ran as the first candidate in all six Berlin districts. Although he gained 16.2 percent of the overall popular vote in Berlin, Jacoby still ran a distant second to the Progressive candidate in each district.75 72

73

74

75

C[arl] A[ugust] S[chramm], Ein Wort zur Verständigung in der socialen Frage. Dem demokratischen Verein zu Berlin gewidmet (Berlin: W. Rubenow, 1871). Ludwig Eckardt (1827–1871) came from a Viennese Lutheran family, participated in the Revolution of 1848, and fled to Switzerland, where he completed his university studies. Having run into trouble for his anticlericalism, Eckardt moved to Berlin in 1862, and then in 1864 to Karlsruhe as a professor of literature, only to be forced into political exile again in 1867; cofounded the Democratic People’s Party from the left wing of the Nationalverein in 1863; together with Ludwig Büchner attempted to reconcile Democrats and the Lassallean socialists with the slogan “Selbsthilfe und Staatshilfe”; participated in the September 1867 Peace and Freedom League conference in Geneva. Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), vol. 4 (1959): 282–283; Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 68–72. Gustav Mayer, “Die Trennung der proletarischen von der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Deutschland, 1863–1870,” in idem, Radikalismus, Sozialismus und bürgerliche Demokratie (Frankfurt/ M.: 1969 [1913]): 108–179, 119–120. Weiss quotation in: Fesser, Linksliberalismus, 170. In the Reichstag elections of 1871, the “Jacoby’sche Richtung” won 16.2 percent of the popular vote in Berlin, against 65 percent Progressive, 10.4 percent Conservative, 5 percent Social Democratic, and 1.5 percent “Ultramontane.” Progressives won all six Berlin seats, including Schulze-Delitzsch in the sixth district and Franz Duncker the fifth. Ernst Bruch, “Politische Topographie Berlins,” in Städtisches Jahrbuch (1871): 96–112. On the loss of Weiss’s and Jacoby’s seats in the Prussian parliamentary elections of Fall 1870, see Höhle, Franz Mehring,

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Public opposition to the Progressive Party also cost the FRC notables most of their positions of influence in the political landscape of Berlin. By 1869, Weiss had already lost his position as chair of his Bezirksverein. May was replaced as chair of his Bezirksverein in 1869 and was not reelected to city council in 1870.76 Die Zukunft folded following the Democratic defeat at the polls in the spring of 1871, and the Democratic Association, too, began a steady path of decline. Over the next two years, in the association meetings and in the new Demokratische Zeitung, Berlin Democrats debated possible union with the Eisenacher Social Democrats (SDAP). August Bebel spoke to the Democratic Association in November 1871 on the relationship of “democracy” and “socialism,” and cast revolution in a spiritual light, appealing to the intellectual and pacifist predilections of the Democrats. “The transformation, the social revolution is no revolution on the streets,” Bebel assured the Democrats, “it is the revolution of those minds that oppose such conditions and try instead to prepare new foundations for economic development.”77 These efforts to win the Berlin Democrats got a boost in 1872 when Johann Jacoby announced that he was joining the SDAP in protest over the treason convictions of Bebel and Liebknecht for their public antiwar stance.78 His conversion to socialism was, however, deeply ambivalent and, soon after joining the socialists, he wrote a letter to the Berlin Democratic Association insisting that they need not follow his example. Although he believed “that the true Democratic or People’s Party must go hand in hand with the workers’ party, [. . .] both can certainly remain independent in their organizations alongside one another.” Citing this letter, his old Königsberg friend and FRC notable Georg Dumas spoke in favor of an alliance of the Democratic Association with the SDAP but not a union.79 In the end, Dumas and the other notables of the FRC chose not to join Social Democracy. For these men conversion to Social Democracy would have meant crossing the political and social chasm that divided the socialists from the civic class of Berlin. It would have also meant abandoning the political imaginary of the classless society organized according to the principles of social harmony

76 77 78

79

44; Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben, 229. On Jacoby’s offer of a candidacy to Schaefer in the fifth district, see Jacoby, Johann Jacoby Briefwechsel 1850–1877, 563. Städtisches Jahrbuch (1872), 154–155. Quoted in Petry, Internationale, 356. Two important advocates of the union of the Jacoby Democrats and the Eisenacher were Carl Hirsch and Max Kayser, the editors of the Demokratische Zeitung, the follow-up organ of Weiss’s Zukunft. Hirsch and Kayser were members of the Democratic Arbeiterverein and went on to become important SPD politicians. The Demokratische Zeitung collapsed in July 1873 following a dispute between Hirsch and Kayser and their financial backers, who wanted to remain Democrats. The latter resolved the impasse by cutting off the paper’s funds. Arno Herzig, “Max Kayser (1853–1888). Der erste jüdische Abgeordnete der deutschen Sozialdemokratie,” in Geist und Gestalt im historischen Wandel: Facetten deutscher und europäischer Geschichte 1789–1989, Bert Becker and Horst Lademacher, eds. (Münster: Waxmann, 2000): 105–112, 107. Quoted in Petry, Internationale, 359.

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and education espoused by Free Religion. Instead they chose political marginalization and, by the mid-1870s, Berlin Democracy had become, in the words of the socialist Freethinker Robert Schweichel,80 “only a thorn in the flesh of the Progressive Party.”81 Numerous Berlin Democrats did follow Jacoby’s example and converted to Social Democracy between 1870 and 1890. These included Paul Singer, Eduard Bernstein, Carl August Schramm, Gustav Kessler, Georg Ledebour, Bruno Wille, and Franz Mehring. With the exception of Singer and Mehring, these men were directly or indirectly affiliated with secularism. As uncomfortable members of the SPD they gravitated toward dissenting groups and inner-party oppositions.

free religion and the formation of social democracy When Ferdinand Lassalle issued his challenge to Schulze-Delitzsch in 1863 and proposed “State Help” (i.e., Prussian state subsidies for productive cooperatives), he met with enormous liberal animosity. Not only did Progressives oppose the socialist challenge to their economic and political interests, they believed that state interference would undermine the moral development promised by the voluntary quality of associations. Some Free Religious preachers led opposition to Lassalle after he founded Germany’s first socialist workers’ party, the General German Workers Association (ADAV) in 1863. Wilhelm Hieronymi tried to discredit Lassalle among anticlericals by pointing out his connections to the Catholic Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler, while Leberecht Uhlich forbade the agitation of the Lassalleans in the powerful Magdeburg workers’ education association. In one meeting, he had members vote on a resolution declaring Schulze-Delitzsch’s proposals to be better.82 Conflict with Free Religious preachers and Freethinkers also marked key stations on the road to the formation of a rival workers’ party in Saxony. As August Bebel pushed the Saxon Democratic People’s Party and the Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine (VDAV) toward the formation of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP) in Eisenach in 1869, the men he beat out in key elections were organized secularists, including the Free Religionists Emil Rossmässler and Robert Krebs, and the future Freethinkers Max Hirsch and Ludwig Büchner.83 80

81 82

83

Robert Schweichel (1821–1907), studied law, active in revolution, returned to Berlin from Swiss exile in 1861 and edited the Norddeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung; twice elected to the board of the Freethought Association Lessing; part of the Jacobyan Democratic circle in Berlin and later supported the SPD. Höhle, Mehring, 35, 48. Quoted in Petry, Internationale, 360. Wilhelm Hieronymi, Herr Herostrat-Lassalle, der ökonomische Kronprätendent, oder Agitation und Ehrgeiz (Darmstadt: 1864). Heiner Grote, Sozialdemokratie und Religion: Eine Dokumentation für die Jahre 1863 bis 1875 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Seibeck], 1968), 93, 97. Bebel beat out Hirsch and Krebs in the 1867 election for the presidency of the VDAV. Birker, Arbeiterbildungsvereine, 68.

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This would seem to support the interpretation in the standard historiography of the SPD that linked party formation to a secularization process, in which the party progressively brushed off utopian and secularist currents and arrived at a politics of class as proposed by Marx and Engels. Certainly, it was in order to formally distance the party from any necessary alliance with secularism that Wilhelm Liebknecht set “the declaration of religion to be a private matter” into the 1875 Gotha party program of the new Socialist Workers’ Party that united the rival ADAV with the SDAP. However, this declaration was deliberately ambiguous, so as not to alienate socialist Free Religious activists and anticlericals.84 As recent studies have shown, rank-and-file support of anticlericalism, ethical socialism, and Free Religion was more widespread and lasted longer than previously assumed. In one sample of active Social Democrats in the years 1863–1875, Thomas Welskopp found that of those who gave information about their confession, 14.9 percent were dissidents or Deutschkatholiken.85 Despite, or more precisely because of this overlap, Social Democracy championed the right to religious dissent and defended Free Religion when state and church institutions attacked it. Berlin’s socialist newspapers opened their pages to agitation by the city’s FRC. Liebknecht’s Volksstaat re-printed texts by G. S. Schäfer in 1870, and the Berliner Freie Presse edited by Johann Most (1846– 1906) reported frequently on developments at the Berlin FRC in the late 1870s. Paul Singer’s Volksblatt covered major events in the Berlin FRC in the 1880s as did its successor Vorwärts thereafter.86 Formally, Social Democracy took a position similar to that of the Progressive Party. It defended the rights of dissenters, but avoided direct association with the movement. Practically, however, as the genesis of the SPD in Berlin shows, secularism formed an important and lasting substratum of the socialist movement. Socialist membership in the FRC kept pace with the rapid development of Berlin to the center of German Social Democracy in the 1870s, and in 1879 police identified forty socialists in the congregation, including two prominent leaders, shoemaker Thomas Metzner and the cigarmaker and Reichstag deputy Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche.87

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Prüfer, Sozialismus, 239–252. Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 149, 581, 582, 584. Grote, Sozialdemokratie, 105, 103. The following prominent Berlin socialists were named in the police list of those 40 (of the 788) members of the FRC suspected of involvment in Social Democracy or one of its affiliated organizations, in particular the “Verein zur Wahrung der Interessen der arbeitenden Bevölkerung”: W. Rubenow, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, Theodor Metzner, Robert Krebs, Ideler, Heinrich Peege, Adam Friedrich Leopold Blücher, and Walewsky. Two later socialists not on the list, Wilhelm Werner and Agnes Wabnitz, were also FRC members in 1879. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 15042, unpag.

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Free Religion in Early Berlin Socialism The biographies of Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche (1825–1905) and Theodor Metzner (1830–1902) demonstrate the integral role played by Free Religion in the initial steps toward an autonomous workers’ movement in the 1860s. Fritzsche is remembered for helping elevate Ferdinand Lassalle to early leadership of German Social Democracy. Together with the master artisan Julius Vahlteich and the chemist Otto Dammer, Fritzsche subverted SchulzeDelitzsch’s plans for a Worker’s Congress under Progressive control by approaching Lassalle late in 1862 and offering him the leadership of a workingclass movement. Fritzsche, Dammer, and Vahlteich knew each other from Leipzig, where earlier in the year they had forced a schism in the Commercial Educational Association. At issue was whether this liberal workers’ education association would pursue technical education, as the majority, including young August Bebel, wanted, or whether it would focus instead on naturalist worldview, as Fritzsche, Dammer, and Vahlteich proposed. All three men were members of Leipzig’s Deutschkatholisch Congregation and took their ideals of worldview and politics from its preacher, the botanist Emil Rossmässler. They gave their breakaway workers’ association the name “Vorwärts” and met in Free Religious preacher Ludwig Würkert’s “restaurant for people’s education, ennoblement and encouragement” in the Hotel de Saxe.88 Thus, if Fritzsche, Dammer, and Vahlteich were “probably the first in the new workers’ movement, for whom one can locate socialist consciousness of some kind,” as historian Schlomo Na’aman has argued, then Free Religion and the freigeistig political imaginary must be seen as contributors to this consciousness.89 Fritzsche went on to become a leading member of the ADAV and was elected to the Norddeutsche Reichstag in 1867. He earned his living as president of the General Cigarmakers Union and used his position as editor of the union’s newspaper to begin an anticlerical campaign that alienated much of the membership.90 When Fritzsche relocated to the capital in 1866 he found that the local socialist scene was deeply divided. The city’s chapter of the ADAV had been founded in 1863 by two Free Religionists, Julius Vahlteich and Theodor Metzner. Metzner served as the Party Representative for Berlin, but by 1865 had affiliated himself with Wilhelm Liebknecht, who nurtured an anti-Lassallean 88

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Na’aman, Arbeiterbewegung, 55, 54; On Würkert, see Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, 375; August Bebel, “Vom gewerblichen Bildungsverein zum Verein Vorwärts,” in Dokumente und Materialien zur Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Peter von Rüden and Kurt Koszyk eds. (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1979), 54–56; Karl-Heinz Ellinger, “Würkert, Friedrich Ludwig (Pseud. Ludwig Rein),” in Sächsische Biografie, online edition: http://www.isgv.de/saebi/ (accessed April 25, 2013). Na’aman, Arbeiterbewegung, 55. The City Yearbook reported with some malicious glee that a production cooperative launched by Fritzsche in 1868 to keep striking cigar workers employed collapsed despite offers by many other unions and consumer cooperatives to buy its “strike cigars.” Städtisches Jahrbuch (1869), 278, 330. On Fritzsche’s anticlerical agitation, see Grote, Sozialdemokratie, 105.

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opposition prior to his departure from Berlin in that year. Following a conflict with Lassalles’s successor as party chief, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, Metzner was ousted from his post and replaced by the stenographer Heinrich Roller, who, incidentally, also later joined the Berlin FRC.91 Dwarfing both the ADAV and its socialist opposition in the mid-1860s was the Berlin Arbeiterverein. Schulze-Delitzsch had drawn 3,000 listeners to Arbeiterverein in January 1863 to hear his famous lectures, which were later printed as the best-selling Workers’ Cathechism (Arbeiterkathechismus). With 838 dues-paying members in May 1864, the association was dedicated to Schulze-Delitzsch’s principles, but after the election of bookbinder Robert Krebs as chairman in 1866, it began to drift out of the ambit of the Progressive Party.92 By 1868, the Arbeiterverein became part of network of opposition to left-liberal dominance of the workers’ movement that brought it close to the Democratic movement and the Berlin opposition to the ADAV. Many of the key players in this transition were members of the FRC, and Krebs would later become a member as well. Pacifism and internationalist humanism formed a key point of contact for these groups and a basis for their joint opposition to the more nationalistic Lassalleans and Progressives. Krebs took the Arbeiterverein into the international peace movement of 1867. He led a delegation of Berlin workers to Paris in May to attend the preparatory meeting of the International Peace League, whose cofounders included some of the leading Democrats of Europe, such as Johann Jacoby, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, Albert and Louis Blanc, Alexander Herzen, John S. Mill, Ludwig Eckardt, and Amand Goegg. Krebs appealed to the French people on May 9, 1867: “Frenchmen, let us strive for the general fraternity of the nations and deplore every war as an atrocity belonging to medieval barbarism! Our battle stations are the sites of industry and the temple of humanity.”93 In July, Krebs issued a declaration on behalf of the Arbeiterverein to German workers, urging them to join the International Peace League under the slogan “People’s Freedom [and] People’s Happiness through People’s Education.”94 Shared pacifism led the Eisenach SDAP, the Berlin

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Like Fritzsche, Heinrich Roller also defected to the Eisenacher VDAV and the IWA in 1869. He was known as a Free Religionist and later buried in the Berlin FRC cemetery. Petry, Internationale, 47–90. Shlomo Na’aman, “Otto Dammer – Der erste deutsche Arbeiterfunktionär aus den Reihen der proletarischen Intelligenz,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, no. 2 (1973): 296; Fesser, Linksliberalismus, 34; Petry, Internationale, 124; Conze, Schulze-Delitzsch, 23. Petry, Internationale, 152. See also Geschichte der revolutionären Berliner Arbeiterbewegung, 149; Birker, Arbeiterbildungsvereine, 91–92. On the Peace and Freedom League, see Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 69; Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels: Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe, Dezember 1872 bis Mai 1875, vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984), 797. Robert Krebs, “Arbeiter Deutschlands! Brüder!,” Der Vorbote 2 (July 1867): 124–125. The emotional highpoint of the first International Peace Congress in Geneva in September 1867 came when Giuseppe Garibaldi proposed a resolution calling for the abolition of the Papacy.

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Democratic movement, the Berlin FRC, and the Arbeiterverein to openly oppose the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.95 The International Peace League was closely tied to the Marxist International Workingman’s Association (IWA), later known as the First International. In 1868, Krebs became one of a handful of Berlin members of the IWA that brought him into contact with Metzner and the other leaders of the ADAV opposition. Krebs was an internationalist and pacifist; however, he was not a socialist revolutionary. At the fifth congress of the VDAV in Nürnberg in 1868, Krebs opposed the majority decision to make the VDAV a corporate member of the International, which effectively meant embracing socialism. Back in Berlin, Krebs explained to the members of the Arbeiterverein that he had faced the choice between “the principle of cooperation and moral progress” and the IWA program, “the realization of which would require a complete transformation of all relationships.” Against such a socialist transformation spoke the ethical fact that “the broad masses [. . .] do not yet possess the necessary maturity.” Lacking moral Bildung, workers would be exploited for “communist ends.”96 The radicals did not agree with this argumentation and, led by the Democratic editor and later socialist Carl Hirsch, they left the Arbeiterverein and united with the socialist opposition to the ADAV in a new organization, the Democratic Arbeiterverein. At the first meeting on December 15, 1868, Wilhelm Eichhoff gave a programmatic speech against “sole sanctifying dogma of cooperatives,” a reference to the “Self-Help” philosophy espoused by Krebs and Max Hirsch, and the “narrow sectarian cult of Lassalleanism.” The Democratic Arbeiterverein was, to follow the characterization of Eduard Bernstein, a “union of social democrats, who did not want anything to do with J. B. von Schweitzer and his people, with the followers of Johann Jacoby and the members of the Berlin Arbeiterverein, who had turned away from the Progressive Party that dominated this association and accepted the program of the International Workingmen’s Association.”97 When Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, editor of the Social-Democrat, seized control of the ADAV in June 1869, Fritzsche, too, declared his secession. The following week he and Metzner were two of three representatives of Berlin workers’ organizations to take part in the founding congress of the SDAP in Eisenach.98 By 1869, then, all of the known socialist members of the FRC were united within the small Eisenacher faction in Berlin and working within the Democratic Arbeiterverein. This Arbeiterverein also bridged the gap to the Democratic movement in which most of the other FRC notables were active.

95

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98

Metzner gave a speech in the Demokratischer Arbeiterverein on October 2, 1870, against the pending annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. Petry, Internationale, 319. Petry, Internationale, 254. Petry, Internationale, 242–244, 254. Eduard Bernstein, Ignaz Auer: Eine Gedenkschrift (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1907), 13. Bauer, Berlin: Illustrierte Chronik, 370.

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At this time the Democrats associated with the journal Zukunft developed warm relations with the Eisenacher leaders. Wilhelm Liebknecht became the Zukunft’s Leipzig correspondent, and August Bebel later recalled the all-night pub rounds that ensued when he visited the Jacoby crowd in Berlin.99 What is the significance of the Free Religious presence in the Democratic Arbeiterverein? What evidence exists for the operation of the secularist political imaginary in this early organization of Berlin socialism? In addition to the pacifism and internationalism already examined, one may point to the intellectualism identified by critics as a key part of the habitus of these democratic socialists. When Fritzsche defected from the ADAV to join the SDAP in 1869, Schweitzer’s Social-Democrat noted laconically: If the so-called “intellects” [Intelligenzen] exit by the dozen, good riddance, other “intellects” will arrive or, better yet, none will arrive. For the lofty chatter of these so-called “intellects” has been of little use to our association, more likely harmful, because whenever it comes to standing tall, they prove to be traitors or at least fickle.100

The characterization of Fritzsche as an intellectual, however ironic, is initially surprising given that his formal education was limited to six months of primary school. However, it corresponds to the worldview-oriented training and FRC membership that he shared with other artisan autodidacts such as Vahlteich and Metzner. Intelligenzen also describes the professional membership of the Democratic Arbeiterverein as a whole. Although workers were elected to the top two posts of the new association, intellectuals and merchants dominated the new organization.101 One historian concluded that the high intellectual potential of the Eisenachers in Berlin meant that “nearly all members were capable of being public speakers,” but – stymied by the local dominance of the Lassalleans – they remained “officers without an army.”102 Eduard Bernstein,103 who would become one of the most important theorists of modern Marxism, began his socialist career in the Berlin Democratic Arbeiterverein in 1871. Looking back some decades later, he blamed intellectualism for its inability to gather a significant political following. And, like the writer for the Social-Democrat, Bernstein linked this intellectualism with a tendency toward factionalism: “Made up of heretics from two movements, Schulze-Delitzsche’s and Lassalle’s, the association suffered from an excess of

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Fesser, Linksliberalismus, 102. Quoted in Städtisches Jahrbuch (1870), 278. Twenty members were workers and artisans, while twenty-seven were “intellectuals,” merchants, and manufacturers (Fabrikanten). Petry, Internationale, 246. Petry, Internationale, 344, 340. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) was the son of a railway employee and nephew of Aron Bernstein, whose Reform Congregation was visited by the parents. Bernstein dropped out of Gymnasium in 1866 because of financial pressure and became a bank clerk apprentice. He exited from the Jewish congregation in 1878.

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mental attenuation [Gedankenblässe].”104 Bernstein recalled chairman Metzner’s response to Ignaz Auer, when the recently arrived Bavarian proposed adding “social” to the association’s name to distinguish it from “bourgeois Democracy.” Metzner, “who enjoyed particular respect as one of the oldest members of the Party and as a sharp-witted logician,” argued that adding “social” to “democratic” and “workers” was “an accumulation of synonymous terms, which must be avoided in the interest of clarity.” When the majority voted against him, Metzner and the rest of the board resigned, presumably not because of their dislike of redundancy, but because of their commitment to the “Democratic” coalition that also characterized the FRC.105 Bernstein called the election of the new board of the Social Demoratic Arbeiterverein a “little revolution” that ushered in a new generation of Berlin socialists, including himself, Auer, and the journalists August Heinsch and Johann Most.106 According to Bernstein, then, the separation of modern Social Democratic political life from organized secularism and Democracy took place rather late among the Berlin Eisenachers. Nonetheless, when one probes the biographies of this new generation of Social Democrats, one finds reproduced there many of the social forms and intellectual/spiritual interests that marked both Democracy and secularism. As with the left-liberals, there was a stratum of socialist leaders who continued to inhabit the secularist political imaginary. They stood out for their ongoing cooperation with Freigeistige and for their tendency toward what might be thought of as “Democratic heresies.” One of these was the revisionism of which Bernstein himself was the central figure. Another was the anarchism associated in the 1880s with Johann Most. The secularist imprint of these two extremes of right and left deviation can be uncovered by a brief investigation of the friendship and common intellectual pursuits of Most and Bernstein prior to their flight from Berlin – Most to England and Bernstein to Switzerland – in 1878.

Eduard Bernstein In his memoirs, Bernstein delivered a rather negative judgment of some of the movements, such as the Democratic Arbeiterverein, in which he had participated during the 1870s. This distancing belies their formative influence on his own intellectual habitus and later revisionism. The initial motives that led the trainee bank clerk to convert to Social Democracy were typical of a Democrat, and had little to do with socialism as an economic system or his own experiences with members of the working class. In his memoirs, Bernstein cites a childhood fascination with Johann Jacoby, opposition to the Franco-Prussian war, 104 105

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Bernstein, Ignaz Auer, 14. Eduard Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre (Berlin: Dietz, 1991 [1928]), 13–14, 36; Bernstein, Ignaz Auer, 13. Bernstein, Ignaz Auer, 14, 15.

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internationalism, and a speech given by Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche in 1872 at “Utopia,” a Berlin discussion club of workers, students, and young commerical employees such as Bernstein.107 More than once in his political career Bernstein found himself in heretical positions, where he was in good secularist company. The first such episode arose with his avid promotion of the ideas of Eugen Dühring among Bernstein’s Social Democratic colleagues in the mid-1870s, when Bernstein even brought copies of Dühring’s writings to his imprisoned friend Johann Most. At that time, Dühring, a blind private docent at the Berlin University, was attracting large crowds to his public lectures on national economics. His combination of materialism, anticlericalism, and socialistic rhetoric could have been heard from any number of other science popularizers or Free Religious leaders in Berlin. Unlike these, however, Dühring was able to stage his criticisms within the walls of one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in Imperial Germany. In polemical atheistic lectures, Dühring encouraged his audiences to see contemporary thought as a battleground, where “[s]ince the fifties there have been in essence only two camps, namely that of materialism and that of philosophy.” He degraded his philosopher colleagues to “second-class priests” and argued that philosophy should be abolished.108 Dühring’s elevation of materialism, his anticlerical rhetoric, and his maverick stance as a radical in a hostile environment were immensely appealing to marginal “half-educated” intellectuals such as Bernstein, Fritzsche, and Most.109 When the university’s academic court revoked his venia legendi, his authorization to teach, Most and Fritzsche organized a public protest meeting on “Freedom of science and the Berlin University court” on July 12, 1877. This protest movement led to the formation of a new discussion group that called itself the “Mohrenklub” after the location of their meeting place in Mohren Street. Like “Utopia” and the Democratic Arbeiterverein, the Mohrenklub was composed of a similar mix of worker autodidacts, commercial employees, and disaffected students, as well as Jews and non-Jews.110 The Mohrenklub took up Dühring’s idea of a “Free Academy” for workers and opened a Workers’ Education School in Berlin in April 1878, where Bernstein taught bookkeeping and Carl August Schramm lectured on political economy before the project fell victim to the “Socialist Laws” passed later that year. Schramm and Bernstein also sought to fulfill the party’s request for “a scientific journal” and launched Die Zukunft in 1877, together with the project’s 107 108 109

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Eduard Bernstein, Entwicklung eines Sozialisten (Berlin: Dietz, 1991 [1930]), 198, 199. Eugen Dühring, Der Werth des Lebens, 3rd improved ed. (Leipzig: Fues, 1881), 44. Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen (Glashuetten bei Taunus: Auvermann, 1973 [1924]), 53–56. Members of the Mohrenklub included: Ignaz Auer, Paul Grottkau, Fritz Mielke, Bernstein, and C. A. Schramm. Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 175–177. The Berlin newspaper closest to the Mohrenklub, the Berliner Freie Presse, was edited by Paul Lossau and Paul Grottkau and directed by chief editor Johann Most.

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underwriter, Karl Höchberg.111 In 1878, Höchberg and Bernstein moved with the paper to Zurich to avoid closure under the Socialist Laws. Die Zukunft prefigured aspects of Bernstein’s later revisionism, such as the rejection of the fatalism associated with economic determinism and the emphasis on mental factors such as the use of scientific knowledge and ethical development. In an article critical of radical anticlericalism, Die Zukunft argued that the party should seek cooperation with the universal ethical content of all religion. This ethical-humanist approach to the “religious question” foreshadowed the solutions to confessionalism later offered by Berlin Freethinkers and the Ethical Culture Society.112 In a letter of 1877, Karl Marx interpreted Dühring’s popularity and Höchberg’s effort to “give socialism a ‘higher, ideal’ direction” as Berlin “inconsistencies” (Halbheiten) that resulted from the permissive atmosphere created by the 1875 unification with the Lassalleans. Engels took on the task of opposing the “whole gang of half-grown students and overly clever Doctores” and teaching the young party a theoretical lesson.113 Under the sarcastic title “Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science,” Vorwärts began publishing Engels’s decisive attacks on Dühring beginning in January 1877. When Vorwärts editor Liebknecht refused to publish Most’s defense of Dühring, Fritzsche and Vahlteich protested.114 Engels’s refutation of Dühring is seen as the first step on the road to the codification of a “Marxist” orthodoxy. Appropriately, socialists followed the early Christian tradition of naming antiheretical texts and simply called it AntiDühring. Bernstein claimed that reading Anti-Dühring cured him of his fascination. It did not, however, cure him of his tendency toward secularist deviations. In exile in England, he joined the Fabian socialists, who shared his interest in the latest Darwinian scholarship and Neo-Kantian ethics.115 In 1895, Bernstein wrote an introductory essay for the first issue of Der Sozialistische Akademiker, a Berlin journal that featured articles by socialist, anarchist, and secularist intellectuals and students. Two years later it was renamed the Sozialistische Monatshefte and became the leading revisionist journal in Germany.

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Zukunft writers with a strong secularist profile included Ludwig Büchner, Johann Most, Albert Dulk, Bruno Geiser, Eduard Sack, Wilhelm Hasenclever, and Max Kayser, as well as Adolf Douai and Paul Grottkau (both in American exile). Ernst Theodor Mohl, “Ein Kapitel zur Frühgeschichte des Revisionismus,” introduction to the reprint of Die Zukunft. Socialistische Revue (Glashütten im Taunus: Auvermann, 1971), I–XII. K. “Die Kirche im Zukunftsstaat.” Die Zukunft: Socialistische Revue I (1878): 549–559. See discussion of ethics in Chapter Six. Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, October 19, 1877. Quoted in Mohl, “Ein Kapitel,” V. Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 717, 718. Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialists from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco: International Scholars, 1999). On Sidney Webb’s ethical socialism, see Mark Bevir, “Sidney Webb: Utilitarianism, Positivism, and Social Democracy,” Journal of Modern History vol. 74, no. June (2002).

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At the turn of the twentieth century, Bernstein was also keeping the memory of Schulze-Delitzsch’s cooperatives alive. He was joined by Free Religious Monist Heinrich Peus,116 the Friedrichshagener Bohemian Paul Kampffmeyer, and the Freethinker Bruno Borchardt,117 who all defended the cooperative movement against the long-standing mistrust of the party leadership. They celebrated cooperatives as a “natural” form of social interaction and a model for integrated community.118 Johann Most If Bernstein represents a connection between secularism and a “right” deviation within the SPD, the biography of Johann Most, Germany’s most famous anarchist, reveals how secularist affinities also played into the “left” deviations of anti-authoritarianism, revolutionary decisionism, and extreme anticlericalism. Born in Augsburg in 1846 as the illegitimate child of a poor woman and a dissipated Bildungsbürger, Most had wanted to study acting, but was forced by his father to enter the bookbinding trade.119 Most was self-taught and read voraciously in natural science, philosophy, and political economy. Bernstein described him as an arrogant, mercurial man, in whom self-aggrandizing feelings of his own genius combined with an intellectual insecurity typical of the autodidact’s relationship to the academic profession and tradition. In a letter to August Bebel from 1875, Most stated that intensive study of scientific materialism was one of his chief occupations in prison: “One has to read so terribly much today, if one doesn’t want to count as an idiot.”120 Materialism offered some epistemological certainty and redeemed his lack of neo-humanist education. In his articles and public speeches, Most described natural scientific knowledge as an 116

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Heinrich Peus (1862–1937), eldest son of a downwardly mobile Catholic master carpenter, worked eight-hour days as a paper bag gluer at the age of eleven, but managed to complete Gymnasium and attend university; converted to Protestantism; studied at the University of Berlin; around 1890 he began to give talks in the FRC and Social Democratic workers’ associations, soon thereafter abandoning his studies; moved to Dessau in 1891, where he edited the Social Democratic Volksblatt für Anhalt and became the leading Social Democrat in the region; Reichstag deputy 1896–1898, 1900–1907, 1912–1918, and 1928–1930. Member of the parlament for Anhalt from 1902 to 1908 and 1918 to 1933, from 1918 to 1928 president of the Diet of Anhalt; nearly permanent member of the city council of Dessau; active in Ido (ReformEsperanto), Freethought, Monism, and worker’s temperance. Monistisches Jahrhundert, April 12, 1913; Torsten Kupfer, Der Weg zum Bündnis: Entschieden Liberale und Sozialdemokraten in Dessau und Anhalt im Kaiserreich (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), passim. Bruno Borchardt (1859–1939), Jewish, writer; joined Freethought Assocation Lessing as a student in 1882; joined the SPD and was elected to city council for Charlottenburg in 1920. Bruno Borchart, “Sozialdemokratie und Genossenschaft,” Genossenschafts-Pionier, vol. 7, no. 11 (July 13, 1903): 87–89. Eduard Bernstein, “Der Ursprung der Ideen von Schulze-Delitzsch,” Genossenschafts-Pionier, vols. 23 and 26 (1902 and 1906); Paul Göhre, ed., Konsumgenossenschaftsbewegung der deutschen Arbeiterklasse (Dresden: Kaden, 1913), 7, 55. Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 218. Bernstein, Lehrjahre, 53, 82–84; Bebel, Leben, vol. 2, 281.

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overwhelming power that was being hidden from the people by priests and liberal scholars. “If the natural sciences are to decisively break the spell of ignorance, in which the great majority of humanity is still locked,” he wrote in 1876, “then they must be preached, as it were, in every street.”121 He understood himself to be the chosen champion of revolutionary knowledge for the educationally dispossessed. For their part, educated liberals did not cease to remind Most of his false pretensions to educated status. When Most gave seven lectures in Berlin in 1877 on “The Social Movements and Caesarism in Ancient Rome,” the great ancient historian and leading Progressive Party politician, Theodor Mommsen, appeared to dispute his claims. A journalist of the genteel Berliner Tageblatt assumed familiarity with this event, when he reported on the rumor that Most would flee to America rather than appear at the Plötzensee prison on December 10, 1878, to begin a two-month sentence for blasphemy: Malicious tongues claim that Mr. Most will soon leave for Philadelphia, where based on his dissertation “On the Gracchi” he will receive his doctor . . . philadelphia. Hopefully he will find there his Mommsen, whom he can topple from the lectern with his pioneering studies in the field of Roman history.122

The satire in this quote revolves around the imperfect mimicry by the “halfeducated” demagogue, who sullies what he secretly idolizes. In Most’s case this connundrum can be given a psychological reading. His iconoclasm, rude anticlericalism, and scientific radicalism were expressions of a love/hate relationship with the circle of the learned, which appears quite literally as a reaction to the lost patrimony in his biography. Anti-authoritarianism is another side of Most’s character that can be linked to secularism and anticlericalism. He embodied the type of rough-hewn, fearless revolutionary who advocated freedom without compromise.123 This made him a highly effective charismatic speaker during the mid-1870s, but proved a liability to the party under threat after 1878. When he fled to London in late 1878 to avoid jail sentences for blasphemy and other political crimes, he founded a newspaper named appropriately enough Freiheit (Freedom). His criticism there of the accommodationist course of party leadership in the early phase of the Socialist Laws increased his estrangement from the party. When he was purged from the SPD at the Weidner Conference in 1880, he characterized his exclusion as an authoritarian auto-da-fé: “He blasphemed God; he is guilty; the heretic will be burnt!”124 121

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Johann Most, “Der Mensch,” Die neue Welt. Illustriertes Unterhaltungsblatt für das arbeitende Volk, vol. 1 (1876), 40–42, 42. Berliner Tageblatt, November 24, 1878. Upon being released from jail in June 1876, Most greeted thousands of well wishers and promised to fight for absolute freedom. Neuer Social-Demokrat, no. 70, June 21, 1876. Police excerpt from Freiheit, London, May 29, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 11725, p. 22.

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Most continued to manifest secularist affinities in exile. He found initial support in the central London branch of the freethinking National Secular Society, where he held “popular-scientific Sunday lectures” in 1879. Anticlericalism was a staple of Freiheit, as noted by Prussian police monitors.125 After having moved to New York, where he became a leading voice in American anarchism, Most penned an anticlerical best seller, Die Gottespest (The God Pestilence), in which he declared “war on the black mob, merciless war to the end!”126 The biographies of Most and Bernstein reveal traces of the secularist political imaginary in anarchism and revisionism. These included a pacifist international humanism that negated class struggle, a hypostasizing of freedom and antiauthoritarianism, a political interest in religion expressed as anticlericalism and/ or advocacy of ethical Bildung, and an emphasis on the liberatory power of natural scientific education. Nearly all of the persons mentioned in this section were accused at some point of such “democratic” deviations with different outcomes. Only Metzner and Bernstein appear to have ended their lives as active and accepted members of the German SPD. Höchberg, Schramm, Most, Fritzsche, Vahlteich, and Dammer did not.127

Conclusion In 1874, Johann Jacoby declined the Reichstag seat he had won for the Social Democrats, withdrew from active political life, and returned to his philosophical investigations. Articles from the last years of his life do not reveal a man concerned with political philosophy narrowly understood. Particularly his lengthy piece “On the Kulturkampf,” published in 1876 in Guido Weiss’s new journal Die Wage (The Scales), shows that Jacoby was still trying to reconcile scientific materialism with idealistic philosophy in a biologically grounded monistic worldview.128 Upon his death the following year, four of Jacoby’s one-time followers in Berlin supported a petition to the city council for a public memorial service in the City Hall. Once united in the Democratic movement, these men were now divided into the three rival parties of the Berlin left. Morten Levy and Guido Weiss were Democrats and Paul Singer was now a leading Social Democrat. Their parties had no seats in the city council, and thus it fell to the 125

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The Prussian police kept a list of crimes committed by Freiheit under Most’s editorship between 1882 and 1884: treason – every issue, lèse majesté – thirty-three issues; insulting the Crown Prince – eleven issues; blasphemy – nine issues. Report of August 2, 1884, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 11726, p. 247; on Most’s connection to the London Secular Society, see the London agent’s report of January 3, 1879. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 11724, p. 98. Johann Most, Die Gottespest, 12th ed. (New York: J. Mueller, 1887), 6. On Fritzsche’s “democratic, philistine” position in American exile, Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1967), vol. 36, 86; Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 158–159. See his “Materialismus und Idealismus” and “Zum Culturkampf” in Die Wage: Wochenblatt für Politik und Literatur, Berlin, vol. 4 (1876): 508ff and 710–749.

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fourth former Democrat, now a Progressive, Paul Langerhans, to speak on behalf of the petition. He asked his fellow councilors to differentiate between the Jacoby who had recently turned to Social Democracy and the hero of 1848: “I believe there is no one among us at this moment who shares Jacoby’s political orientation, such as he documented at the end, and yet I do believe there are many among you, who would like to pay tribute to this great citizen after his death.”129 Liberals felt that Jacoby had fallen out of step with history. Historians have largely concurred with this view and offered Jacoby as a chief example of what happened to those Democrats of 1848 who did not embrace “realism” and compromise in a pragmatic fashion with the power of the monarchic state. By failing to accept political compromise, radical Democrats became victims of their own idealism, lost electoral support, and maneuvered themselves into political insignificance. Gustav Mayer, one of the first historians to study German Democracy, concluded that, although he personally admired men such as Weiss and Jacoby, [t]hey were too old or narrow, too full of character or obduracy to reorient their political ideal, inspired by the pre-revolutionary desire for freedom, to the comprehensive needs of a changed time. And sworn to the teaching of natural law, as formed by the Democratic tradition, they saw in the sudden enthusiasm for “Realpolitik” of many of their former comrades a despicable capitulation to a contemporary idol.130

Mayer’s portrait of Jacoby as “an old testament prophet” wailing in the Reichstag was echoed by historian Leonard Krieger, who found that Jacoby’s “ideal of undifferentiated democracy [. . .] had few takers in the Germany of the 1860s.”131 In harsher terms, Heinrich August Winkler condemned the “static doctrinaire stance” of the “Progressive-Democrats,” who lacked a “sense of reality and will to power.” “Loyalty to pure democratic principles meant more to the Left than their realization in the realm of the attainable. This renunciation was,” Winkler concluded, “in the end nothing other than the expression of a deeply unpolitical mindset.”132 Dieter Fricke, an East German historian, found in Jacoby’s belated and incomplete commitment to Social Democracy a similar failure to come to grips with political realities.133 Common to all of these analyses is the conviction that Democrats were punished by history for their unwillingness to read the signs of the times. Borrowing from the anticlerical 129

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The council passed the measure without further discussion. Stenographische Berichte über die öffentlichen Sitzungen der Stadtverordneten-Versammlung der Haupt- und Residenzstadt Berlin, vol. 4 (1877), 157. Mayer, “Die Trennung der proletarischen von der bürgerlichen Demokratie,” 136. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom, 393. Heinrich August Winkler, Preussischer Liberalismus und deutscher Nationalstaat: Studien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Fortschrittspartei 1861–1866 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Seibeck], 1964), 119, 118. Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 70.

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rhetorical arsenal of the Democrats’ liberal opponents, historians have uniformly applied the terms “doctrinaire” and “dogmatic” to characterize the quasi-religious attitude of Democrats and contrast it to the supposed secularization of German politics going on about them. This chapter has verified that there was something religious and hence “unpolitical” about the Democrats. Those leaders most accused by historians of doctrinaire idealism, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and Johann Jacoby, were leading theoretical lights in Berlin’s left-liberal and Democratic scene. Secularist religious dissent, particularly in the Vormärz, had played a role in their political biographies. The leaders of Berlin’s FRC were largely identical with the local leadership of the Democratic movement and, as long as they operated under the umbrella of the Progressive Party, these Democrats were able to take leadership positions in the network of semipolitical civic associations. This associational network expressed the ideal shared by many Democrats and left-liberals of a selfcultivating civil society. This ideal was informed by and in turn sustained the secularist political imaginary. We can agree with historians, such as Mayer, Krieger, and Winkler, that radical Democracy was cut adrift by the differentiation going on within the German left. The futility of the Democratic position in the German political landscape was repeatedly demonstrated by the failure of efforts to resurrect Democratic parties in 1870, 1879, 1886, 1908, and 1924. These efforts had significant secularist input.134 Thus one must ask whether Democracy, the secularist political imaginary, and organized secularism were as insignificant for the political life of the unified German state of the Kaiserreich and beyond as the above-mentioned historians have indicated? Our answer must be a qualified “no,” based on two considerations. First, the splitting of the left led not to an elimination of organized secularism from politics, but to its dispersal to the right and left. This becomes more apparent if one looks beyond Berlin and examines the political affiliations of Germany’s Free Religious preachers in the 1860s or 1870s. The party favored most by the founding generation of Free Religious preachers was the Progressive Party, for which Eduard Baltzer, Julius Rupp, Heinrich Sachse, and Andreas Reichenbach held elected office and in which Theodor Hofferichter and Leberecht Uhlich were important local leaders. Prominent members of the different Democratic People’s Parties outside of Berlin included Emil Rossmässler and the future Freethinker Ludwig Büchner. The most important secularist leaders outside Berlin to join the SPD in its early years were the Free Religionists Ludwig Würkert and August Heine and the leaders of the Stuttgart Freethought Congregation Albert Dulk and Jakob Stern. Second, we must challenge the generational explanation offered by other historians for Democracy’s supposed “untimeliness” in the 1860s and 1870s. Democrats, so the argument goes, remained trapped in the generational 134

Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 98–101, 137–144, 260.

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experience of 1848 and were unable to adjust to new political realities. Certainly, for the generation of Schulze-Delitzsch and Jacoby, Feuerbachian humanism and the Vormärz movements of religious dissent remained alive in their later thought. However, the democratic-secularist mode of politics pioneered by these men was sustained, and it was modernized in the associational network of adult education societies, dissenting congregations, and popular science venues that flourished throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. This mode of politics was also sustained by the confessional structures that politicized religious identity and continually reinvigorated the utopia of a spiritual unity beyond confession. Figures such as Max Hirsch, Theodor Metzner, and G. S. Schaefer may appear epigonal when compared to Schulze-Delitzsch and Jacoby. Nonetheless, they represented a new generation of politically engaged secularists. They would be followed by another generation of secularist leaders that came to the fore in the 1890s and yet another in the 1920s. Some of these men and women played significant roles in communal and national politics. Across these generations, there were recurring patterns of intellectualism, antiauthoritarianism, and a spiritual approach to politics. Did the decline of Democracy represent a secularization of German politics? Yes, in that politicians such as Jacoby and Schulze-Delitzsch failed, in part, because of their secularist disposition, which resisted the separation of spiritual and political aims. No, in that new representatives of this disposition emerged and assumed important roles in German politics after the first generation had walked from the stage in the 1870s. The secularist political imaginary appeared again and again throughout the next half-century as an undercurrent with heretical potential within the liberal and socialist inheritors of the Progressive Party.

5 Secularism in the Berlin Kulturkampf, 1869–1880

If the thesis that secularism contributed substantially to the politics of confession in nineteenth-century Germany is to have any analytical validity, then it must reveal something new about the period following the national unification of 1870–1871, when the state and its allies waged a bitter struggle against Catholicism. For it was this Kulturkampf or “culture war,” as it soon came to be called, that above all else led to the lasting confessionalization of German politics. Over the next forty years, the majority of German Catholics would vote for a confessional party, the Center Party. The chief aim of this party, which often used a fortress as its electoral emblem, was to build a strong wall around the community of Catholic believers and defend their institutions from attacks from the new state and from those parties of a predominantly Protestant Germany that branded political Catholics “enemies of the Reich.” The great attention now paid to the role of confession and religion in German history is to no small degree a product of historical studies of the Kulturkampf. Taken as a whole, these studies have lodged two critiques of the interpretations favored by the German social-historical school that rose to dominance in the 1970s. First, they have challenged the portrayal of the Kulturkampf as a necessary defensive response of the modern state against the encroachments of “backward-looking” and “authoritarian” Catholicism that felt contempt for the “deeply held Protestant principle of toleration” (Hans-Ulrich Wehler).1 Instead historians now give greater credence to the religious and confessional dimensions of this conflict. Whereas historians such as David Blackbourn and Thomas Nipperdey explained the ferocity of anticatholicism out of liberal elevation of science to a secular worldview, Helmut Walser Smith drew attention to the role of longseated confessional 1

Wehler, The German Empire, 116–117. Anticatholic bias is also found in the treatment of the Kulturkampf by DDR historian Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck: Das Reich in der Mitte Europas (Berlin: Siedler, 1990), 104–125.

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hostilities in the struggle to make united Germany, like Prussia, a Protestant country.2 For many German Bildungsbürger, modernity and Protestantism were understood to be two sides of the same coin. The other area of revision, and one that brings the study of the Kulturkampf to the center of the “Sonderweg debate,” is its relationship to liberalism. Historians of German Catholicism, biographers of Bismarck, and social historians have described Catholics as the first victims of Bismarck’s strategy of “negative integration,” whereby national unity was achieved through a policy of division and exclusion that prevented the formation of a stable parliamentary majority that could threaten monarchical rule. Accordingly, the “great turn” of 1878–1879 was but a substitution of enemies, with socialists (and later Jews) replacing Catholics as the enemies of the Reich.3 The failure of liberals to establish their relative political dominance over workers, Catholics, and the state at this time was a key piece of evidence brought by social historians to argue that Imperial Germany was characterized by an incomplete or failed democratization. Against this Sonderweg thesis, revisionist historians contended that liberals and the bourgeoisie were much stronger than their political history suggests. Their realm of power, it was claimed, was civil society and the public sphere. Because theirs was a cultural rather than a political hegemony, historians began to take the “culture” of the Kulturkampf quite seriously.4 The operative thesis of the most recent writings on the Kulturkampf is that on both the discursive and political levels, the conflict was driven by liberal Protestants striving for “cultural hegemony.” Influenced by postcolonial and gender theory, historians have described how Catholicism served as a foil against which Kulturprotestanten (and liberal Jews) could define themselves. Anticatholicism, like racism or sexism, served to ground the identity of liberal European males and justified their domination. Catholicism was “the other of modernity.”5 2

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David Blackbourn, “Catholics, the Centre Party and Anti-Semitism,” in Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London, 1987), 168–187; idem, Marpingen; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1, 366; Smith, German Nationalism; idem, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 234. Historians who take a Bismarck-centered approach to the Kulturkampf include Winfried Becker, “Der Kulturkampf als europäisches und deutsches Phänomen,” Historisches Jahrbuch 101 (1981): 422–446, 423; Rudolf Morsey, “Der Kulturkampf – Bismarcks Präventivkrieg gegen das Zentrum und die katholische Kirche,” in Das Staat-Kirche-Verhältnis in Deutschland an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert, Rudolf Morsey ed. (Münster: Aschendorffsche Buchhandlung, 2001), 5–27; Wehler, The German Empire, 91. Dieter Langewiesche argued that the political weakness of liberals stood in inverse relation to their cultural influence. Their identification with the nation, their openness, and their integration in the “dominant culture” made liberals “politically vulnerable.” Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 164. Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur. Herzog, Intimacy; Manuel Borutta, “Das Andere der Moderne. Geschlecht, Sexualität und Krankheit in antikatholischen Diskursen Deutschlands und Italiens (1850–1900),” in Kollektive

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As laid out in the introductory chapter, the problem with the theory of cultural hegemony is that it really only allows for a binary organization of factors. This is useful for the analysis of political discourse, which is often organized around friend–foe differences. However, when binary categories are imposed on complex historical events, such as the course of the Kulturkampf, this can lead to a flattening of important distinctions.6 Organized secularism poses a challenge to the model of liberal hegemony, because, despite speaking within the liberal idiom, one of its defining sociological characteristics was a latent (and sometimes manifest) opposition to liberal hegemony. Free Religion had taken the religious criticism of liberal Protestantism, radicalized its message, and given it a social form that ultimately caused a rupture between the congregations and the urban elites. Likewise, in the field of popular science, secularists balanced a reliance on the authority of academic science with the conviction that they had privileged access to scientific truth by virtue of their political and religious autonomy. If secularism organized itself both within and against liberalism, the question to be posed in this chapter is whether secularism was significant enough to disrupt the course, and thus also today’s reigning interpretation of a much larger event, namely the German Kulturkampf. The chapter opens with an examination of the desecration of a newly erected Catholic facility on the outskirts of Berlin in August 1869. The event, which became known as the “Moabit Klostersturm” (Storming of the Monastery), sent ripples through the political landscape, such that one Prussian parliamentarian referred to it as the “egg, from which the whole Kulturkampf later developed.”7 The actions of local Democrats, Socialists, and Free Religionists in this event demonstrate that in this opening battle of the Prussian Kulturkampf, liberals had no monopoly over the terms of religious struggle. The second section shows how secularists responded to the state-backed Kulturkampf of the 1870s by radicalizing their anticlericalism. As this anticlericalism became increasingly identified with socialism, tensions mounted within the anticatholic alliance, thereby contributing to the political crisis that led

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Identitäten und kulturelle Innovationen. Historische, soziologische und ethnologische Studien, W. Rammert, ed. (Leipzig, 2001), 59–75; idem, Antikatholizismus; Michael Andermatt, “Konfessionalität, Identität, Differenz: Zum historischen Erzählen von Conrad Ferdinand Meyer und Gottfried Keller,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vol. 27, no. 1 (2002): 32–53; Roisin Healy, “Anti-Jesuitism in Imperial Germany: The Jesuit as Androgyne,” in Smith, Protestants, Catholics and Jews, 153–181. On Jewish anticatholicism, see Alexander Joskowicz, “Liberal Judaism and Confessional Politics of Difference in the German Kulturkampf,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook vol. 50 (2005): 177–198. On the homogenizing effects of universal concepts in postcolonial studies, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). The quotation is from a statement made in the Prussian Diet in 1880 by the Protestant and antisemitic deutschkonservativ deputy Karl Strosser, as quoted in Manuel Borutta, “Enemies at the Gate – The Moabit Klostersturm and the Kulturkampf: Germany,” in Clark and Kaiser, Culture Wars, 227–254, 247.

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Bismarck to break with liberalism and halt the secularizing advance of his Minister of Education, Adalbert Falk. The connection between secularism and the “great turn” of 1878–1879 is revealed in the third section, which investigates the application of the draconian “Socialist Laws” to the Free Religious Congregation. State interventions in the form of police observation, repression, and threat of closure intensified the ongoing conflict among left-liberals, Democrats, and Social Democrats within the congregation, which ultimately ended in the permanent division of the secularist camp.

the “moabit klostersturm” of 1869 The violent events of Moabit were part of a wave of anticatholicism that swept Europe in the late 1860s. Liberals and democrats were flush with confidence that they were on the threshold of routing the alliance of monarchy and Catholicism. Following Austria’s military defeat at Königgratz to Protestant Prussia in 1866 and the establishment of the dual monarchy in 1867, Austrian liberals pushed to deconfessionalize the Catholic Habsburg state. Louis Bonaparte withdrew his protection over the Papal States in 1867, opening the way for Rome’s fall and the completion of Italian unity. Responding to these setbacks, in June 1868 the pope convoked the first Vatican Council for 300 years to open in December 1869. Church leaders were expected to approve the declaration of papal infallibility, the latest measure to assert papal control over church institutions and to stiffen Catholic opposition to liberalism around the globe. In Germany, national unity lay in the air. A Reichstag had already been created for the North German Union, and the exclusion of Austria guaranteed that the future “small German” Reich would be dominated by Prussia and its Protestant majority. Bismarck could rely on support from National Liberals and Free Conservatives, who found ideological common ground in anti-ultramontanism. The world historical struggle with Catholicism was thus already on the minds of Berliners, when, in late July 1869, the city’s Progressive and National Liberal papers gave extensive coverage to the scandalous discovery of a “naked, barbarised, half-insane female” who had been found “buried alive” in a Cracow nunnery.8 In the liberal and Protestant imagination, the monastic orders were the territorial agents of Roman spiritual colonization and epitomized the depth of Catholic cultural and moral depravity. With the telling title, “Self-Help of the Spirit,” an article in the Volkszeitung on July 30, 1869, rallied readers to spiritual self-defense and celebrated the agitation in Spain and Austria against concordats with Rome as “a powerful witness to the beginning dominion of the spirit over superstition.” 8

Michael Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Borutta, “Klostersturm,” 235. See also the more descriptive account in Kurt Wernicke, “Der ‘Moabiter Klostersturm,’” Berlinische Monatshefte vol. 3, no. 8 (1994): 6–14.

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fig. 5: “The later the day, the more beautiful the guests.” An anti-Catholic satire of monks fleeing Austria for Berlin Moabit. “Monks can cook coffee here” reads the sign. Müller was the Catholic vicar who inaugurated the new chapel in August 1869. (Courtesy: Univeristy of Heidelberg, Kladderadatsch, 1869, Nr. 37/38, p. 149).

On St. Dominic’s Day, August 4, 1869, the Berlin Missionsvikar Eduard Müller (1818–1895) consecrated a new chapel and Dominican refugium that had been added to an existing Franciscan orphanage in the working-class district of Moabit, which lay just outside the city walls. Although this residence for a few monks was a small affair, the press elevated it to a “monastery,” and satirical cartoons transferred the Cracow scenarios to Moabit (Fig. 5). For Free Religious preacher A. T. Wislicenus, as for many Berliners, this monastery built “in the capital of Protestantism” appeared as “a ghost in the light of day.”9 On the Sunday following the consecration, a group of hecklers left the Moabit Bierquellen and went to “greet” the Dominican monks. They began a charivari (Katzenmusik) and threw rocks at the monastery’s windows and street dung at the brethren. The police intervened and prevented any further damage that evening or the following evening, when again a crowd gathered.10

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A. T. Wislicenus, Zur Kirchen- und Klosterfrage. Verständlich für Jedermann (Berlin: Rubenow, 1870), 26. Volkszeitung, no. 184, August 10, 1869; Vossische Zeitung, August 11, 1869.

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A week later, on Monday, August 16, 1869, a crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 persons descended on the monastery armed with “cudgels, poles and other equipment.”11 After the nine police guards withdrew under a hail of stones, the crowds laid waste to the building, destroying windows and doors. Order was finally restored at two in the morning after police reinforcements had arrived.12 According to the report in the city council’s Yearbook, “[u]nfortunately, a not insignificant number of people allowed themselves to be led to excesses and physical attacks, and one can assert with some probability that without the intervention of the police the monastery with all of its inhabitants would have been destroyed.”13 Historians Michael Gross and Manuel Borutta have investigated the Moabit Klostersturm at some length, not merely because the event contributed to the decision of Catholic leaders to refound the Center Party in December 1870.14 The Klostersturm presented a rich case study for examining how a specifically liberal “anticatholic imagination” informed both politics and popular confessional conflict. For Gross and Borutta, the Klostersturm was paradigmatic of the Kulturkampf as a cultural-moral clash between liberalism and its Catholic other. Although both historians identify liberals as the key political agents of the violence in Moabit, they do not give credence to the accounts of Protestant conservative and Catholic papers of the time, which held that the riot was orchestrated by “grey bearded gentlemen” who arrived in coaches on the afternoon of August 16, 1869, and made the rounds in pubs gathering supporters with false rumors of free beer and an outdoor tight-rope act with a “velocipaedist.”15 In Borutta’s account, these supposed string pullers served as a projection screen for Catholic conspiracy theories, which described them varyingly as Jews, masons, or liberals. Although police noted the presence of a few “finely dressed” men in the crowd, the seventeen “ring leaders” arrested by the police consisted of metal workers, factory boys, and shoemaker apprentices. The only potentially bourgeois person arrested was a high school student [Gymnasiast], who was not tried.16 Nonetheless, Borutta concludes that although the rioters were plebian, 11 12

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Recollections of a police commissioner from 1877; quoted in Borutta, “Klostersturm,” 240. Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, no. 191, August 18, 1869; Vossische Zeitung, August 19, 1869, Volkszeitung, no. 192, August 19, 1969; Wernicke, “Klostersturm.” “Das Kloster in Moabit,” in: Städtisches Jahrbuch (1870), 272–274, quotation 272. Gross, The War against Catholicism; Borutta, Antikatholizismus. Earlier studies that connected the Klostersturm to the formation of the Center Party: Heinrich Brück, Die Culturkampfbewegung in Deutschland (seit 1871), vol. 1 (Münster: Aschendorffsche Buchhandlung, 1901), 16; C. Möckeberg, Das Ende des Kulturkampfes (Hamburg: Gustav Eduard Nolte, 1880), 117–118. Catholic Märkisches Kirchenblatt, quoted in Borutta, Antikatholizismus, 254. On the “SeilVelocidpaedist,” see Wernicke, “Klostersturm,” 8. On arrests: Vossische Zeitung, August 18, 1869, first supplement; Wernicke, “Klostersturm,” 10. Catholic lay brethren told police lieutenant von Radonitz on the day of the attack about the “finely dressed gentlemen” who directed the crowds from their coach, which led von Radonitz to conclude that these must have been representatives of “Demokratie.” Two schoolteachers who lived near the monastery confirmed the presence of “fine people” who led the action in Moabit,

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the “impulse for the attack” came “from the midst of society (from the liberals).” Borutta, Gross, and other historians point to the press as the key channel through which liberals instigated the Klostersturm.17 This top-down explanatory model of liberal domination of the plebian mob via the press fits an understanding of the Kulturkampf as an outgrowth of liberal “cultural imperialism” “that would end with the lasting subordination of Catholicism to the liberalProtestant hegemonial culture of the German Empire.”18 By bringing our knowledge of Berlin secularism to bear on the available evidence, another reading opens of the Moabit Klostersturm. The press carried reports of meetings held before, on the day of, and after the Klostersturm that contributed significantly to the political framing of the event and gave it traction in the unfolding of the Berlin Kulturkampf. Most of the organizers and several of the men who spoke at these meetings represented the Free Religious Congregation and the Arbeiterverein, two key organizations in the radical wing of the associational network of the Progressive Party, which was being hotly contested at the time by Berlin’s Democratic and the socialist movements. In other words, there were intermediary forces at work in the events surrounding the Klostersturm, who cannot be viewed simply as the agents of liberal elites. Just prior to the Klostersturm, Berlin papers carried reports of a large public meeting in Vienna on the “Monastery question.” An audience of some 5,000 listened first to a young lawyer, Dr. Edmund Lewinger,19 who enumerated how the three oaths of the monks to poverty, to chastity, and to obedience to Rome contradicted the health of the state, which was based on work, the family, and national and personal autonomy. He demanded that “[t]he people must act politically, otherwise they will become a victim of those who should represent them [vertreten] but in reality often trample on them [zertreten]. I call upon you to declare with me: down with the monasteries!” The crowd readily complied. The next speaker was one of the best-known radical Democrats in Germany, Ludwig Eckardt, the founder of the anti-Prussian Democratic People’s Party. Like Lewinger, Eckart turned his criticism of the monastery to an attack on the state and a demand for deconfessionalization: “[t]hose who say, religious freedom requires that the monasteries be allowed should first give us religious

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but subsequent police investigation was not able to identify anyone. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 9548, pp. 18–21. Borutta, “Klostersturm,” 243; Sperber, Popular Catholicism, 186–187. A brief interpretation more in keeping with that presented in this chapter is found in Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 2, 368. Borutta, “Klostersturm,” 230–231. Dr. Edmund Lewinger (1838–1869) was a Jewish lawyer from Vienna, whose calls for the removal of the monasteries caused some controversy in the Jewish community, where some worried – quite correctly considering the antisemitic interpretation of the Märkisches Kirchenblatt – that it would only incite further Catholic anti-Judaism. See discussion in Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, feuilleton supplement to no. 47 (November 23, 1869): 956–957.

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freedom. In a state where Jew and Christian cannot stand together before the marriage altar there is no religious freedom.”20 On the evening of the actual “storming” of the monastery on August 16, 1869, a large crowd gathered at the Berlin Arbeiterverein and listened to Free Religious preacher G. S. Schaefer’s one-and-a-half-hour–long speech on “the confessionless school and the monastery in Moabit.” According to the Vossische Zeitung, he declared to the assembled audience: One should not underestimate the foundation of the monastery as occurs in some circles; he [Schaefer] pointed to the efforts of precisely these orders to get control of children’s education into their hands. Furthermore, it is known that they seek to influence emotions, especially in the hearts of women, and that these efforts are not always without success.21

Schaefer attempted to direct anticatholicism to his own secularist project, and demanded that in order to “take up the proffered fight in the field of the spirit” the audience should sign his new petition for the creation of confessionless schools. Later reports connected the violence in Moabit to this meeting. The Catholic Märkisches Kirchenblatt claimed that an “excursion of the Free Religious” that afternoon deliberately took crowds by the “monastery.”22 Three days after the Klostersturm, the Police President noted in his report to Interior Minister Count zu Eulenburg that although police action had ended the physical threat, he expected the agitation against the monastery to move to public meetings and Bezirksvereine, where the people “usually air their grievances through protests, resolutions and petitions.”23 Indeed, ten days later between 1,400 and 3,000 persons gathered in the Berlin Concert Hall (Tonhalle) to discuss the “monastery question.”24 Again, the associational network of the FRC and the radical democratic wing of the Progressive party was the organizing force. The city councillor, Ludwig May, had called the meeting, and he and two other FRC members, Paul Langerhans and the head of Arbeiterverein Robert Krebs, were elected to chair it. As Schaefer had done two weeks earlier, the men sought to turn the anticatholic animus generated by the monastery against the Prussian state and the Protestant Church. After Krebs opened the meeting, another member of the Arbeiterverein, Waldow, pointed out the injustice involved in the state allowing Catholics to build a monastery while refusing dissidents permission for a confessionless primary school. Given that the 1810 order dissolving monasteries in Prussia was still

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Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, no. 186, August 12, 1869. Vossische Zeitung, August 18, 1869, first supplement. “Der Geist des Klosterstürmens,” Märkisches Kirchenblatt, no. 36, September 4, 1869; Städtisches Jahrbuch (1870), 272–274. Police President to Interior Minister zu Eulenburg, August 19, 1869, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 9548, p. 30. The police lieutentant present at the meeting gave the lower figure of 1,400. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 9548, p. 60ff.

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valid, Waldow submitted a resolution calling for the Prussian Landtag to carry out the “elimination of monasteries, expulsion of the Jesuits and above all the nullification of the concordat signed with Rome in 1821.”25 Supporting this petition, Krebs asked the audience: “Are we in Spain, France or Austria? No, we are in the constitutional monarchy Prussia [. . .] According to the constitution, the dissidents must have the same rights.” Members of the audience shouted in agreement, to which Krebs responded, “You say ‘that’s right!’, yes, but the government has authorized certain people, who practice indolence and beggary, to teach your children. Do you know where that leads? To the whip and holy inquisition! Thus we must form a decisive front against this tendency, against the rulers of this system that costs Prussia 100 million, which you pay. Thus out with the whole pack!”26 The third speaker was Ludwig May, who asked his audience to think with him beyond the reports in the press. Although in general agreement with Waldow, May found Waldow’s resolution too negative. Because petitions to the state have little value, May recommended instead a more fundamental, positive act. Many of those present remained affiliated with the Protestant church and showed up at marriages, baptisms, and burials even though they had broken with the faith and no longer attended church services on Sunday. This “hypocrisy,” May concluded, was “the greatest crime.” Thus May proposed to add to Waldow’s resolution a passage calling for anyone who found the orthodox church out of date to officially exit the state church and seek “true happiness with his fellow men through ethical action [. . .] in this life, not in a dreamt-up Beyond [Jenseits].”27 Widening the struggle to include Protestantism was rejected by the following speaker, the bookseller Grothe, who declared himself to be a member of the “half ostracized party of the socialists.” He warned the assembly “not to head too far out to sea, where so many crags lurk.” Instead they should “steer directly toward the target,” that is, those Dominicans and Jesuits who have turned “[t]he religion of love into the religion of hate.”28 Following the great merriment produced by the recitation of an anti-Jesuit poem, a “beardless” member of the Catholic journeymen’s association sought to defend the monks, who had “done nothing evil.” The crowd did not want to hear this and forced the speaker from the stage and, according to the Volkszeitung, with “gentle pressure drove him from the hall.” The final speaker, Aron, tabled a third resolution that would solve the monastery problem through “the separation of church and state and of school and church,” which included 25

26

27 28

Waldow was likely identical with the board member of the FRC in 1860 of that name. “Zur Besprechung der Klosterfrage,” Volkszeitung, no. 202, August 31, 1869. To this last comment, a police official noted: “that can only mean the ministers,” but Goltz noted in another marginal note that “a legal prosecution does not appear opportune.” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 9548, p. 60ff. “Zur Besprechung der Klosterfrage,” Volkszeitung, no. 202, August 31, 1869. “Zur Besprechung der Klosterfrage.”

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the elimination of obligatory religious instruction. This was to be achieved through “purely political agitation,” whereby the assembled agreed to only elect men who would stand up to the “ruling system” and refuse budget requests until these demands were met.29 In the end, the audience rejected May’s proposal, which would have opened up a front against Protestantism, as well as that of Aron, which entailed secularization and religious tolerance without anticlericalism. They approved Waldow’s specifically anti-ultramontane resolution with the addendum that they were not agitating against “any religion, but only against institutions of stupifaction [Verdummungs-Anstalten) and dens of vice!”30 The Arbeiterverein called a meeting two weeks later to pursue further steps to be taken on the “Klosterfrage,” but members of the Catholic associations showed up en masse and managed to usurp control and pass their own resolutions. On October 3, Krebs convened another meeting with an even larger turnout. Among the 3,000 in attendance, supporters of the Arbeiterverein were in the majority and managed to elect Krebs to chair the meeting, but the supporters of the Catholic associations were so loud that after three quarters of an hour of banging, shouting, and shoving, the meeting had to be dissolved by the police and the printed petition could not be voted upon.31 These obstructions were celebrated as the beginning of an effective Catholic political defense that would culminate in the foundation of the Center Party the following year. An ironic commentary by the editor of the Catholic newspaper Germania in 1871 indicates the important role played by the Free Religious leaders in this development: “We are still very grateful to Messrs. Schaefer and Mai (sic), because if it were not for Old-Moabit in 1869, we would have no Catholic faction; the Catholics would certainly still be slumbering; but instead they were awoken, and, thank God, by the time of Reichstag elections they were fully conscious of what was going on.”32 This statement is revealing, because it shows that Catholic leaders were aware of the specific interests of Berlin’s most important Free Religious leaders, yet understood their actions within the context of widespread anticatholic sentiment. This corresponds to two revisions that might be made of the reigning interpretations of the Klostersturm. First, the model of medial hegemony, whereby the “liberal” papers gave the anticatholic hysteria sweeping Europe in 1869 a local point of expression, is incomplete. It leaves out the crucial intermediary role played by clearly identifiable and well-organized urban 29 30

31

32

Police noted that the speaker was a Jew. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 9548, p. 60ff. Volkszeitung, August 31, 1869, no. 202. A briefer, contrary account of the final resolution was given in Die Post, no. 444 (morning edition), August 31, 1869. However, the Volkszeitung account is corroborated by the petition actually received by the Landtag. The Arbeiterverein was never able to convene a public meeting on the “monastery question” although Dr. Langerhans did hold a lecture on the topic in the Arbeiterverein in December. Police reports on meetings of September 12 and October 3, 1869, convened by May and Krebs. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, No. 9548, pp. 82, 101; Berliner Börsen-Courier, no. 489, December. 20, 1869. Germania, February 28, 1871.

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radicals from the Free Religious Congregation, the Progressive workers’ associations, and the Democratic movement. Their actions are less crucial in explaining the violence itself than its political framing. Without the resolutions and petitions formulated by the organizers and passed by the attendees of these meetings, this particular act of violence would have remained merely a mob action. Instead the petitions led to a parliamentary inquest and a report penned largely by National Liberal jurist Rudolf Gneist, which advocated restricting the foundation of monasteries in Prussia. When the report was discussed in Prussian Diet in February 1870, it provoked an outcry from Catholic deputies, who declared it to be a gauntlet thrown at the feet of all Catholics.33 The second revision pertains to the relationship between secularism and anticatholicism in this opening phase of the Kulturkampf. The speeches given by Berlin secularists during the meetings of the Klostersturm show that they accessed the same gendered tropes and binary categories of the “anticatholic imagination” that had characterized German liberalism since its inception. However, neither on the intellectual nor on the political level did Catholicism appear as the secularists’ chief target. Rather, they sought to channel the wave of anticatholic hysteria that swept Germany and indeed Europe in 1869 toward their own existing secularist agenda in Berlin, which was focused on the Protestant church hierarchy and the Prussian Christian State. Secularism in the Berlin Left in 1869 Already the resolutions tabled at the meeting in the Concert Hall on August 29, 1869, indicate that there were several secularist positions among the organizers. In order to open up the secularist politics of the Berlin left on the eve of German unification, it will be useful to analyze the statements and actions taken at the time by the two preachers of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation. In his 1870 pamphlet On the Church and Monastery Question, the congregation’s elder preacher A. T. Wislicenus welcomed recent criticism of the monasteries. This criticism was needed “to cast light into darkness and bring those who work therein before the judgment seat of free humanity.” But to truly understand the monastery, he continued, one must “inquire after the womb that carried the world-despising life, yes, from which it is eternally born anew, and that is the church.” According to Wislicenus, the church still bore the mark of the two developments that had crippled the original Christian spirit: the “oriental” influence of monasticism and the “Constantinian shift,” which had turned Christianity into a state religion. The Protestant Church had not freed itself from these deformations. “The two armies into which the world is divided today are no longer the Catholic and Protestant

33

Möckeberg, Ende des Kulturkampfes, 117–118. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Preußischen Hauses der Abgeordneten, (Berlin), 10. Legist. Period 1869– 1870, Anlagen, vol. 78, no. 2: 990–1007. See also Gross, War against Catholicism, 182–184.

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Churches,” he concluded, but rather “independently thinking humanity” and the religious orthodoxy backed by “imperious princes.”34 Wislicenus’s criticism was historical. He identified clericalism within the Protestant Church with the incomplete separation of Protestantism from Catholicism. This viewpoint was compatible with that of many Progressive leaders, such as Rudolf Virchow, who made a similar argument during the parliamentary speech of January 17, 1873, in which he introduced the term “Kulturkampf.” Whereas the church had begun as the “true bearer of the entirety of human development” it had fallen into dogmatism once this role had passed to “the scientific laity.” Virchow cast from himself accusations that he was a “materialist” bent on imposing his creed on the public. His goals were merely “freedom of individual religious conscience” and “the emancipation of the state.”35 It will be recalled from Chapter 2 that at precisely this time Wislicenus was defending the “Protestant principle of freedom” against the attempts by his younger colleague, G. S. Schaefer, to make naturalistic monism the binding confession of the Free Religious. In a corresponding fashion, whereas Wislicenus and Virchow directed anticatholicism toward a critique of the Protestant orthodoxy and confessional state, Schaefer folded his agitation against Catholicism in the summer of 1869 into an attack on Christianity as a whole. The Berlin police had opened up an observation file on Schaefer in 1868 upon receiving a complaint from the Director of the Royal Orphanage and Seminary about blasphemous statements made at a public meeting chaired by Volkszeitung owner Franz Duncker to remove “the ruinous influence of the church on the school.”36 Schaefer received a court conviction and three-month jail sentence for “denial of a personal God, personal immortality and the effect of the sacraments.” During appeal hearings the following year, a police officer quoted Schaefer as having said, “the Free Congregations eat a beefsteak for communion,” and “[n]o one would be so dumb as to believe that God sits in heaven and ‘spins the earth with his finger.’” Schaefer rejected this account, but stated that he did not expect mercy from the court: “he knew that every advance initially demands a certain martyrdom from individuals and he is happily prepared to bear the consequences of his actions.” Despite his willingness to accept punishment, and despite the expressed wish of the Minister of the Interior that he should endure it, the court overturned Schaefer’s conviction.37 34 35

36

37

Wislicenus, Klosterfrage, 26, 45. Quoted in Georg Franz, Kulturkampf: Staat und katholische Kirche in Mitteleuropa von der Säkularisation bis zum Abschluss des preussischen Kulturkampfes (München: D. W. Callwey, 1954), 9–10. Letter of November 11, 1868, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 12978, p. 1; excerpt from Kreuzzeitung, November 11, 1868, 3. Vossische Zeitung, no. 261, November 7, 1869. In a letter to the Minster of Culture of March 17, 1870, the Minister of the Interior blamed the failure of the case against Schaefer on lack of evidence and suggested improvements in gathering evidence. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 12978, 48.

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The chief issue vexing moderate and radical secularists alike was confessionally organized primary education. Tensions flared up in 1868 when the Protestant consistory nixed plans to reorganize clerical oversight of public education in favor of school boards comprised largely of elected lay officials. The recent synodal censure of a liberal Protestant minister for his public advocacy of natural science heightened local left-wing anger at the “perilousness of the orthodoxy.”38 As in the anticatholic agitation against the monastery, the left acted in a diverse fashion. The Protestantenverein, which represented liberal elites, submitted a series of protest declarations against the church authorities.39 Progressives called a public meeting in July 1868 demanding the “liberation of the school from clerical oversight.” In November 1868, the Association for School Freedom was founded under the chairmanship of Franz Duncker with the active participation of G. S. Schaefer and Karl van den Leeden.40 Here were gathered Jewish, Protestant, and Free Religious advocates of confessionless schools, who held their meetings in the Progressive Bezirksvereine and workers’ associations. It was in the interest of this organization that Schaefer agitated against the Moabit “monastery” in August and would continue to agitate in early 1870.41 A connection was made repeatedly in the Klostersturm meetings between the state’s supposed granting of permission for the Catholic orphanage in Moabit and the denial of permission for a confessionless school. Left-wing journalists blamed the Catholic Church for blocking the establishment of a confessionless school in Breslau, which was backed by a similar coalition of Jews and dissidents.42 The Märkisches Kirchenblatt was not entirely off the mark when it chalked up the anti-monastery petitions to Krebs’ Arbeiterverein and “Christian and Jewish reform congregations.”43 Although some of the activists may have been motivated by specific confessional interests, the secularism and anticlericalism evidenced at the antimonastery meetings was widespread in Berlin in 1869. Protestant conservative papers interpreted the events in Moabit as proof of the anti-Christian attitude of the city’s Progressives. According to the Evangelische Kirchenchronik, 38

39

40

41

42

43

John Frederick Smith, “Schleiermacher and the German Church a Century after his Birth,” vol. 6, no. 26, Theological Review (July 1869): 290–292; Städtisches Jahrbuch (1868), 348–349. Smith, “Schleiermacher.” The Oberkirchenrat refused to allow the Protestantenverein the use of church buildings for its October 1869 meeting; Möckeberg, Ende des Kulturkampfes, 107. On the Protesanten Verein, see Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus. On the Schuldeputation’s rejection of the application for a private confessionless school planned, among others, by members of the Free Religious Congregation and the Jewish Reform Congregation, see Städtisches Jahrbuch (1870), 269–272. Die Zukunft, vol. 4, no. 2 (January 4, 1870). In early 1870, Schaefer spoke in the Bezirksverein of the 85th district against the “21 Papal bans” of the Vatican Council. Die Zukunft, vol. 4, no. 50 (March 1, 1870). “Ultramontanismus und Protestantismus in Norddeutschland,” Wiener Neue Freie Presse, August 24, 1869; “Das Kloster in Berlin,” Städtisches Jahrbuch (1870), 272–273. Märkisches Kirchenblatt, no. 1, January 1, 1870.

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Progressive papers of the capital had had the “honor of setting the mob against the Dominicans” in Moabit, and had now “let the mask drop enough to reveal their actual intention to the light of day. They are not after the Catholics, but after believing Christians as a whole. When the sweet mob does not know where it can next employ the power of its fists for the good of humanity, it will be pointed clearly to the Protestant mission house and the believing pastor.”44 The coverage in the liberal papers points to widespread agreement between many liberals and the more radical activists on the significance of the Moabit monastery. First, they gave it an antigovernment barb. The Volkszeitung, Kladderadatsch, the Vossische Zeitung, the Montags-Zeitung, and Die Zukunft portrayed the Prussian state and its Minister of Culture Heinrich von Mühler as key defenders of the Catholic monastery. Mühler’s deputy, Adalbert Kraetzig, who as head of the Catholic Department oversaw the state’s management of Catholic Church affairs, was reportedly present at the opening ceremony of the chapel in Moabit in early August, when the Mission Vicar Eduard Müller gave a vitriolic antimodernist speech. This led the Montags-Zeitung to quip that “from Mühler to Müller is just a step.”45 Suspicion of government collusion was deepened by press reports that, on the night following the Klostersturm, gendarmes charged the gathered crowd without warning and wounded many with sabers. A Berlin correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse wrote that although the Catholics were to blame for disrupting the confessional peace of Berlin, the real culprit was the Prussian government, which had secretly aided the construction in Moabit and “sought with the help of the Jesuits to suppress German freedom for ever.”46 Second, the city’s Progressive papers did not offer Protestantism as the positive antithesis to reviled Catholicism, but rather natural science, humanism, Bildung, and reason. Events prompted by the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt in 1869 indicate the integrative function played by natural scientific Weltanschauung across the liberal–democratic spectrum in Berlin. The city government announced that it would contribute 10,000 marks to a park to be called the “Humboldt-Hain,” which is now in the Wedding district. This was also the point at which Rudolf Virchow spearheaded the founding of a popular scientific Humboldt-Museum, as a safeguard of “modern civilization against those opponents whose only strength is the ignorance and opacity of the masses.”47 The museum’s declaration “To the German People” offered Humboldt as a figure of national unity, a “German scholar” in whose “spirit the world is reflected without the constraints or stains of national prejudice.” Humboldt’s great deed was the fusion of the humanism and classicism of his 44 45

46

47

Evangelische Kirchenchronik, vol. 2, no. 3 (1869): 129. Die Wahrheit, humoristic supplement to the Berliner Montags-Zeitung, vol. 9, no. 32 (August 9, 1869). Mühler denied that any member of his ministry had been involved in the consecration, Borutta, “Klostersturm,” 233. Staatsbürgerzeitung, August 19, 1869, Wiener Neue Freie Presse, August 24, 1869. Police later successfully charged the liberal papers with libel, but lost the case on appeal in 1870. “Das Humboldt-Museum,” Volkszeitung, no. 156, July 8, 1869.

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early education with natural science, so that “no German can deny that he owes to [Humboldt] a part of his education [Bildung], his particular worldview.” The list of dignitaries supporting the museum contains many of the city’s most influential Progressive party leaders and scientific elites, as well as familiar figures of the Free Religious Congregation.48 A final piece of evidence that illustrates the prevalence of naturalistic worldview and secularism in Berlin at the outset of the Kulturkampf is of anecdotal nature. The first act of anticlerical violence in August 1869 did not transpire in Moabit, but in the center of the city, during services in the Protestant Berlin Cathedral. As the minister spoke the liturgical phrase “I believe in God, the Father,” a young man rushed up to the altar, shouted “you’re lying!,” and fired a bullet. The shot missed the minister. Police investigation revealed the assailant to be an eighteen-year-old Gymnasiast distraught over the decision taken by his father, a master blacksmith from Lanke near Berlin, to make of him a Protestant clergyman. He told his interrogators that he intended to “kill the first minister he met in the church” because he was “a materialist and as such an enemy of all preachers [Pfaffen], with whom one finds only hypocrisy, lies and deception.”49 Although tied to the desperate act of a distraught teenager, this justification nevertheless attests to the presence of radical secularist currents in the city at the time. Catholicism may have provided the chief foil against which liberal and radical anticlericalism was articulated, but in Berlin the first shot was fired in a Protestant Church.

secularism and kulturkampf, 1871–1878 On February 2, 1870, Bismarck spoke out against the government intervention in Catholic affairs called for in Rudolf Gneist’s report on monasteries in Prussia.50 Yet the following year he began a series of conflicts with the Catholic Church that would identify him more than any other actor with the Kulturkampf. Many factors have been cited for Bismarck’s decision to take up the challenge posed by the Vatican Council and designate ultramontane Catholicism the chief enemy of the new Reich. There was a concern with the loyalty of the Catholic ethnic minorities who lived in peripheral regions of the Reich, such as Posen and the annexed areas of Alsace Lorraine. Constitutional demands raised by the Vatican Council were a direct challenge to the modern state. Finally, the Kulturkampf gave expression to Bismarck’s own deeply felt hostility to Catholicism.51 48 49 50 51

Volkszeitung, no. 153, July 4, 1869. Volkszeitung, no. 184, August 10, 1869. Quoted in Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, November 3, 1888. Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, “Protestantische Geisteskultur und Konfessionalismus im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Probleme des Konfessionalismus in Deutschland seit 1800, Anton Rauscher ed. (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1984), 9–28, 22–23. On the constitutional challenge posed by the Vatican decrees, see Engelberg, Bismarck, 114–115.

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Bismarck’s quick strides from war to unification to Kulturkampf shook up assumptions on the Left. Opposition to war and annexation had pushed disgruntled radicals, such as Johann Jacoby and G. S. Schaefer, to finally abandon the Progressive fold and launch an autonomous party. At an election meeting of their new Democratic Volkspartei in February 1871, Schaefer criticized the “Progressive Party and the Liberals” for not having taken up the struggle for freedom and against the Catholic party. Yet, if the report in Germania is accurate, he struck surprisingly conciliatory tones when he spoke of the “connection and agreement” he felt with Bismarck and his Minister of Education Heinrich von Mühler, who Schaefer believed had been hindered in establishing nondenominational schools not by his own beliefs, but by the “system.”52 Although certainly wrong about Mühler, Schaefer was not entirely wrong about Bismarck’s intentions at this time. One of the key sites of conflict brewing with the Catholic Church was over clerical oversight of schools, which Bismarck sought to overcome by selective application of the deconfessionalization measures proposed by liberal lawmakers. His conservative and pious Minister of Education opposed this move. Unable to act through Mühler, Bismarck used his direct authority over the newly acquired territory of Alsace-Lorraine to introduce confessionless schools there in the autumn of 1871. “It is the clear intention of Prince Bismarck to drive religious instruction from both the higher and lower schools,” complained Mühler in a letter to the kaiser. “Because he cannot achieve this aim directly, he has chosen indirect paths.”53 This conflict led to Mühler’s demission in January 1872 and his replacement with the liberal jurist Adalbert Falk. Unlike his predecessor, who was only willing to counter ultramontane challenges through administrative means, Falk tied anticatholicism to a systematic effort to separate church and state through sweeping reforms that shook the constitutional pillars of the confessional system. Schaefer was not the only former enemy of Bismarck, who believed that he had undergone a conversion from “Saul to Paul.”54 The volte-face in religious policy gave Bismarck’s government wide support among urban liberals and democrats, well beyond his actual parliamentary base of support in the Free Conservative and National Liberal parties. So great was the essential consensus around the perceived aims of the Kulturkampf that when some liberals opposed specific pieces of anticatholic legislation, they often experienced this decision as a moral quandary. National Liberal Karl Biedermann initially opposed the 1872 legislation banning the Jesuit order from Germany, but confided to Eduard

52 53

54

Germania, February 28, 1871. Quoted in Günther Wolf, “Rudolf Kögels Kirchenpolitik und sein Einfluß auf den Kulturkampf” (PhD Diss., Bonn, Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät, 1968), 103; see also Borutta, Antikatholizismus, 318. Lothar Gall, Bismarck: Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1980), 469.

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Lasker, “it is difficult to fall into conflict [with the party majority] over a matter about which one is naturally au fonds in total agreement, because of the means and ways [of achieving it.]”55 The Progressive deputy Hermann SchulzeDelitzsch similarly rejected the draft bill in the name of his party because it left too much discretion to the government and could in the future be used to “enter a pact with the Jesuits.” Privately, however, he argued for the “ruthless struggle against ultramontanism.”56

Free Religion during the Kulturkampf Falk’s laws gave religious dissidents new rights. One of the “May Laws” of 1873 enabled Prussian citizens to leave the state churches more easily, and in 1874 civil marriage was introduced, which placed dissidents on legal par with members of the state churches.57 The state-sponsored Kulturkampf created an unprecedented atmosphere of freedom for the Free Religious Congregation in Berlin. The regular police observation reports, which today provide the chief window into the life of the congregation from 1845 to the 1890s, largely ceased between 1871 and 1877. Those few documents held in police files from those years, primarily printed pamphlets and correspondence with the state, reveal a new self-confidence. When the congregation printed a list of all its members in February 1872, it included instructions on how to leave the church and noted the remarkably high portion of new members in the previous year who had already done so (110 of 137). In October, the Association for School Freedom, now firmly tied to the Free Religious and Democratic milieu through the chairmanship of Karl van den Leeden, issued a new program. Whereas the previous one of 1869 had called for a secularization of primary schools and the foundation of a comparative approach to the instruction of ethics and religion, this new program called for “general cultural history and moral instruction founded on the laws of human nature.” Corresponding to this replacement of a pluralistic approach to religious education with a monist worldview, the new program was also anticlerical and atheistic. It lambasted the confessional schools for inculcating obedience to authority, blind faith, and religious prejudice. The program called for confessionless schools with a curriculum rooted in the study of natural science that

55

56

57

Karl Biedermann (1815–1901) was a professor, historian, journalist, member of the Saxon Parliament until 1876, Reichstag 1871–1873, and leader of the Saxon National Liberals. Letter from Karl Biedermann to Eduard Lasker, June 12, 1872, reprinted in Wentzcke, Politische Briefe, 53. Despite such statements, Schulze-Delitzsch, like Biedermann, voted to pass the “Jesuit Law” in the end. For a discussion, see Gross, War against Catholicism, 266–271. Schulze-Delitzsch quotations: Brück, Die Culturkampfbewegung in Deutschland, 88; and Aldenhoff, Schulze-Delitzsch, 233. Morsey, “Bismarcks Präventivkrieg,” 10–13.

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would raise children to embrace personal autonomy and world improvement as the logical consequence of the realization that there is no afterlife.58 Further evidence that the supportive environment of the Kulturkampf encouraged the radicalization of Berlin Free Religion is offered by the congregation’s decision of 1873 to adorn the gate of its cemetery with an aphoristic statement of belief. Schaefer initially proposed the wording “Neither fear nor hope for the Beyond [Jenseits] do we require, The improvement of this world [Diesseits] is our desire,” but this was rejected, because “if one no longer hopes for a Beyond, it does not mean that belief in the Beyond has been eliminated.” Two other slogans were also rejected before the congregation finally passed the commission’s suggestion, which was the only one to explicitly deny the possibility of a transcendent sphere: “Make life here good and beautiful, / There is no Beyond, no resurrection.” (Schafft hier das Leben gut und schön, / Kein Jenseits ist, kein Auferstehen.)59 Although the sign was not directly visible from the street, this semipublic demonstration of atheist dominion over the cemetery and its dead was a calculated and permanent affront to a public order still widely understood to be Christian. Emboldened perhaps by Falk’s legislative initiatives, the FRC petitioned the Ministry of Culture in June 1874 to receive the status of a legal entity, which would have ended its precarious position as an unregistered association. The police evaluation of this request contains the mildest portrayal of the congregation that would flow from a lieutenant’s pen in the entire nineteenth century. “The congregation itself has never demonstrated, and probably never had a political character,” it began. The occasional “excess” had been the exception, and thanks to the congregation’s “sensible comportment, no obstacles to its development have been erected by the government.” Yet, despite this whitewashing of the history of a deeply conflicted relationship, the report went on to recommend against the provision of additional rights because of the danger that Free Religion posed to public piety. The FRC lured Berliners into formally leaving the churches, but because the new law did not require them to convert to Free Religion, the FRC just served as a transit station on a path out of religion altogether. “That the lower classes of the population will thereby be demoralized,” it concluded, “is beyond doubt.”60 The author of the police report was observing an unexpected consequence of the Church Leaving Law of 1873. Most of those who left the church were not Catholic but Protestant, and most were from the plebian classes that the state believed required the moral guidance of a paternalistic church. Thus, by 1874,

58

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“Freiheit und Confessionslosigkeit der Schule,” Städtisches Jahrbuch (1870), 269–72. “Programm des Vereins für Freiheit der Schule,” October 25, 1872. The two other slogans were “Versöhne die Lebenden, / Die Toten sind tot; / Träume kein Auferstehen” and “Was wir an Liebe uns erwerben,/ Das dauert fort, wenn wir auch sterben.” Quotations in Harndt, Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde, 35–36. Report of September 30, 1874, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag.

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some Prussian officials were becoming aware that the Kulturkampf legislation, rather than tempering religious passions, was destabilizing the religious system. On February 16, 1875, Minister Falk turned down the FRC request.61 Secularism and Liberal Protestantism at the Height of the Kulturkampf In 1874, there was still widespread confidence across the liberal spectrum that the Kulturkampf was advancing their aims all along the front. Bold secularist statements were made, for example, in the New Year’s editorial of the National Liberals’ most influential paper, the Berlin Nationalzeitung. “What we have hoped for for so long, the year 1874 will realize,” it predicted. “We will be able to live and die as citizens outside the shadows of the church.”62 A month later, Rudolf Virchow declared in the Prussian Landtag that just “as Luther saw in the church the actual Antichrist, so it is our view that we recognize the actual Antichrist in that which is called church, at least in great segments thereof.”63 Many on the left were cheered by the decisive victories won by church liberals over their orthodox opponents in the parish elections of the Protestant Church in Berlin in May 1874. At the same time, however, prominent voices began to target liberal Protestantism itself. In 1873, David Friedrich Strauss had declared that the position represented by the Protestantenverein, half within Christianity and half within modernity, had become untenable. The following year, Eduard von Hartmann, the “philosopher of the unconscious,” celebrated the Kulturkampf as the last phase in the “self destruction of Christianity.” He urged liberal Protestants to accept that they had parted ways with Christianity and open the path for the “religion of the future.”64 The Democratic journalist Franz Mehring concluded in January 1875 that the “‘Kulturkampf’ has had one benefit, namely it has led church reformers ad absurdum, [. . .] and shown the fact that for honest people there are no intermediary positions between Pio Nono and David Strauss.”65 Conservative observers also noted the centrifugal forces pulling at liberal Protestantism. In 1874, a writer for the Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland prophesied quite accurately that when the recently beaten Protestant orthodoxy reorganized and launched a counteroffensive in parish elections, the liberals would have increasing difficulty mobilizing support. He believed that the new church-leaving law, which had removed some of the hindrances contained in the 1847 “Dissidents’ Law,” would lead to a massive 61

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Letter from Minister of Culture Falk to FRC, February 16, 1875, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag. Quoted in anon., Adolf Stöcker und die Angriffe seiner Gegner im Lichte der Wahrheit. Von einem Nichtpolitiker (Berlin: Martin Warneck, 1901), 14. Quoted in Rudolf Lill, ed., Der Kulturkampf (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), 164. Eduard von Hartmann, Die Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums und die Religion der Zukunft (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1874). Möckeberg, Ende des Kulturkampfes, 106. Quoted in Höhle, Franz Mehring, 62.

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exodus of disaffected Protestants and that Berlin would “very soon have several hundred thousand confessionless.” This prediction proved false. However, the anonymous author was correct in understanding that the new law placed a weapon in the hands of the socialists who would “simultaneously attack capital and property as well as the state churches, which until this day and despite their own inner fragility have remained an important lever and support of the social and governmental order.” With more than a hint of Schadenfreude, the author described the coming dilemma of the liberals, when the Kulturkampf would bite itself in the tail: The National Liberal bourgeoisie, which by means of the new church-political legislation has sought to rule within and to subjugate the churches, just as it has done with the state, must come under tremendous pressure. Without overestimating their mental capacities, it may still be expected that very soon many [liberals] will come to the realization that their ecclesiastical, economic and political position can no longer be defended against the socialists. That moment will be decisive.66

Indeed, anticlericalism proved to be an excellent mode of propaganda for the rapidly expanding and – after the reconciliation of Lassalleans and Eisenachers in 1875 – now unified socialist movement. Social Democratic Secularism during the Kulturkampf Although German Social Democracy came into its own during the 1870s, the movement has remained largely absent in historical accounts of the Kulturkampf. Given the periodic tactical cooperation between the socialists and the Center Party, and given their statements belittling anticatholicism as a ruse to draw attention away from the more important “social question,” some historians have concluded that the socialists were a neutral party, or even sympathetic to the plight of the Catholics.67 In synthetic histories of the German Empire, Social Democracy generally appears at the end of accounts of the Kulturkampf, when conservative fears of the “red international” finally trumped fears of the “black international.”68 These accounts should be revisited, because, as a closer look at the period will show, Social Democracy did not grow up outside of the confessional struggles. Both socialists and their opponents in the 1870s understood the “red” threat within the framework of the struggle over religion and confession. When socialists opposed anticatholic legislation, they did so in the name of more radical steps toward cultural secularism and state secularization. In the Reichstag debate on the “Jesuit Laws” in 1872, August Bebel explained his 66

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Anon., “Die Kirchliche Berlin,” Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland vol. 47 (1874): 623–638, 704–711, 817–830, 830. Margaret L. Anderson, Windhorst: A Political Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 213–214. Wehler, The German Empire, 52; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 2, 383.

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party’s more fundamental criticism of religion as whole: “once heavenly authority is undermined then naturally earthly authority also soon ends and the consequence will be that in the political realm republicanism, in the economic realm socialism, and in the realm that we call the religious atheism will exercise its full effect.”69 Bebel’s commitment to secularism was substantial; he used a term in prison begun in summer 1872 to devote himself to the study of history and popular science, including works by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner, and the chemist Justus Liebig. One of Bebel’s first published works was a translation and gloss of Ives Guyot and Sigismond Lacroix’s critical text, Etudes sur les doctrines socials du christianisme. Given his prominent advocacy of scientific atheism and anticlericalism in the 1870s, historian Vernon Lidtke dubbed Bebel “the German workingman’s Voltaire.”70 Bebel was one of the first Social Democrats to take advantage of the new laws on leaving the churches (Saxony had passed one in 1870) and left the Protestant confession in the autumn of 1873.71 Confessionlessness had become theoretically possible in Prussia with the Dissidents’ Law of 1847; however, the Saxon law, which was followed by a similar Prussian law in May 1873, made formal church exit (Kirchenaustritt) less financially, bureaucratically, and socially onerous. As the writer for the Historisch-politische Blätter had recognized, one of the unintended consequences of the church-leaving laws was to give socialists a legal framework for public campaigns of anticlericalism. They also allowed “confessionlessness” to develop into the ideal public (non)confessional status for party members. Following the passage of the Saxon law, resolutions demanding church exit for all functionaries were tabled at the party congresses of SDAP in 1871, 1872, and 1874. Although such a measure was never passed, over the years most leading Social Democrats did become “dissidents.”72 With dissidence increasingly becoming the de facto confessional status not only of the Free Religious, but of socialists as well, expanding the size of the confessionless flock served both of their interests, and in 1874 they launched a joint campaign for church exit, which became known as the “Dissidents movement.” The Social Democrats Samuel Kokosky and Wilhelm Bracke founded a Dissidents Association (Dissidentenverein) in Braunschweig in 1874, and in 1876 the socialist Chemnitzer Freie Presse issued an “Appeal to all dissidents and Free Religious confreres [Gesinnungs-Genossen]” to attend the founding congress in Dresden of the Saxon League of Dissidents (Dissidentenbund).

69

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Volksstaat, no. 56, July 13, 1872. Bebel took this triad from an 1871 essay by the socialist and former Free Religious leader Carl Borrutau. Quoted in Prüfer, Sozialismus, 42. Vernon Lidtke, “August Bebel and German Social Democracy’s Relation to the Christian Churches,” Journal of the History of Ideas, no. 27 (1966): 245–64, 253. Bebel left the church with his wife on November 6, 1873. Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Arbeitsgericht Leipzig, no. 707. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 82.

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The initial cooperation between Progressive and Socialist Free Religionists broke down at the Dresden congress.73 The now-retired Berlin preacher Adolf Timotheus Wislicenus celebrated the Kulturkampf as an accomplishment of Free Religion but, according to the report in Johann Most’s Berliner Freie Presse, he insisted that unlike the socialists, his movement maintained a positive definition of religion.74 For his part, Julius Vahlteich declared that only socialists could be true dissidents: The socialists want to tear the veil off of the whole lie. From which social classes are the Deutschkatholiken and Free Religious drawn? Certainly primarily from the workers. The worker thinks more clearly and also has the bravery to give expression to his convictions. [. . .] Socialism is religionless, it is the school of religious free thought [Freisinnigkeit].75

In a meeting in December 1876, Oskar Klemich, a leading figure in Dresden’s secularist scene, accused “bourgeois” Free Religious leaders of acting like church liberals: “Only Social Democracy stands outside of today’s world order and it alone represents dissidence. [. . .] Any dissident who is hostile to Social Democracy or friendly only to the National Liberal or Progressive parties, is a traitor to the dissident cause.”76 Parallel conflicts emerged in Berlin. In February 1876, FRC speaker Schaefer exchanged sharp words with socialists present at a meeting in the Handwerkerverein that had been called to support a Brandenburg Gymnasium teacher fired for prefacing a court oath with a declaration of his disbelief in God.77 True to his Democratic position, however, Schaefer refused to burn bridges with Social Democracy, something that met with the displeasure of Berlin’s left-liberal Free Religious. In 1876, Heinrich Sachse, a Progressive politician who had assumed the helm of the large Magdeburg congregation following Leberecht Uhlich’s death in 1872, launched an Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life (Verein zur Pflege des freireligiösen Lebens) in Berlin. Sachse’s organization became a gathering place for members of the FRC who opposed Schaefer’s cooperation with socialists.78 Political differences 73

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Heiner Grote, Sozialdemokratie, 104–105. On the Dissidentbund, see Prüfer, Sozialismus, 240–243, 261–262, Vahlteich quotation, 241. Berliner Freie Presse, no. 178, August 2, 1876. Quoted in Prüfer, Sozialismus, 241. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 242 Grounds for Franz Rohleder’s 1875 dismissal were “unworthy behavior outside of service.” Volksstaat, no. 28, March 8, 1876. FRC figures who associated with the Verein were Hermann Jacobson, Adolph Abarbanell, and Georg Dumas. Johann Most’s socialist paper announced two lectures to be given by Heinrich Sachse, with the remark: “We include this announcement because we are happy to support antireligious efforts, however we would like to allow ourselves the following question for the honorable gentlemen: Have you split off from the Free Religious Congregation [. . .] merely because the majority of the congregation members are too radical, i.e. too consistent?” The lecture subjects were “Otto Ule as a true popular educator and friend of humanity” and “Is the central question of religion the choice between theism, pantheism or atheism?” Berliner Freie Presse, no. 251, October 26, 1876.

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coincided with philosophical–theological differences. A police officer observing a lecture by Sachse in 1879 remarked that whereas “the principle of the immortality of the soul is retained in the Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life,” it was “fully negated” in Schaefer’s lectures. Sachse supported “the pantheism of the philosophy of Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant against the materialism of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann” favored by Schaefer.79 This remark indicates that the secularist dynamics of the Kulturkampf had come home to roost. As materialism became increasingly identified with the social and political interests of the SPD, atheism and anticlericalism became key points of dispute within the Berlin Free Religious scene.

Anticlericalism and the Crisis of Liberalism Bismarck’s biographer Otto Pflanze wrote of the Kulturkampf that it appears as “a kaleidoscope, altering its shape with each angle of observation.”80 This is particularly true of the final years of the Kulturkampf, which coincided with the grand realignment of the German political system. Many factors led Bismarck to accept the resignation of Minister of Culture Falk in 1879 and seek accommodation with the Center Party. Hans Rosenberg argued that the economic pressures of the “Great Depression” that began with the stock crash of 1873 and deepened in 1878 forced new interest groups into the political arena, where they challenged the monopoly previously enjoyed by liberal notables. Margaret Anderson and David Blackbourn have shown that the Catholic lay and clerical leadership was particularly successful in seizing the tools offered by democratic suffrage and challenging and beating liberals in elections to make their party one of the strongest in the Reichstag and the Prussian Diet.81 When secularism is taken as the angle of observation for viewing the collapse of the Kulturkampf, the gaze drifts away from Catholic resistance, important as it was, and toward the breakdown of the coalition of Protestant conservatives and liberals that had entered the Kulturkampf in Bismarck’s corner. Here the earlier perturbations caused by radical secularism increasingly gave way to outright alarm. Deep cracks in liberal confidence become apparent in 1877. The year began with electoral successes for the recently united Socialist Worker’s Party (SAP 79

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According to the police, Sachse’s talk “on the natural and spiritually enlightened person” drew a crowd of 150 “persons from the educated classes, teachers, students, young merchants (mostly from the Waldeck-Verein); the socialists of the Free Religious Congregation stay far away.” Report of June 30, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 179. Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik im Mitteleuropa (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967); Anderson, “Kulturkampf,” 109; idem, Practicing Democracy; David Blackbourn, Volksfrömmigkeit und Fortschrittsglaube im Kulturkampf (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1988).

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later SDP) in the January Reichstag elections. The presence of Johann Most and three Free Religionists among the twelve socialist deputies indicates that socialist anticlericalism was attractive to many voters. In Berlin, two Free Religious socialists, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche and Wilhelm Hasenclever, managed to defeat their Progressive rivals in runoff elections.82 The sociologist Albert Schäffle (1831–1903) recalled that SPD victories in 1877 shocked the liberal middle classes, particularly in Berlin, who saw “the ‘red’ spook haunting [everywhere], down to the last pub.”83 In a parliamentary speech of April 18, 1877, August Bebel portrayed his party as the true embodiment of the modern secular age and attacked state support of Christianity because it excludes “millions of people, who now live in Germany and take an essential part in our cultural development,” namely the Jews and those like “myself and my party friends,” who “stand for a completely religionless, an atheistic-materialist perspective.”84 Such statements by ascendant Social Democracy hastened the retreat from secularism by leading Progressives. It was precisely at this juncture in 1877 that Virchow gave his famous speech urging liberals not to turn Darwinism into a worldview that could be hijacked by socialists. In that same year, Max Hirsch launched an “Antisocialist Congress.” The crisis of German secularism was also reflected in one of the key institutions of liberal sociability: freemasonry. Masonic lodges offered bourgeois men a semipublic venue for experimenting with religious, political, and social ideas. Johann Caspar Bluntschli, a Swiss-born legal scholar and leader of the German Protestantenverein, had argued in the 1850s that the task of freemasons was to “humanize” state and church.85 In the early 1870s, masons increasingly moved toward a superconfessional embrace of humanity, and many German lodges granted regular admission to non-converted Jews for the first time. In September 1877, a rift opened in international masonry when the largest French lodge, the Grande Orient, removed references to Judeo-Christian belief from its rites, replaced the Bible upon which the masons swore allegiance with an blank book, and ceased requiring obedience to the “great builder of all worlds,” who was identified with the transcendent God. This move led the English, Irish, American, and Scandinavian lodges to break off contact with the Grande Orient

82

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Ribbe, ed., Geschichte Berlins, 680. According to Heiner Grote, well-known Social Democratic Free Religionists of the day included Karl Demmler, Fritzsche, Hasenclever, Anton Memminger, and Vahlteich. Grote, Sozialdemokratie, 105. Although Hasenclever was buried in the Berlin FRC cemetery, I have not found concrete evidence of his membership in the FRC. Quoted in Dieter Groh, “Integration durch die Metropole? Berlin aus der Sicht der ‘Reichsfeinde’ im Kaiserreich,” in Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit: Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift Hans Mommsen, Christian Jansen, Lutz Niethammer, and Bernd Weisbrod, eds. (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), 119–132, 123. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 97. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Die Politik der Geselligkeit: Freimaurerlogen in der deutschen Bürgergesellschaft 1840–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 96.

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(ties with German lodges had already been severed on account of the FrancoPrussian war).86 After 1877 German masonry began to push back against secularism. In 1878, Bluntschli struck new tones, declaring God the guarantee of order, and defending him against too much humanization. Bluntschli called on masons to enter a two-front battle against pantheists, for whom “the moral world order loses its purchase and its authority,” and against theists, who “sacrifice their intellectual powers. [. . .] Raw socialism and black Jesuitism are just the outer flanks of each of these widespread imbalances and errors.”87 This was not a complete renunciation of his earlier secularizing theology, but Bluntschli’s faith in progress had been tempered. Lessliberal tendencies were rising within German masonry. Reversing the policies of the early 1870s, the chief German lodges began to exclude Jewish and dissident masons, who were forced to seek admittance to other fraternal societies, such as the Odd Fellows. Eventually, a Masonic opposition to the Prussian lodges formed in new independent lodges (Winkellogen). The monist lodge in Berlin “To the Rising Sun” had to be sponsored by the Grand Orient, because no German great lodge would affiliate with it.88 Anticlericalism and the Rise of “Positive” Protestantism Anticlericalism during the Kulturkampf also contributed to the emergence of new forms of Protestant political organization on the right. Falk’s laws permitting civil marriage, civil registries, and church-leaving rang alarm bells with Protestants committed to the Christian State.89 Furthermore, they identified Falk with a Kulturkampf within the Church itself. Conservatives bitterly recalled the rancorous 1874 church elections when “quite a pretty number of ministers revealed themselves to be rationalists and deists,” and “many liberal voters kept their hats on their heads [in church], held despicable speeches against the clerics [Pfaffen], and first appeared for the election after the religious service was over.”90 As in the Vormärz, the requirement of a positive identification with the truth of the Apostolic Creed was a major issue that divided liberals from “positive” conservatives. 86

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Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 14–24; Hoffmann, Freimaurerlogen, 306. Quoted in Hoffmann, Freimaurerlogen, 261. A. P. Eberhardt, Von den Winkellogen Deutschlands – Freimaurerlogen neueren Datums – im letzten Vierteljahrhundert (Leipzig: Bruno Zechel, 1914); Hans Detlef Mebes, “Die Loge “Zur Morgenröte”. Reform-Freimaurerei im Wilhelminischen Berlin,” Der Bär von Berlin. Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins vol. 48 (1999), 63–82. Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany 1871–1887 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 30–34. Quoted in Möckeberg, Ende des Kulturkampfes, 827; Walter Wendland, Siebenhundert Jahre Kirchengeschichte Berlins (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1930), 341.

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Plans tabled by Falk’s ministry to allow nonconfessional schools in Prussia brought the Protestant opposition into the open. In 1876, an Association for the Preservation of the Protestant Elementary Schools was formed in Düsseldorf, and in Berlin the Court Chaplains Rudolf Kögel and Adolf Stoecker formed the “Positive Union.” This well-connected pressure group became known as the “Court Chaplains’ Party.”91 Kögel used his court ties to turn the Kaiser against Falk in key appointments and quashed efforts by liberal Berlin clergy and laity to make the Apostolic Creed optional. Letters from Kögel to his court ally Field Marshall Edwin von Manteuffel and from Manteuffel to the king show how members of the Positive Union connected the liberal assault on the Apostolic Creed with Falk’s draft school bill and with the anticlerical campaign of socialist radicals such as Johann Most.92 In 1879, Kögel summed up the negative balance of the Kulturkampf: “Rome was the target” but “Wittenberg was hit.”93 Where the Positive Union sought to strengthen traditional ties between state and church, Court Chaplain Stoecker experimented with political populism as another means of combating anticlericalism. In January 1878, he launched the Christian Social movement, which combined the reform traditions of the evangelical Inner Mission with elements borrowed from his Social Democratic, Catholic, and social-liberal enemies. Stoecker was a pivotal figure in German history because he opened conservatism to the possibilities offered by democracy and antisemitism. He also inspired a generation of social reformers, such as Friedrich Naumann, whose National Social movement remained indebted to Stoecker’s Christian Social example.94 The degree to which the terms of the Kulturkampf in Berlin had slipped from liberal hands can be seen in the fact that the highpoint of secular–religious struggle in Berlin erupted in 1878 as a standoff between the conservative Christian populist Stoecker and the radical Social Democrat Johann Most. The two men first exchanged verbal blows on January 3, 1878, during a meeting at the Berlin Eiskeller called by Stoecker to launch his Christian Social Workers Party.95 In his speech, Stoecker acknowledged the validity of the economic demands of the Social Democrats, but attacked their embrace of 91

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Marjorie Lamberti concluded that Protestant opposition to this bill “contributed substantially to Falk’s political decline from 1876 until his resignation in July 1879.” Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 61. Wolf, “Kögels Kirchenpolitik,” 399, 394. Bernt Satlow, “Die Revolution von 1848. Die Kirche und die soziale Frage,” in Beiträge zur Berliner Kirchengeschichte, Günter Wirth ed. (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1987), 177–196, 190–191. Quoted in Ross, Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, 32. On Stoecker, see Dietrich von Oertzen, Adolf Stoecker: Lebensbild und Zeitgeschichte, vol. 1 (Berlin: Verlag der Vaterländischen Verlags- und Kunstanstalt, 1910) and Walter Frank, Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker und die christsoziale Bewegung (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1928). Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Sozialdemokratie und ‘praktische’ Religionskritik. Das Beispiel der Kirchenaustrittsbewegung 1878–1914,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte vol. XXII (1982): 263–298. See also Prüfer, Sozialismus, 262–273.

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internationalism, atheism, and anticlericalism. “I cannot believe,” he stated in a subsequent speech, “that our people wants, like a bad soldier, to roll up and break the standard under which it has fought its finest spiritual battles, in order to follow the red flag upon which the slogan stands: atheism and revolution.”96 The aim of his movement was to show workers that there were two socialisms on offer: “orthodox or atheistic, monarchic or radical. Whoever claims that a socialist must necessarily be a revolutionary or republican, materialist or atheist is arbitrarily combining socialism with other things.”97 This effort to disentangle socialism from republicanism and materialism prompted Most and a thousand supporters to appear at the Eiskeller to confront Stoecker. The socialists usurped the meeting and passed their own anticlerical resolutions. At a socialist meeting on January 22, 1878 in the Berlin Handwerkerverein, some 4,000 listeners came to hear Most’s disquisition on “the stance of the population of Berlin against the clerisy.” His speech peaked in a call on those present to strike a blow at the “demagogic efforts of the Pfaffen” by leaving the churches and thus starving them of church taxes. “Is it not outrageous,” Most asked, that “non-believers should contribute, so that the systems of religion that they laugh at can be sustained?” Weakening the “Pfaffen” weakens the state, and vice versa; the priests “stand and fall with the present society.” Printed applications for church exit were distributed at the meeting.98 When the Christian Socials called their own meeting in the Handwerkerverein on January 25, 1878, they were again outnumbered by socialists. Most showed manifest pleasure at the opportunity to make blasphemous and atheist jokes in Stoecker’s presence and concluded with the rhyme: “My motto is taken from Hutten, I want to rip off the hypocrites’ Kutten [cassocks]!” which was followed by “terrible noise, deafening applause and loud protest.” Even after the observing police officer demanded that the tumultuous meeting be disbanded, it took an hour for the hall to clear. While the Christian Socials signed up new members on the podium, the socialists collected church-leaving forms in an adjacent room.99 In the following weeks and months, Stoecker and Most continued their public war of insult and incrimination, generating an enormous amount of publicity in the process. This earned Stoecker a rebuke from his patron, Kögel, at the March meeting of the Evangelischer Verein (conservative counterpart to the Protestantenverein). Johann Most, meanwhile, had to face a series of criminal trials for blasphemy, lese majesty, and speaking at a disbanded meeting. He ultimately chose English exile over prison in December 1878.100 A police report 96

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Die Post, supplement to no. 4, January 5, 1878; “Rede des Hofpredigers Stöcker, gehalten am 1. 2.1878 in Handwerkerverein Berlin,” Flugblatt no. 4 des Central-Vereins für Social-Reform auf religiöser und constitutionell-monarchischer Grundlage, (1878), 7. Quoted in Oertzen, Stoecker, 135. Die Post, no. 23, January 24, 1878. Germania, no. 24. January 29, 1878; Die Post, no. 26, January 27, 1878. Court transcripts in: LAB A. Pr. Br. no. 11724, p. 81; and Vossische Zeitung, no. 302, January 24, 1878.

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from June 1878 found that the church-leaving movement had effectively ended and that of the 1,783 persons who had registered their church exit, only 873 had carried through and made the second appearance at the civil registry as required by the law on church-leaving.101 The public conflict between Stoecker and Most shows how the dynamic effects of anticlericalism ultimately strengthened two movements that agitated outside and against liberal hegemony. The Positive Union used Most’s agitation in its effort to turn the kaiser away from Falk and the Protestant liberals. Although Most won some admiration among nonsocialist Freethinkers, Franz Mehring was certainly correct in stressing the negative effect that Most’s radical socialist anticlericalism had on potential cooperation between left-liberals and Social Democrats: Even today I still consider those years before the enactment of the socialist laws to be the unhappiest episode in the history of German Social Democracy, because the agitation of Most and Hasselmann was as repugnant as possible, whereas I still believe today that at that time there had been a certain openness to social reforms in the middle classes, which admittedly was then stamped out by the interest politics and repression of Bismarck’s system.102

Like Mehring, other SPD leaders later depicted Most’s campaign as a deviation from socialist policy on religion. Historians have largely followed this interpretation.103 However, the fact that leading socialists, such as Eduard Bernstein and Wilhelm Liebknecht, left their confessions in early 1878 after Most began his agitation suggests that anticlericalism continued to receive tacit party support until the assassination attempts on the kaiser in May and June 1878.104 Bebel, who in April 1877 publicly linked atheism to socialism, first tried to distance his party from the “primitive” materialism of the church-leaving campaign in a speech of July 1878 aimed at preventing the passage of the “Socialist Laws.”105 It is thus questionable whether Most’s anticlerical agitation was really as marginal to the Social Democratic mainstream as was later remembered, once Most had been expelled from the party and could serve as a scapegoat for the party’s anticlerical sins during the Kulturkampf.

the “socialist laws” and free religion, 1878–1880 On May 11, 1878, and again three weeks later, shots were fired at Kaiser Wilhelm I as his carriage drove down Unter den Linden. For Prussian conservatives, the fact that the first would-be assassin, journeyman plumber Max 101 102 103 104

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LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15799, pp. 10, 13. From his 1891 Kapital und Presse. Quoted in Höhle, Franz Mehring, 275. Prüfer, Sozialismus; Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung.” Bernstein, Lehrjahre, 58. Liebknecht left the Protestant Church on April 6, 1878 with his children but not his wife, Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Amtsgericht Leipzig, no. 705. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 254, 271, 258, 256.

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Hödel, had recently been expelled from the Socialist Workers’ Party gave the attacks a clear political and religious meaning. Kögel sniped in a letter to Manteuffel that Falk was resisting the appointment of a court chaplain to the church’s highest governing body, but “he can stand his ground with a confessionless school [and] if need be with Most and Hödel.”106 On June 3, the day after the kaiser had been seriously wounded by a middle-class, educated man with no clear socialist ties, Manteuffel wrote to Wilhelm I: “Your Majesty has shed His blood for the confession [Bekenntniss] of our faith, and that brings you – for it is clearly written in the Holy Scripture – the crown above. [. . .] Your Majesty has now stood up for the Apostolic [Creed] and its preservation means the destruction of Social Democratism.”107 The changed atmosphere following these events helped tip the balance of power within the High Church Council, and by 1879 Kögel had successfully isolated Falk within this crucial body. According to Christopher Clark, Bismarck himself had become “unnerved by the anti-clerical and secularizing energies released by the Kulturkampf.”108 The assassination attempts provided an opportunity for their neutralization. Indeed, the draconian measures he proposed against Social Democracy had multiple targets. A humorous cartoon of the day depicted Bismarck as an archer aiming at a socialist painted on a paper target, behind which stand a group of liberals. The caption reads, “what if he overshoots the mark?” When the National Liberals, out of commitment to basic civil liberties, refused to pass the first draft of the “Socialist Laws,” Bismarck called a snap election. In the febrile political atmosphere of the summer of 1878, perceived softness toward the “fatherlandless” socialists led to the punishment of the liberal parties at the polls. The nowweakened National Liberal caucus helped pass the Socialist Laws in October, a concession that paved the way for the division of the party the following year, when Bismarck forced liberals to swallow the bitter pill of protectionist tariffs and toleration of the Center Party or face the onus of opposition. Many of those who had championed the secularizing legislation of Falk’s ministry, such as Eduard Lasker, seceded from the National Liberal Party and took the Kulturkampf into the political opposition.109 Yet, even this new liberal opposition was hamstrung by the Socialist Laws. Rather than generating solidarity for the proscribed party, police suppression deepened liberal antisocialism. The Socialist Laws had similarly divisive effects 106 107 108

109

Wolf, “Kögels Kirchenpolitik,” 399 Quoted in Wolf, “Kögels Kirchenpolitik,” 394. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 571. Heinrich August Winkler, “Ein Attentat als Alibi: Wie das Jahr 1878 zur historischen Zäsur wurde,” in idem, Auf ewig in Hitlers Schatten? Über die Deutschen und ihre Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), 33–42; idem, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus: Der deutsche Liberalismus in der Krise von 1878/79,” in idem, Liberalismus und Antiliberalismus: Studien zur politischen Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 232–245.

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in the secularist camp. This can be shown by a brief consideration of the controversies that erupted within the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in the years 1878 to 1880. As the previous chapter illustrated, the Congregation’s board of directors contained some of the city’s most prominent Democrats, whose dominance rested, in part, on their ability to mediate between the congregation’s left-liberal and growing socialist contingents. Police intervention into the congregation’s activities via the “Socialist Laws” made this mediation increasingly difficult. The primary form of police intervention was direct observation of the congregation, which began in June 1878 and escalated in April 1879, when police decided to send uniformed police officers to protocol every Sunday meeting. The justification for this observation was a hypothesis, namely that the Social Democrats had either secretly taken over or were trying to take over the FRC. This hypothesis was first aired in a police report of June 23, 1878, which cited interactions between the congregation and Johann Most’s circle over the prior six months, including the April burial in the Free Religious cemetery of the socialist agitator, August Heinsch. The mass turnout for Heinsch’s burial, at which Most and Fritzsche spoke, reportedly made it the largest political demonstration in the capital since the burial of the “March dead” in the revolution of 1848.110 However, the report’s claim that speaker Schaefer and his listeners were Social Democrats appears false.111 No prior police report had mentioned significant numbers of socialists in the FRC and, despite their repeated attempts at cooperation with socialists, Schaefer and May remained fixtures of the Democratic scene in Berlin. What had changed was police perception. Bismarck’s first draft of the “Socialist Laws” on May 20 had given police a normative interpretation of the first assassination attempt and set off a red scare. In the witch-hunt atmosphere of the summer of 1878, the minority of socialists within the congregation came to stand for the whole. Ultimately the reports were to serve as grounds for police intervention and legal action; hence even erroneous intelligence had an instrumental use. By misapprehending anticlericalism as inherently socialistic, Berlin police were able to restrict the congregation’s activities, thereby hindering liberals, too, from continuing to struggle against the Protestant Church.112 This practice was formalized by the placement of secularist titles onto the list of socialist books forbidden by decree in February 1879. A clandestine investigation of the congregation’s library in April 1879 discovered “socialist” works, even by Free Religious writers opposed to socialism such as August Specht and Eduard Baltzer, and justified the preparation of a police raid.113 Secularism was caught in a trap. 110

111 112 113

Welskopp, Sozialdemokratie, 380; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15052, p. 39; Rocker, Most, 50; Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 269; Bernstein, Lehrjahre, 62. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15052, p. 39. Police reports of February 18 and April 7, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Police reports of April 23 and 29, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag.

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The visit to the congregation by the Reichstag deputy Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche on April 20, 1879, strengthened the police hypothesis that the organization was being used for clandestine Social Democratic activity. Social Democrats turned out to greet Fritzsche in great numbers. They asked his opinion about the nihilists in Russia, where an attempt had been made to assassinate the czar a week earlier: would they spread to Germany and had they already sent emissaries? Fritzsche responded that the situation in Germany was very sad, but he did not think nihilism was inevitable. He “advised calm, praised the Free Religious Congregation and its aims and prompted his friends and supporters to join it.” Although the police took Fritzsche’s recommendation seriously and began to observe every meeting of the congregation henceforth, it is extremely unlikely that his party had a coordinated strategy to take over the FRC.114 Fritzsche and Metzner’s participation in Free Religion was not appreciated by many in the party’s central leadership, and Bebel, in particular, was known to oppose the Free Religious congregations.115 Nonetheless, the notables who led the congregation did have reason to be worried about the increasing Social Democratic presence in the congregation. The remarkable inroads the party had made into the Free Religious social milieu in the course of the 1870s meant that many of the congregation’s members were likely shifting allegiance to the SPD. Certainly, three important Berlin socialists, Ottilie Baader,116 Agnes Wabnitz,117 and Adolph Hoffmann,118 were recruited to the party in the mid-to-late 1870s by socialists in the congregation. Police harassment under the “Socialist Laws” only exacerbated this demographic shift, as it made the congregation an attractive replacement for now-banned socialist organizations, while the continual presence there of police officers demonstrated to “bourgeois” members that the congregation was tainted and led many of them to keep away to avoid guilt by association. There was a significant shift in membership away from merchant groups and toward artisans in the 1879 list of FRC members.119 The resumption of the harassment and surveillance techniques of the 1850s put the congregation on notice that it could be dissolved at any time. This led the 114 115 116

117

118

119

Police report of April 20, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag. Police report from July 9, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15052, p. 113. Ottilie Baader (1847–1925), worker, church exit and membership in FRC 1877, later socialist and women’s rights activist, sat on the board of directors of the Workers’ Education Association in 1891. Baader, Ein steiniger Weg: Lebenserinnerungen. (Stuttgart and Berlin: Dietz/ Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1921), 20–21. Agnes Wabnitz (1842–1894) seamstress, joined FRC in September 1879, studied at Humboldt Academy, and gave talks on popular scientific topics to workers’ associations in late 1880s. Committed suicide rather than begin a prison sentence for blasphemy. Adolph Hoffmann (1858 -1930), Protestant, church exit in 1886, trained as an engraver and gilder, became a journalist in 1890, bookdealer. Active in FRC Berlin since 1870s. Member of Reichstag 1893, 1904–1906, and 1920–24, Prussian Parliament from 1908 to 1918, Berlin city council 1900–1920, Co-Minister of Culture for USPD in 1918. NDB 9, 402–403. Krapp, Jugendweihen.

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FRC notables to take measures to curb socialist influence on their own. This preemptive obedience was both a pragmatic response to the very real police threat and an opportunity for liberal and democratic elites to suppress socialist rivals. Both motives were in play at a meeting of Berlin’s popular education and dissident religious organizations that had been convened by the Progressive Heinrich Sachse on May 31, 1879, to coordinate their response to the socialist threat. In attendance were the Democratic leaders of the FRC, May and Schaefer, and the Progressive directors of the Society for the Propagation of Popular Education – Franz Duncker, Justizrat Hermann Makower, and Julius Lippert.120 Sachse, who represented the Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life, argued that their joint effort to promote the “education and enlightenment of the people” was being undermined by the rise of the SPD in the Free Religious Congregation.121 His proposed solution was a united front against SPD activity in their organizations, which failed, police surmised, because Schaefer and Lippert continued to cooperate with socialists.122 Police threats also sowed seeds of dissent within the FRC, as documented by a row that erupted after the police ordered the congregation in October 1879 to remove the atheistic slogan emblazoned on its cemetery gate.123 At a business meeting of the congregation’s notables, Dr. Abarbanell stated, “Our dear old Dr. Jacobson and I have often declared ourselves to be decidedly against the sign and the words and the contents thereof. . . . The cemetery slogan is radical and I propose it be removed.” The shoemaker Theodor Metzner, who was one of Berlin’s leading Social Democrats, responded, “I am of the opinion that the sign must stay just as it now stands. [. . .] We want to confess our religious perspective to the whole world and persevere in martyrdom for our faith. Thus no modification, no removal.” Schaefer characteristically tried to mediate between the two positions, while May backed Metzner on this point. In the end, after more police pressure, the congregation decided not to remove the sign, but to place a wooden board over it in protest.124 120

121 122 123 124

Police reported that the writer Julius Lippert was a former school director from Bohemia who had begun to “flirt” with the Social Democrats after having been forced out of his position by “clerical agitators.” Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch was involved in a later meeting of this group. Reports of May 31 and June 1, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Police report of May 31, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Police reports of May 31, June 1, and June 21, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Police report of November 21, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. This incident led Wilhelm Hasenclever to publish a satirical poem, “Vernagelt,” with the following verse, in his journal Lämplein, Leipzig. We are temporarily nailing up a plank Truly, that characterizes our gate And characterizes our times! So dear reader, if you visit the Pappel Allee Let your gaze drift up on high To where the plank of reaction shines.

Wir nageln einstweilen ein Brett Fürwahr, das characterisirt unser Thor Und characterisirt unsere Zeiten! Drum Leser besuchst du die Pappel-Allee So lass deinen Blick auch mal dort in die Höh, Nach dem Reactionsbrett gleiten.

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From June 1879 until early the following year, there were repeated reports that the congregation would split into a “bourgeois” and a “Social Democratic” congregation, as had already occurred in Breslau.125 In the event of a socialist breakaway, police planned to promptly ban their new congregation.126 The Democratic and left-liberal notables began to hold secret meetings on the socialist threat to the congregation. In January 1880, the physicians Stahn and Abarbanell, the lawyer Jacobson, and Direktor Simon met with Chairman May to propose a series of measures to drive back Social Democratic influence, including changing the statutes to restrict membership, curbing Schaefer’s Monday discussion evenings that gave members a chance to air their views, and reducing the number of nonmembers attending FRC social events.127 In the end, the Democratic notables maintained their control through largely legitimate means. With the exception of the expulsion of one long-time member, the master furniture maker Meyer, there was no indication of a use of coercion against the socialists.128 A police informant even reported in March 1880 that the FRC’s inner circle had concluded an agreement with the socialists not to officially accept members who were “known socialists,” but to maintain them as shadow members, who would not attend public meetings at which police officials were present.129 All of these incidents reveal how the Socialist Laws left Democrats such as Schaefer politically isolated. The search for an ally outside the Social Democratic or Progressive factions in Berlin led Schaefer to undertake a curious journey. In June 1880, he traveled to London to enter into negotiations with Johann Most, who had been rebuffed by the SPD leadership in May. According to a Prussian police spy in Most’s entourage, Schaefer urged Most to break with “Zürich” (i.e., the SPD in exile) in an open letter and create a new “middle party” that might be called the “Democratic” party. Schaefer stated – almost certainly disingenuously – that he was personally against such a moderate name, but under conditions of the “state of siege” in Germany, it was a necessary compromise. Although he would not be able to publicly participate because of his position in the FRC, Schaefer said that he had access to people with “significant fortunes,” whom no one suspected of being socialists. Schaefer envisioned a revolution brought on by a joint anticlerical campaign: “it is only a matter of time [until] the socialist ideas find acceptance, one must merely take that stupid lump of religion from the people, then there is no power left on earth that can stop the people from toppling their present tyrants.” Most was not impressed

125 126 127 128 129

Excerpted without date in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. See also police observation reports of October 13 and November 21, 1879. Report of June 18, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15052, p. 117. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15052, pp. 157–160. Report of October 12, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15052, p. 129. Report of March 16, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15043, FRC 1880, p. 98.

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and rejected this proposal. He afterward told his friends that he did not think Schaefer was of much use, except to “miseducate” (verbilden) the people.130 In the end Schaefer found no political allies for his version of socialism. He became increasingly hostile to Social Democracy and in October 1880 alienated many with his statement that “the Free Religious Congregation must protect itself from becoming a proletarian congregation.”131 Slowing the growth of socialist membership came at the cost of an overall stagnation of the membership of FRC. In September 1882, the police reported that Progressives held sway over the congregation, but that “otherwise the Free Religious movement is static and not progressing; it has not penetrated the population in the least.”132 Conclusion: Kulturkampf and Liberal Hegemony What has our minority report on the German Kulturkampf from the perspective of organized secularism contributed to the historical debate? First, it revealed the multivocal nature of anticatholicism. The most prominent names in the historical register may belong to Protestant and liberal men, but there also lie recorded there Democratic, socialist, Jewish, and Free Religious voices. They all claimed to be coauthors of the script according to which the Kulturkampf was being fought, whether as a struggle for Progress, for Protestantism, or for Humanity. In other words, they all understood their positions to be hegemonic. Not all competing claims to hegemony were equal, of course. As historian Harold Mah notes, only certain groups are able “to make their social or group particularity invisible so that they can appear” to embody the “universal.” Liberal Protestants were best able to present themselves as the disinterested representatives of society.133 Their claim to represent the universal was bolstered by the political dominance they enjoyed during most of the 1860s and 1870s in city councils, state parliaments, and the Reichstag. Yet, as political dominance faltered, the plurality of voices became more apparent, so that after the Kulturkampf, the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung could differentiate clearly: “Social Democrats: hatred of God, Progressives: hatred of the church, National Liberals: hatred of confession.”134 Second, secularist activities render questionable interpretations of the Kulturkampf that focus solely on the interaction of anticatholicism and resistance to it. In 1869, the Free Religious sought to integrate anticatholic sentiment within their own struggle against the confessional order and elite political domination. Socialists, too, found this language congenial for their 130 131 132 133

134

Report of July 10, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 12978, p. 67, June 28, 1880; p. 69. Report of September 28, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15045, p. 72. Police report of September 7, 1882, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15045, unpag. Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 72, no. 1 (2000): 153–182, 168. As quoted in Lichtstrahlen, Blätter für volksverständliche Wissenschaft und atheistische Weltanschauung. Zugleich ein litterarischer Wegweiser für das Volk, no. 18, May 29, 1892, 821.

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struggle against liberal politicians and the authoritarian state. Radical secularists were emboldened by the secularizing advances of Bismarck and his parliamentary allies, particularly in the years 1872 to 1878. The combination of state secularization, liberal anticlericalism, and radical secularism called out a conservative opposition. The threatened deconfessionalization of the primary school system contributed decisively to efforts within the Protestant Church to unseat Minister of Culture Falk. The confrontation between Social Democrats and Christian Socials in early 1878 demonstrates how the dynamics of anticlericalism eluded liberal control and contributed quite directly to the collapse of the political coalition that had made Kulturkampf possible in the first place. Court Chaplain Stoecker and Johann Most took extreme positions on secularism and competed within the social milieu that had previously been under Progressive hegemony. Socialism came to overshadow ultramontanism as the chief threat to Protestantism, making the Socialist Laws, in part, a confessional strike against secularism. Third, if the Kulturkampf deepened Protestant–Catholic antagonisms, its demise contributed significantly to confessionalization processes on the left. The Socialist Laws acclerated the “pillarization” of the political–moral milieus. Although the laws led the SPD away from overt anticlericalism, they reinforced connections between confessionlessness and the socialist camp. They also further split the urban lower-middle class milieu in which Free Religion operated. Continual police pressure compelled Democratic and Progressive notables in the congregation to stamp down on socialist activity. This enabled them to maintain control in the short run, but ultimately undermined the social deference they previously enjoyed. The price came in 1886, when the Democratic clique that had controlled the congregation for over twenty years was voted out of office and replaced with a board compatible with the local hegemony of the socialist party. The most fundamental changes wrought by secularism during the Kulturkampf were probably those within liberalism. Here, responses in Berlin set the tone for liberals elsewhere. Among left-liberals, there was a retreat from secularism in favor of secularity or a secular understanding of Protestantism. For a significant portion of liberals, however, particularly those National Liberals who stuck with Bismarck in 1879, the turn to the right coincided with a strident defense of Christianity against secularism. Inspired by the pro-Christian rhetoric of National Liberal grandee Heinrich von Treitschke and the antisemitic propaganda of Stoecker’s Christian Social movement, Berlin students organized into a new Verein deutscher Studenten in 1881 with the slogan “With God, for Kaiser and Reich.”135 Precisely how confessional antagonisms toward Jews and secularists were used to shore up the new integral nationalism of the German right will be the topic of the next chapter.

135

Quoted in Fischer, “Der deutsche Protestantismus,” 499.

6 From Worldview to Ethics: Secularism and the “Jewish Question,” 1878–1892

Having traced the role that mounting opposition to secularism played in the collapse of the Kulturkampf and the establishment of antisocialism as a cornerstone of governmental policy, it is now time to consider how antisecularism figured in another dimension of the great transformation of German politics in the period between 1878 and 1880. This was the opening of a new front of confessional struggle in the autumn of 1879 in the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy.” Some antisemites referred to theirs as the “new Kulturkampf,” such as publicist Otto Glagau, who called on “Catholics and Protestants to fight like brothers shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy.”1 In turning the notion of Kulturkampf against the Jews, antisemites gave it a novel twist. One of the confessional masks they painted on their imagined Jewish enemy was the mask of secularism, the mask of “godlessness.” The identification of their religious community with unbelief prompted loud protests from leading German Jewish intellectuals, as we shall see. However, many Jewish freethinkers understood this conflation of Judaism and secularism as an outgrowth of the logic of the confessional system itself. Waldeck Manasse, a mainstay of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation between the 1880s and the 1920s, tried to reveal the absurd side of this logic with the help of the ring parable in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise.” In Lessing’s play, three brothers – representing the Abrahamic religions – each receive a ring from their father. Each jealously contends that only his is true until Nathan reveals that all rings are of equal value. Updating this parable, Manasse asked about the fate of those who now placed themselves “outside the realm of the rings” by becoming confessionless dissidents. Rather than gain equal recognition and freedom, Manasse concluded that the confessionless would be subject to the arbitrary action of the state and could share a fate similar to the army recruit

1

Otto Glagau, Des Reiches Noth und der neue Culturkampf (Osnabrück: B. Wehberg, 1879), 268.

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who announced himself to be a dissident, and “at whom the proud keeper of a ring, Captain von Bärenhorst, shouted: ‘if you don’t come up with a proper [anständige] religion by tomorrow morning, I’ll have to stick you with the Jews!’”2 The ability of readers to understand the black humor of this anecdote relied on their knowledge of the proximity of the categories of Jewish and dissident in the legal repertoire of the confessional system. As examined in Chapter 1, Prussia had indeed stuck the dissidents with the Jews in the “tolerance” decrees of 1847, and neither the Jewish emancipation contained in the July 1869 and of the North German League nor the various secularizing laws enacted during the Kulturkampf significantly altered that practice. As long as the state itself continued to discriminate against religious minorities, the new laws on leaving the churches passed in Prussia, Saxony, and neighboring Austria failed to allow Jews and dissidents a way out of the confessional system. The deepening political crisis of Germany toward the end of the Kulturkampf placed the relationship between Judaism and organized secularism (i.e., between those “third” and “fourth” confessions without state-issued rings) in a new light. This chapter revisits the activity of Berlin secularists and their opponents in the years 1879 to 1892, the period when – roughly speaking – modern antisemitism “bedded in” to German political culture. It takes up three vantage points that show with great clarity how the “Jewish question” related to the internal and external constructions of secularism. It begins in the antisemitic camp, where the specter of “godless Jewry” was raised with the dual aim of stopping secularism and reversing Jewish emancipation. The second perspective is that of secularist philosemites, whose defense of the Jews proved highly ambivalent. Although they embraced Jewish emancipation and welcomed Jews into the secularist fold, most secularists believed that the “Jewish question” was linked to the problem of confession overall and could only be solved by Jewish “conversion” to secularism. From this perspective, the “third” confession was to dissolve into the “fourth.” The third perspective is provided by the liberal Jews who entered secularist organizations in Berlin in the 1880s and 1890s, seeking there not only a means of combating antisemitism but also a mode of attaining national unity that did not require them to relinquish their identity as Jews. For, by and large, liberal Jewish secularists did not wish to cease to be Jews, even as they sought a point of spiritual convergence with other secularists. My claim here is that modern antisemitism must be understood in the context of the struggle over secularism. At the same time, the confessional dynamics of secularism itself are clearly revealed in the struggle against antisemitism. As this chapter will explore, the debates over the “Jewish Question” contributed directly to the differentiation of organized secularism in 2

Waldeck Manasse, Lebens-Fragen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Otto Roth, 1910), 6. The left-liberal Jewish MP Ludwig Haas later recounted this story in the Reichstag. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben, 216.

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the last decades of the nineteenth century. Progressive Jews constituted the core membership of Berlin’s first Freethought association Lessing in 1881. Although it did not carry the stigma of conversion as did Free Religion, Freethought, too, confronted Jewish members with the secularist antinomy. Did the expectation that German unity would be achieved through conversion to a new postreligious, scientific worldview not contradict their right to community identity? Searching for an alternative, some liberal Jewish Freethinkers wrote ethics on their banner and entered into a struggle with the advocates of naturalistic monism. Five years after police repression closed Lessing in 1887, a new association took up the banner: the German Society for Ethical Culture. Yet here, too, the antinomies of supraconfessional politics became apparent.

antisemitism and confession The public accusation that Jews were the hidden authors of the Kulturkampf emerged as a defensive strategy for those groups opposed to liberal anticlericalism. It was initially strongest in the Catholic camp and, with the notable exception of party spokesman Ludwig Windthorst, many leaders of the Catholic Center Party signed on to this argument even before the pope endorsed it in 1872. In Berlin, Father Eduard Müller, the editor of the Märkisches Kirchenblatt, tapped Jewish liberals as the real authors of the “Moabit Klostersturm.”3 By the time liberal secularism reached its high-water mark in 1874 and 1875, opposition to the Kulturkampf had spread, and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories circulated increasingly in the conservative and liberal Protestant press as well. However, it was not until the sharp crises of 1878 to 1880 – the assassination attempts, the passage of the “Socialist Laws,” and the breakdown of the government coalition – that antisemitism became a key political factor in Protestant Berlin.4 Historians commonly cite the eruption in 1879 of the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” as the event during which antisemitism was first fully articulated and popularized in its modern form. In September of that year, Protestant Court Chaplain Adolf Stoecker elevated Jews to the chief target of his Christian Social movement and linked them to the socialist and secularist threats to the nation. A greater shock to Berlin’s liberal 3

4

Müller also used his Berliner St. Bonifaciuskalendar to publicize antisemitic views. Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 303; On Windhorst, see Anderson, Windhorst; on Pius IX’s position, Günter Brakelmann and Manuela von Brocke eds., Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Ein Arbeits- und Lesebuch (Waltrop: Hartmut Spener, 2002), 83. Articles published in the Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung in 1872 and 1874 blamed Jews for the “‘Humanity’-swindel of the present.” In 1874, Otto Glagau argued in an article published in the liberal Gartenlaube that Jews were behind both the Kulturkampf and the stock market collapse of 1873, and in 1875 both the conservative Protestant Kreuzzeitung and the Catholic Germania ran antisemitic glosses on the Kulturkampf. Brakelmann and Brocke, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 219, 259. Olaf Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 48–51.

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fig. 6: Two Berlin antisemites: historian Heinrich von Treitschke and Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker, “A modern day Reformer” nails his 95 theses on the door of the synagogue. (Courtesy: Bavarian State, Die Gartenlaube, 1866, p. 557; University of Heidelberg, Kladderadatsch, 1879, Nr. 53/54, S. 213.)

public sphere came two months later when the prominent Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke declared Germany’s Jews its national “misfortune.” This intervention by one of Germany’s leading intellectual voices is widely credited with having taken antisemitism from the streets (and the pulpits) and making it socially acceptable. Within the next two years, antisemitism became a rallying point for a nationalist right that had become disaffected with liberalism. The petition drive of Berlin students calling for a reversal of Jewish emancipation found thousands of signatories at other universities and prompted a debate on the floor of the Prussian Diet in November 1880.5 Bernhard Foerster, a Berlin Gymnasium teacher censured for scuffling with a Jewish man insulted by his provocations, founded together with other teachers and journalists one of the first explicitly antisemitic organizations, the Deutsche Volksverein. On December 30, 1880, this group staged a large antisemitic rally in Berlin.6 The following day organized crowds descended on the central Friedrichstadt neighborhood, where amid shouts of “Juden raus!” they broke windows and provoked fistfights with those they took for Jews. “All this naturally under the 5

6

Uffa Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger: Bürgerliche Juden und Protestanten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 288–291. On the Deutsche Volksverein, see LAB A. Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15097.

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slogan of the defense of German idealism against Jewish materialism and the protection of honest German work against Jewish exploitation,” remarked the Jewish socialist Eduard Bernstein, who considered the year following the riot as “one of the most eventful in Berlin’s political history. It was the year, when for a time it appeared that the antisemitic agitation would dominate the entire public sphere.”7 Why did antisemitic agitation pass through Catholic and conservative Protestant circles to national-liberal and proto-volkish populist circles at roughly the point in time when each began to oppose the Kulturkampf? One answer offered at the time by the National Liberal leader Eduard Lasker was that antisemitism was the “confessional coloration” of a “reactionary epoch.”8 Yet historians have pursued this line of thought only halfway by tying antisemitism to illiberalism. They have failed to examine the genesis of antisemitism through the lens of confession. This omission is in keeping with the still-dominant view that the key innovation of the Berlin antisemites was the substitution of traditional Christian anti-Judaism with racial antisemitism. Oft cited to prove this point is the claim made in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, the pamphleteer credited with inventing the racial term “antisemitism,” that he approached the “Jewish question” “from a non-confessional point of view.”9 In her influential essay of 1978, historian Shulamit Volkov argued that Marr’s rejection of religiously motivated attacks on Jews and his neologism were necessary steps in shifting anti-Judaism from Jews as persons to Jewishness [Judentum] as an abstract idea. Antisemitism thereby became a multivalent “cultural code” that expressed opposition to a number of emancipatory modern movements.10 Volkov went on to enumerate the “false metaphors” or tropes, whereby antisemitism bundled the disparate complaints of the authoritarian culture. Since the publication of Volkov’s article, scholars have challenged her neat sequential division of modern racial antisemitism from traditional religious anti-Judaism.11 Helmut Walser Smith has called for expanding the study of confession to Jewish–Christian relations, and argued that just as the memory 7 8

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Bernstein, Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung, 59. Lasker to Berthold Auerbach, December 29, 1881, reprinted in Wentzcke, Politische Briefe: 389–340. Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum: vom nichtconfessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (Bern: Rudolph Costenoble, 1879). Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as Cultural Code – Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Germany,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXIII (1978): 25–46, 39. Christhard Hoffmann, “Christlicher Antijudaismus und moderner Antisemitismus: Zusammenhänge und Differenzen der historischen Antisemitismusforschung,” in Christlicher Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus: Theologische und kirchliche Programme Deutscher Christen, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1994). Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 51–89.

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of the early modern wars of religion colored the relations between nineteenthcentury Protestants and Catholics, patterns of early modern anti-Jewish violence and prejudice continued to inform Jewish–Christian relations throughout the long nineteenth century.12 Historians of East Central Europe have noted the importance of Christianity to reactionary nationalist conceptions of the people in the late nineteenth century, thereby providing a prehistory to comparative studies of the Christian basis of the imagined national community of many European fascist movements.13 Wolfgang Altgeld has drawn attention to the structural similarity of the antisemitism of the late 1870s to the anticatholicism at the outset of the decade. Like the “black international” of ultramontane Catholicism, the “yellow international” was portrayed as an antinational, divisive conspiracy to weaken the nation.14 Depictions of “Talmudic Jewry” as a fossilized, superficial, and retrograde religion paralleled similar tropes that Protestant liberals mobilized against Catholicism. However, although it is true that there was a religious logic to the new antisemitism, this was not a mere continuity of religious anti-Judaism. The crucial difference between antisemitism and anticatholicism was that antisemites identified Judentum less as a religious competitor than as religion’s very undoing. It is this connection to secularism that is largely missing from the newer research into the religious and confessional aspects of modern antisemitism in Germany.15 Yet, a survey of texts by key protagonists in the Berlin Antisemitism Controversy will reveal that the conflation of modern Jewry with worldview secularism was a unifying feature across the political and religious spectrum of the emerging antisemitic discourse. Christian conservatives could and did agree with the atheist Marr that they were operating from “a non-confessional point of view,” because they were all accusing Jews of being the secret agents of antireligion in Germany. Antisemites linked Jews with both the secularizing measures of the Kulturkampf and with secularism as a philosophy/religion. Already in its early phase the Catholic press depicted the Kulturkampf as a Jewish ploy to deepen the confessional division of Germany, with the ultimate aim of destroying

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Smith, Continuities. Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Wolfgang Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century Germany” in Smith, Protestants, Catholics and Jews, 49–65, 59. Studies that investigate aspects of secularism in the formulation of the “Jewish question”: Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63; Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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Christianity.16 In 1874, the conservative Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland claimed that the hidden “titan” in the Reichstag was “the religion of material interests,” or “in short, Judaism.”17 Similar tropes circulated with greater frequency in the conservative Protestant press, as the Protestant Church began to feel the effects of the secularizing legislation put forward by Bismarck’s Minister of Education, Adalbert Falk. Following the introduction of civil marriage and proposals for nondenominational schools, many Protestants came to see their church as the greatest victim of the Kulturkampf. As in Catholic circles, some of the most vocal Protestant antisemites, such as Adolf Stoecker, were also frontline leaders in the battle against secularism and the Kulturkampf. Stoecker had experienced the FrancoPrussian war as a sacred intervention, in which God handed the German people a weapon to purify itself of “French godlessness” and “the dogma of its animality.” Soon after arriving in Berlin to become a court preacher in 1874, he began to preach against the “dance around the golden calf,” party division, and de-Christianization he witnessed in the capital.18 It was at this time that he first developed the notion of an inner bond between secularism and Judaism. In a speech given in March 1875, Stoecker claimed that the anticlericalism and materialism that threatened German culture were products of the disintegration of the Jewish religion. It was, he declared, “a judgment of God that a nation that God chose to be the guardian of religion is attempting to cheat Christians of their religion. Do not let yourselves be fooled by the remains of religion” that Jews manifested in their maintenance of the Sabbath, “[t]he division of belief and unbelief is also splitting the ranks of Israel.” But, whereas Christianity was still withstanding the onslaught, Stoecker believed that Judaism had already succumbed to unbelief: “[w]ith that the prophets are dead, the Old Testament dead: Blood has come and in its torrents has engulfed the faith of Israel. The blood of judgment has come; the Jews no longer have a hope.” Their only salvation was the “blood of Jesus.”19 16

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Olaf Blaschke noted that antisemitism proved useful to Catholics, “in order to compensate the compressed experience of secularization” in the Kulturkampf. Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 56. Yuri Slezkine argues that secularism became identified with Jews, in part, because of Jewish prominence in its support: Slezkine, Jewish Century, 63. “Die Reichstags-Titanen.” Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland vol. 47 (1874): 948–959, 955. In 1881, the journal referred to confessional division as the “fissure in the rock of the German nation” into which “the upward-reaching tree of Jewish power has sunk its roots; and it has succeeded in penetrating to the ground.” “Wie das alte Jahr dem neuen die Judenfrage vermacht,” Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland vol. 87 (1881): 15–16. From Stoecker’s articles of 1870 and 1876 in the Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, as quoted in Hans Engelmann, Kirche am Abgrund; Adolf Stoecker und seine antijüdische Bewegung (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1984), 25, 75. Quoted in Oertzen, Stoecker, 130–131. On the importance of secularism to Stoecker’s antisemitism, see Engelmann, Kirche am Abgrund, and Martin Greschat, “Protestantischer Antisemitismus in Wilhelminischer Zeit – Das Beispiel des Hofpredigers Adolf Stoecker,” in

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Stoecker’s argument about the vulnerability of Jews to secularism relied on the old Protestant tradition of viewing Judaism since Jesus as a degenerated and desiccated form of ancient Hebrewism, as well as on the eschatological belief that the mission to the Jews was required for universal salvation.20 However, Stoecker now raised Jews from a negative foil of Protestantism to its chief threat. He repeatedly returned to the accusation that liberal, secular Jews had become “godless,” calling “Jewry” an “irreligious power” in the Reichstag.21 In April 1885, he gave a well-attended speech on “Semite, Atheist and Social Democrat,” in which he restated his appreciation for “Old Testament Judaism,” as against “modern” Judaism. “Semite and atheist,” he claimed, had “recently gained in affinity” and “such a Jewry, which wants atheism, must be fought by us to the death [auf Tod und Leben].”22 Echoing Marr, one of Stoecker’s lieutenants, the Protestant preacher Hapke, told a Jewish opponent who had spoken up at an 1880 rally that Christian Social criticisms of the Jews were made from a national and “not from a confessional viewpoint.”23 Yet, I would argue that it was precisely by declaring that Jews had forfeited consideration as a confession that they could be made responsible for secularism. Identified as “Jewish,” secularism could be both robbed of its supposedly universality and more readily comprehended as an enemy within the confessional system. “Jewish spirit” became the inversion of the Christian Social vision of a German nation integrated by “Christian spirit” or “Christian worldview,” to quote two of Stoecker’s common phrases. This construction would have a lasting impact on how Protestant clergy and institutions reacted to secularism and to Judaism, and would play a role in the fateful choices made by Protestant leaders during the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The confessional identification of Judentum with atheism also had a privileged place in the antisemitic bundle of the supposedly “non-religious” early völkisch nationalists.24 This paradox was given expression in the first point of the 1881 program of the antisemitic Deutsche Volksverein, which declared it to

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Antisemitismus, Günter Brakelmann and Martin Rosowski eds. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 27–51. Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Antisemitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden, Boston: Brill 2009), 578. In 1880, Stoecker called “modern Judaism [. . .] an extinct form of religion, [. . .] which has lost its divine course,” and which chased the “idol of gold.” Cited in: Günther Ginzel, “Vom religiösen zum rassischen Judenhaß,” in Antisemitismus: Erscheinungsform der Judenfeindschaft gestern und heute, Günther Ginzel ed. (Bielefeld: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1991), 154. In a private letter to Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1880, Stoecker insisted that he was “not attacking the Jews, but rather the irreverent, godless, usurious, deceitful Jewry [Judentum], which is, in fact, the misfortune of our people.” Cited in: Oertzen, Stoecker, 219. Police report of April 28, 1885, LAB A. Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15072, p. 26. Police report on the meeting of the Christlich-Socialen Arbeiterpartei on January 16, 1880, LAB A. Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15069, p. 15. The trope of “godless Jewry” is also found among those antisemites who identified as “freethinkers,” such as Wilhelm Marr. “The Jew,” he wrote, had “no ideal religion, [. . .] just a business contract with Jehovah.” Another leading völkisch thinker who briefly captured the imagination of

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be not a “religious but social-political” association, only to affirm in the next sentence the Christian basis of the German Volk.25 Through the negative referent of the degenerated “Jewish spirit,” völkisch groups activated their idealized notions of a national-religious German spirit. Similarly, the notorious antisemite Otto Glagau announced in his Berlin journal Der Kulturkämpfer in 1880 “a struggle against atheism and materialism [. . .] for the loftiest and holiest goods of the nation.”26 Materialism formed the central metaphor of the antisemitic cultural code because it fused natural scientific atheism, laissez-faire economics, and socialism in a single term. The linkage of Jews to atheism and anticlericalism also performed a crucial function in Treitschke’s “Unsere Aussichten” of 1879, which appeared amid the looming breakup of the National Liberal Party over Bismarck’s willingness to reverse liberal economic policies and freeze the Kulturkampf. Treitschke’s article is often cited as the key text marking the shift from “left to right” nationalism, that is, from one based on liberal-humanitarian principles to one rooted in authoritarian chauvinism.27 A masterful rhetorical dismantling of the Progressive definition of the German nation, Treitschke’s essay begins by calling into question the “liberal wish list of the [18]60s and the naïve faith in the infallible moral power of ‘Bildung’” In it, he claimed that the recent assassination attempts against the kaiser had forced Germans like himself to “rethink the value of our humanity and enlightenment.” Against the “feeble philanthropy of our age” Treitschke applauded the “reawakened conscience of the people,” which sought a restoration of strict order through obedience to law and monarchy. In the tradition of liberal cultural nationalism, Treitschke still adhered to the notion that the German nation reflected a spiritual unity. But instead of embodying the rational political ideals of liberalism, he claimed that this national foundation was grounded in the religious realm and under threat from secularism. “While broad segments of our people have fallen victim to arid disbelief,” – a development Treitschke blamed on Jewish journalists – he celebrated the recent and “unmistakable resurgence of church feeling.”28

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many German socialists was Eugen Dühring, who wanted to form an “anti-religion” that would replace Christianity and take up battle with Jewish spirit. This “anti-religion” was decidedly not that of Free Religion, which he accused of being a tool of Jewish interests. Johannes Heil, “Antisemitismus, Kulturkampf und Konfession – Die antisemitischen ‘Kulturen’ Frankreichs und Deutschlands im Vergleich,” in Katholischer Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Ursachen und Traditionen im internationalen Vergleich, Olaf Blaschke and Aram Mattioli eds. (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2000), 195–228, 210, 215, 217. Eugen Dühring, Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sittenund Culturfrage (Karlsruhe and Leipzig: H. Reuther, 1881), 147–148. LAB A. Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15097, pp. 3–5. Published in 1880 in Der Kulturkämpfer, a journal Glagau founded and edited between 1880 and 1888. Quotation in: Realismus und Gründerzeit. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1848–1880, Max Bucher et al. eds. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1976), 317, 113. Volkov, “Antisemitism as Cultural Code”; Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus.” Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, Walter Boehlich ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965), 7–14.

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In a further article of January 1880, Treitschke opposed the notion put forward by a leading Berlin liberal Moritz Lazarus that “today every nationality is comprised by several religions” making Judaism “German in the same sense as Christianity.” Treitschke believed that only Christianity was “tightly interwoven [. . .] with all fibers of the German people,” so that if “half of our people deserted Christianity, [there is] no doubt, the German nation must fall. Everything we call German would end in rubble. Lazarus does not consider the difference of religion and confession; he imagines the categories Catholic, Protestant, Jewish as coordinated.” From Treitschke’s perspective, confessional division was only tolerable among Christians, for whom he held out the supraconfessional hope that it would some day come to a “purer form of Christianity, [. . .] which would reunite the divided brothers.” He concluded with the warning that the “Jewish question” would not subside “until our Israelite citizens learn through our stance that we are and want to remain a Christian people.”29 Treitschke’s attempt to pin the rise of materialism and anticlericalism on Jews earned him particularly sharp rebukes from Jewish opponents. The Breslau rabbi and philosopher Manuel Joël wrote that he shared Treitschke’s abhorrence at the spread of “unbelief” but denied that its source was either the Jews or Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of “humanity” idolized by Jewish liberals and ridiculed by Treitschke. Rather, Joël argued, atheism stemmed from the followers of the idealist Hegel and from the materialists, ranging from Jacob Moleschott to Ernst Haeckel, all of who were Christians like Treitschke. “Why then,” demanded Joël, “do you accept the argument against the Jews of atheism?”30 It was Treitschke’s confessional argumentation that most vexed Hermann Cohen, a founding figure of Neo-Kantian philosophy. If Treitschke had restricted himself to an argument about biological differences or “RacenInstincte,” Cohen would have dismissed his attack as merely insulting and tasteless. But by basing his arguments on religious and confessional difference, Treitschke had made “confessing [Bekennen] [. . .] a religious obligation, also in a national sense.” Cohen’s “Bekenntnis” was to a Judaism that shared with liberal Protestantism the “cultural historical mission of humanizing religion.” Cohen agreed with Treitschke that religion was the foundation of the German nation. However, contrary to Treitschke’s claims, Cohen believed that liberal Judaism had already achieved a “religious community” with Protestantism and shared with it the same “enemies” in those naturalists who “attack the idea of the single God.”31 29

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Heinrich von Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 79–92, 88. Manuel Joël, “Offener Brief an Herrn Heinrich von Treitschke,” in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 15–27, 18–19. Hermann Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 126– 151, 127. The Jewish–Protestant “synthesis” and connections of ethics, philosophy, religion, and national unity continued to inform Cohen’s work up until the very end of his life. Hans Bach, The

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Cohen’s commentary is instructive because it points to the fact that the racial thinking present in all early antisemitic texts did not supercede the religious understanding of Jewish difference, as has been frequently argued, but rather it helped recast it. Racial thinking made Jews suitable for a new religious role, which was to embody materialism and national degeneration. Christian nationalists first popularized Marr’s term through the formation of the Antisemitenliga in 1879, at roughly the same time that Stoecker lauded Marr as a defender of a “Christian State.”32 As a writer for a Protestant newspaper found in 1880, once abandoned by the spirit of God, all that was left of the ancient Jews was their Semitic race. “The Semitic spirit,” he concluded, “is as different from the spirit of God as night from day.” They oppose one another like “nature and grace.”33 Identified as a manifestation of “Jewish spirit,” secularism could be both robbed of its supposedly universality and more readily comprehended as an enemy within the confessional system. Thus, although antisemitism may have flowed through “an old, nearly dried up river bed,” as the philosemitic Democratic politician Ludwig Quidde observed in 1881, its religious motivation was not traditional Judenhass, but “reaction against religious liberalism and radicalism, against modern faithlessness, against skepticism and materialism.”34

philosemitism and secularism Joël and Cohen tried to expose Treitschke’s accusations as falsehoods by arguing that liberal Judaism was the most reliable partner for Protestant nationalism in a joint struggle against the godless and the orthodox alike. By contrast, organized secularists largely affirmed the linkage of their movement to the Jewish struggle for emancipation. Free Religious preachers were among the earliest non-Jews to denounce the antisemitic agitation of Treitschke and Stoecker, and other prominent philosemites, such as the pacifist Bertha von Suttner, ethicist Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, and Democrat Ludwig Quidde, evidenced a lifelong secularist affinity.35

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German Jew: A Synthesis of Judaism and Western Civilization, 1730–1930 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 194–201. Moshe Zimmermann, “Aufkommen und Diskreditierung des Begriffs Antisemitismus,” in Das Unrechtsregime; Internationale Forschung über den Nationalsozialismus, Ursula Büttner, ed. (Hamburg: Christians, 1986), 59–77; Engelmann, Kirche am Abgrund, 78. The 1880 article “Zur Judenfrage,” Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung, as quoted in Wolfgang Heinrichs, Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Deutschen Kaiserreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des Deutschen Bürgertums in der Krise der Moderne (Cologne: Rheinland-Verl., 2000), 59. Anon. (Ludwig Quidde), Die Antisemitenagitation und die deutsche Studentenschaft (Göttingen: Peppmüller, 1881), 3, 6. Uffa Jensen has shown that non-Jews generally did not respond in print to Treitschke’s accusations until the autumn of 1880. Free Religionists proved to be an exception to this rule. Jensen, Doppelgänger, 269–316. Some of the brochures published by Free Religious preachers in response to the Berlin Antisemitism Controversy include Johannes Ronge, Offenes Sendschreiben (January 16, 1881); Theodor Hofferichter, Für die Semiten. Vortrag gehalten am

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The manner in which secularists defended Jews against antisemitic attack reveals how central the “Jewish question” was to the internal construction of secularism. An excellent case study is provided by the agitation initiated by the long-time preacher of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, Georg Siegfried Schaefer, after Jewish members of the congregation urged him to respond to Court Chaplain Stoecker’s assaults in November 1879.36 Rather than merely defend the rights of Jews, Schaefer used his lectern as a platform to develop a public position that placed the “Jewish question” at the center of his critique of the confessional system and linked it to the fate of Free Religion. Typical of most non-Jewish (and many Jewish) opponents of antisemitism, Schaefer acknowledged the reasonableness of many of the antisemitic claims. Police protocols of his speeches state that he held the Jews partially to blame for the fact that antisemitic slander fell on fertile ground. Here he named pride, the collection of wealth, and parvenu ostentation as “excesses” produced by centuries of ghettoization and discrimination. Yet these “excesses” were not the real motor driving antisemitism, Schaefer claimed in a speech in November 1880. Rather, antisemitism was a defensive reaction by the confessional system itself. This system had developed without a place in it for Jews, whom Schaefer called the “recognized dissidents,” because of their long history as Germany’s most publicly recognized excluded minority. By struggling for the same rights as Christians, Jews exposed the false unity that had existed between the subject of the state and the subject of the state Church. This shook the foundations of the confessional state and the divine right of the Prussian monarchy. Antisemitism was for Schaefer an elite strategy to rescue the confessional system and its privileges: “the movement does not originate from below, but from above [. . .] from pulpit, lectern and judge’s [bench] [. . .] [b]ecause the old privileges of public and social life [. . .] depend on the old faith.”37 Schaefer told his listeners that behind the Jews were the Free Religionists, who occupied a similar structural position outside of the confessional order. Although less visible, these “non-recognized dissidents” were ultimately more radical and dangerous because they possessed a fitting anticonfessional worldview. The most radical dissident for Schaefer was, however, the secularist Jew, the ultimate nemesis of the Christian Socials:

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28. November 1880 vor der freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Breslau (Breslau: 1880); Andreas Reichenbach, Die moderne Judenhetze. Nach einem öffentlichen Vortrage (Breslau 1879) and idem, Nach der Hatz. Kritische Betrachtung der letzten Judenhetze in Deutschland als der neuesten Krankheitserscheinung des deutschen Volkes (Zürich 1881); Karl Scholl, Das Judenthum und die Religion der Humanität. Vortrag zum 33. Stiftungsfest der freireligiösen Gemeinde in Mannheim am 17. August 1879 (Leipzig 1879), idem, Das Judentum und seine Weltmission (Leipzig 1880) and idem, Jesus von Nazareth, auch ein Semit, 3. Aufl., (Leipzig 1881). On von Suttner, Foerster and Quidde, see Alan Levenson, Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism: Defenses of Jews and Judaism in Germany, 1871–1932 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 21–43. Report of November 30, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Police report of November 28, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15043, p. 286.

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One often hears: “I prefer a Jew of the old faith to a Free Religious Christian.” The secularist [freigeistig] Jew, however, destroys the old belief in divine right, the belief [that] you are dependent on God’s mercy, you have to submit to it. Instead, the man of reason says Man himself is God. From these principles is born the reform of the entire life. Thus the religious is the most radical reform.38

The notion that Jewish emancipation and freigeistig dissent posed a direct threat to the authoritarian state was not original to Schaefer. As explored in Chapter 1, the influential conservative legal theorist Friedrich Julius Stahl had made a similar argument in his 1847 essay Der christliche Staat und sein Verhältnis zum Deismus und Judenthum. For Stahl the movement of German Jews into the camp of the liberals and their cooperation with the rationalist Christian dissidents was an unfortunate consequence of the state’s need to exclude Jews from full citizenship in order to maintain its own Christian character.39 The historical record provides ample evidence to support the claims of Schaefer and Stahl that Jews and dissidents made natural allies in a joint struggle against the confessional order. In cities such as Königsberg, Berlin, and Breslau, Jews and Free Religious cooperated in a number of liberal projects that spoke to the common interests of their communities, such as the agitation for and formation of confessionless schools.40 For Schaefer, however, such cooperation was not the endpoint of the relationship between Jewish and Free Religious dissent. Schaefer expected the “non-recognized dissidents” to supersede the Jews, because, in his eyes, the ultimate target of antisemitism was dissidence itself. By stepping into the clerical crossfire Free Religion had “assumed the martyrdom, which had previously burdened [the Jews].”41 Furthermore, Schaefer suggested that Jews were being justly punished for not fully embracing secularism. Remaining separate was for Schaefer the real sin of Jewish emancipation. Schaefer told his listeners that the decision of the Reform Jewish Congregations to remain loyal to the “historical mission” of promoting 38 39

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LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15043, p. 286. Stahl, Der christliche Staat und sein Verhältniß zu Deismus und Judenthum, 43. Acknowledging his own debt to Stahl, Treitschke called him the “sole great political head among all thinkers of Jewish blood.” Hanns-Jürgen Wiegand, Das Vermächtnis Friedrich Julius Stahls: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte konservativen Rechts- und Ordnungsdenkens (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1980), 10. In 1847, Julius Rupp’s dissident congregation in Königsberg met in the local synagogue. In Breslau cooperation between left-liberal Jews and Free Religious (represented by the preacher Theodor Hofferichter) took place in the large popular scientific Humboldt-Verein and in the successful efforts to found the Johanneum, a nondenominational Gymnasium. Alexander Ari Joskowicz, “Anticlerical Alliances: Jews and the Church Question in Germany and France, 1783– 1905” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008), 212–218; Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 322. For similar, ultimately unsuccessful Jewish-dissident efforts in Berlin, see Chapter Five. Police report of November 28, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15043, p. 286; police report of October 12. 1879, no. 15042, unpag.

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monotheism rather than join the Union of Free Religious Congregations in 1859 was now “wreaking its vengeance on them.” Schaefer warned “as long as the Jews do not reach out their hands to liberated humanity, they will be castigated.”42 Just as the young Karl Marx had argued that the “Jewish Question” could only be solved by the elimination of the capitalist system that produced Jewish difference along with the division of labor, Schaefer argued that only the destruction of the confessional system would eliminate antisemitism and “then the Jew is also liberated from Jewishness.”43 Consequently, at a discussion evening in November 1880, Schaefer proposed that the Free Religious Congregation respond to antisemitism by taking out ads in all major Berlin newspapers with the following declaration: “Away with the dissident and Jewish question from the people. Away with all religious privileges from the state. Away with confessional instruction in the schools.” Dr. Adolph Abarbanell, a prominent Jewish member of the FRC, objected sharply to this self-interested identification of the Free Religious Congregation with the plight of the Jews: “it is not the time to now step forward publicly and say, ‘we are also not Christians, but demand equal rights.’ Such a declaration would just fan the flames.”44 Despite this criticism, Schaefer continued to press his view that the proper response to antisemitism was to strengthen Free Religious anticonfessionalism and pressure freethinking Jews to abandon their confessional autonomy. “The maintenance of the special Jewish confessionality and mission” was, according to theses Schaefer’s congregation submitted to the national congress of the Union of Free Religious Congregations in July 1881, a “main obstacle” to the formation of “interconfessional humanistic congregations.”45 Schaefer’s comments demonstrate that radical secularism, too, displayed the same philosemitic logic of assimilation and exclusion that scholars have identified in a host of nineteenth-century movements ranging from Christian evangelicalism to liberalism. Within the framework of a single nation and a single God, to seek unity between Jews and non-Jews was ultimately to seek the exclusion of Jews as Jews from this unity. Christopher Clark’s pithy definition, “a philosemitic is an antisemite who loves Jews,” may be overstated, but Clark is correct in arguing that “[a]xiomatic to both was the assumption that the collective destiny of the Jews and that of the Christians were inseparably bound up.”46 42

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Schaefer had already expressed his hope that Jewish congregations would join the Union of Free Religious Congregations in 1870, G. S. Schaefer, Die Grundsätze der freireligiösen Gemeinde. Als Entwurf der allgemeinen öffentlichen Kritik, insbesondere der freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Berlin übergeben (Berlin: author’s edition, 1870), 9. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15043, p. 286. Police report of November 16, 1880, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15043, p. 279. Die Morgenröte der Reformation des 19. Jahrhunderts. Sonntagsblatt für Freunde der religiösen Reform, vol. 4, nos. 25 and 26 (July 19, 1881). Christopher Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 281.

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Schaefer shared with Treitschke and Stoecker the fantasy that the destruction or punishment of Jews would be a means toward the salvation of the nation and a solution to the competition between confession and secularism. As Dagmar Herzog has shown in her study of the liberal and dissident philosemitism of the 1840s, the encounter between Jews and non-Jews was central to the constitution of liberal humanism.47 By dissolving the boundaries between Jew and non-Jew on an imaginary or practical-political level, the universal drama of humanism was performed. Schaefer himself provides a good example of this drama in the preface he wrote to an anonymous pamphlet published in 1885 as Thoughts of the Nineteenth Century on the Inevitable Solution of the Social, Political and Religious Question by a Jew according to his Birth and Orthodox Education.48 Schaefer invited the reader to approach the pamphlet’s text as a glass, which would reflect the reader’s own experience of the spirit of the age. Most important, the reader might recognize himself reflected in the man behind the text, the author, “because you only comprehend the spirit that you equal [gleichst] or at least resemble [ähnelst].” It is crucial that the author is a Jew. Only through this sharing of the spirit of humanism across the gulf separating Jew from non-Jew, can post-Christian humanism become universal and unifying. “I for my part,” Schaefer concluded, “have found myself reflected in the present work [. . .] with a few minor exceptions. This is a joy of spiritual recognition, which Lessing expressed with the words: ‘O that I could find one more, for whom it suffices to be a human [Mensch]!’”49 This motif is also found in the writings of Jewish secularists, for example in this line from Ferdinand Falkson, a key figure in events leading up the 1848 revolution: “And from the Jew, from the Christian / Rises up the human [Mensch] with joy.”50 Yet, despite such shared yearning for spiritual unity, Falkson and Schaefer disagreed on its form. Falkson refused to join Free Religion despite his principal agreement with it, while Schaefer demanded that Jew and non-Jew, each having cast off their orthodox upbringing and recognizing each other as brothers, must unite in “free humanist congregations.”51 Jewish difference is crucial to producing the universality of secularist humanism, but the continued existence of Jews as separate from non-Jewish secularists is, in the eyes of philosemites, an act of betrayal; hence the love of Jews and the hostility toward Jewishness that mark philosemitism. Thus one finds in a single speech Schaefer’s exaltation of the “freigeistig Jew” (here he may have had his mentor Johann Jacoby in mind) followed by a resounding condemnation of

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Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy. Anon., Gedanken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts zur unausbleichlichen Lösung der sozialen, politischen und religiösen Frage von einem Juden, seiner Geburt und orthodoxen Erziehung nach mit einem Vorwort von G. S. Schäfer, Lehrer der fr. Gemeinde (Berlin: Rubenow, 1885). Anon., Gedanken, I, II. Quoted in Toury, Orientierungen, 73. Anon., Gedanken, II.

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Reform Judaism and the intimation that antisemitic persecution was a divine punishment for Jewish resistance to the loving embrace of Free Religion.52 Schaefer’s views were not idiosyncratic. Philosemitic ambivalence was anchored in the constitution of the Union of Free Religious Congregations. At the founding congress in 1859, the prominent former Protestant preacher Leberecht Uhlich proposed that entrance to the Union “also be held open to Jewish Reform Congregations.” Eduard Baltzer, another former Lichtfreund, opposed the measure with the remark that, because the Union was open to anyone that supported its constitution, no special invitation to Jewish congregations was needed.53 Uhlich’s proposal was voted down. Although seemingly impartial, this decision expressed a rejection of Free Religious Congregations that wanted to remain Jewish-identified. Jews were welcomed within Free Religion but as individuals rather than as members of a community. In effect, entrance into Free Religion implied a conversion from Judaism. Despite the exclusionary logic of philosemitism, until the late 1870s liberal and radical Jews had generally been able to identify with the universalist vision captured in the often-invoked dream of a “religion of humanity.” For as long as liberals were optimistic, the imagined spiritual unification of Germany remained an open-ended process that encompassed various interpretations of just what was meant by “religion of humanity,” be it national Protestantism, a fusion of cultural Protestantism and cultural Judaism, or materialist Weltanschauung. This changed with the spreading pessimism of the late Kulturkampf when many segments of the population were gripped by the feeling that Germany had fallen victim to the forces of national disintegration. Whipped on by antisemitic agitation, philosemites demanded that the process of Jewish assimilation be foreshortened and pressured Jewish liberals to sacrifice their difference to shore up national unity. This shift manifested itself starkly in historian Theodor Mommsen’s reply to the antisemitism of his colleague Treitschke. In an essay published in the autumn of 1880 by this stalwart of the Berlin Progressive Party, Mommsen affirmed the beneficial qualities of Germany’s racial pluralism and defended the Jewish right to freedom of conscience, but he concluded with a plea for Jews to convert to Christianity as the ultimate solution to the “Jewish question.” “The entry into a great nation has its price,” Mommsen admonished. As long as it did not contradict the dictates of their conscience, Mommsen believed that German Jews should abandon their religious affiliation, thereby fulfilling their obligation “to eliminate their particularity and cast down all barriers that stand between

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In her analysis of the central role that fraternal and romantic love between Jews and non-Jews played in the philosemitic imaginary of religious dissenters of the 1840s, Dagmar Herzog showed that this merging took place within the liberal logic of assimilation, in which the specifically Jewish identity was to be eliminated. Herzog, Intimacy, 54–84. Tschirn, Geschichte, 94.

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them and the other German citizens.”54 Thus, rather than the self-guided process of assimilation many German Jews accepted, philosemites such as Mommsen and Schaefer confronted liberal Jews with the demand for an immediate assimilation through religious conversion.

jewish responses to secularist philosemitism Secularism presented liberal German Jews with a conundrum. How could they join a national community based upon a shared secular–spiritual foundation without abandoning their own Jewish identity and community? Some clearly found an acceptable model of unity in Free Religion, and records reveal a small but steady stream of “converts” – a term that we must use guardedly because until the 1870s many if not most new Free Religionists, Jews and non-Jews alike, did not actually withdraw from their old confessions when becoming members. Jews made up roughly 3 to 5 percent of all new members in Berlin’s Free Religious Congregation in the years 1861–1878.55 Among the handful of prominent Jews who did join, there is no evidence of withdrawal from liberal Jewish social and family networks. Three Free Religious notables retained their membership in Berlin’s elite Gesellschaft der Freunde (Society of Friends), a liberal Jewish club founded in the late eighteenth century as an alternative to the bourgeois societies and masonic lodges that still excluded Jews.56 Some Jewish Free Religionists portrayed their new faith not as the abandonment but as the summation of Judaism; among them was Hermann Jacobson, the son of Israel Jacobson, one of the most radical Jewish reformers of the Napoleonic era. He announced his “conversion” to Free Religion in 1852 based on his “conviction . . . that Christianity, as understood and desired by its founder, is a further development of Judaism.”57 Others depicted Free Religion as an equal confluence of Jewish and Christian developments, such as the young rabbi Felix Adler, who shocked American Jews when he asked them to join and even lead the American Free Religious movement. “Draw in your breath,” he enjoined the members of the Temple Emanu-El in New York in October 1873, “and listen to the clear, metallic notes that ring from the pulpits of the Free Religionists here 54

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Theodor Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” in Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 212–227, 227. These estimates are based on membership lists turned over to the police. LAB A. Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, unpag. The FRC members in the Gesellschaft der Freunde were Hermann Jacobson, Adolph Abarbanell, and Rudolf Pringsheim. Other members included liberal leaders Samuel Kristeller, Ludwig Bamberger, and Aaron Bernstein. Hermann Baschwitz, Rückblick auf die hundertjährige Geschichte der Gesellschaft der Freunde zu Berlin (Berlin: R. Boll, 1892); Namen-Verzeichnis sämtlicher Mitglieder der Gesellschaft der Freunde, (Berlin: R. Boll, 1880). Thanks to Sebastian Panwitz for information about this association. Jacobson also stated that “the new edifice can rise up ever stronger and more world dominating” if built “on the ground of a general human moral system separated from Mosaic law and prepared for the world by Jesus.” Kampe, Geschichte, vol. 4, 32.

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and elsewhere. Do you not hear the great humanitarian doctrines of Judaism reecho in their words? Are not they, too, the children of the prophets – our brothers?” This sermon ended the rabbinical career of the young man who had just returned from studies in Germany, but Adler went on to become the president of the Free Religious Association of America and the founder of the Ethical Culture movement in the late 1870s.58 Many factors contributed to Jewish conversion to Free Religion. For some, there was the practical desire to overcome legal restrictions. Particularly during the Vormärz, membership in Free Religion had helped Jews and non-Jews overcome obstacles to marriage. In several instances, Jews who had previously converted to Christianity chose to join Free Religion, indicating perhaps that their initial Christian conversion had been a matter of social, marital, or professional necessity rather than of religious conviction.59 In the early 1880s, most new Jewish members in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation came from outside of Prussia, primarily from Russia. These members, for the most part merchants (Kaufleute), were never mentioned in police reports or in Free Religious publications, and seem to have taken no part in the life of the congregation.60 Their assumption of a new confessional identity through membership in Free Religion was likely a ruse to evade the wave of police expulsions of Russian Jews that began in Berlin in 1881.61 Most secularist Jews resisted conversion however. Coinciding with the Berlin Antisemitism Controversy, the entry of Berlin Jews into Free Religion dropped.62 Antisemitism compelled many Jews to reaffirm their confessional identities, a painful step for those liberals who felt they had surpassed traditional religion. Georg Brandes, a Jewish-Danish journalist and perceptive observer of Berlin society, noted in January 1881 that in the freethinking era of the 1870s 58

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Quoted in Horace Friess, Felix Adler and Ethical Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 37. See also Howard Radest, “Ethical Culture,” in The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief, Gordon Stein ed. (New York: Prometheus Books, 1985). In early 1863, two Protestants from prominent Jewish families joined the Berlin Free Religious Congregation: Cäcilia Bab, nee Mendelsohn, and the chemist Dr. Gustav Jacobson, who was a parliamentary candidate for the Nationalverein. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15041, p. 17. On Jacobson see Toury, Orientierungen, 59. Police reports and the lists of new members sent to police between the 1860s and 1880s. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, nos. 15041–15048. The expulsion of Russian Jews from Berlin began in 1881 and continued up until the early 1900s. In spring and summer of 1884, for instance, 667 Russians, primarily Jews, were expelled from Berlin. Some 4,000 more Russian Jews were expelled in the early 1900s. Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Antisemitism, 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 163. Estimates of the total number of Jews expelled from Prussia between 1880 and 1888 vary from 10,000 to 20,000. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 48. The drop in conversions of Jews to Free Religion coincided with an overall drop in formal exits from the Jewish congregations of Berlin, which did not climb again until the late 1880s. Peter Honigmann, Die Austritte aus der jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin 1873–1941. Statistische Auswertung und Interpretation (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988), 78.

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many Jews “had so completely forgotten their Judaism, that, as one put it ironically during a meeting, only now did they truly ‘become Jews – by the grace of Stoecker.’”63 The following year, Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923), like Brandes, a foreign-born Jewish writer with secularist affinities, published a novel, Der neue Ahasver, about a Jew who wanted to convert to Protestantism, but was prevented from doing so by antisemitism. In a letter to Theodor Mommsen reprinted as a preface to this novel, Mauthner explained that now more than ever, conversion was no means of countering antisemitism. Just as “no German moved to Paris during the war,” it would be cowardly for German Jews to abandon the field of battle through conversion.64 After 1880 Jews who officially left the Jewish “confession” and joined Free Religion tended to “convert” to socialism at the same time; that is, they became completely oppositional. The dropping off of conversion does not mean, however, that liberal Jews had lost interest in organized secularism.

Freethought A particularly rich case for investigating the relationship of Jewish and nonJewish secularism is provided by the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing, which was founded in May 1881 by Wilhelm Loewenthal, a Jewish physician, social hygienist, and writer. Police conjecture that Lessing was “a type of Jewish Masonic lodge” was an overstatement. Although a majority of its initial fifty-six members appear to have been Jewish, the association attracted a number of non-Jewish notables to its ranks, including writers Robert Schweichel and Richard Schmidt-Cabanis,65 and later the editor Georg Ledebour. Among prominent Jews were the editor and social activist Lina Morgenstern, the founder of Germany’s liberal unions

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Brandes, Reichshauptstadt, 394. As a language philosopher, Mauthner was also aware of the contradiction between personal Bekenntnis and public Konfession. A Bekenntnis to a religion based on a dogma was not compatible with modern culture. He asked “[w]hich confession has a dogma broad enough for one [. . .] who has lost his old faith through science?” And he answered that a belief system acceptable to an educated individual would necessarily fail to attract an entire nation, because “the greater the content of a category the smaller is its reach! That is an old axiom of logic. And only a faith that can be expressed in the shortest definition can unite the greatest number of confessors.” Fritz Mauthner, “An Theodor Mommsen,” in Der neue Ahasver. Roman aus JungBerlin (Dresden and Leipzig: Heinrich Minden, 1882), 9. Richard Schmidt-Cabanis (1838–1903), actor, humorous writer, chief editor of the Berliner Montagszeitung in 1876 and the supplement “Ulk” of Berliner Tageblatt; penned a satire of Richard Wagner Hep Hep in 1872, freemason; wrote of himself in 1897: “My intellectual work consists of clearing up the chains, called dogmas, that once served mankind marvellously by taming the passions but now . . . hem the further development of a higher morality.” Wrede and Reinfels, Das geistige Berlin, 57.

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Max Hirsch and the famous cultural critic and later Zionist Max Nordau.66 A key patron of the association was Eduard Lasker, the most important liberal Jewish politician of the nineteenth century. That the Free Religious Congregation had only a small minority of Jews while Jews initially constituted the majority of Lessing points to the different social and political milieus from which each association recruited. In 1881, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation was situated politically between the radical democratic and socialist movements and drew increasingly from the lower-middle class and the mass trades that were then drifting into the socialist camp. The students, journalists, merchants, and professionals that initially joined the Freethought Association Lessing represented those segments of the urban middle class, in which most Berlin Jews found themselves and which were politically dominated by the liberal parties.67 The Lessing Association attracted some of the city’s most influential political opinion makers. A full seven of the fifty-six original members were newspaper editors, many of whom were also leading lights in the liberal press association, Verein Berliner Presse.68 In 1877, the liberal magazine Die Gartenlaube featured a large engraving showing most of these men and women in fine attire among the handful of other leading members at the association’s ball (see Fig. 7). These were well-established figures in Berlin’s political landscape, situated largely on the left wing of the Progressive Party with some, such as Schweichel, Ledebour and Kessler, also affiliated with radical Democracy.69 The political and confessional impetus behind the formation of German Freethought can be observed in the path cut by its most famous associate, Eduard Lasker. He was elected to Lessing’s board in July 1881, and although Lasker did not accept the office because of his own reelection to the Reichstag in autumn of that year, he continued to serve as the organization’s patron. A principled champion of religious freedom, Lasker broke ranks with his own party to oppose discriminatory legislation against the Jesuits in 1872, and in 1876 he disappointed many liberal Jews when he fought for a modification to the church-leaving law to allow Orthodox Jews to secede from the Jewish 66

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LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 4, p.10. Max Nordau (1849–1923) was born in Budapest to Rabbi Gabriel Südfeld from Krotoschin, Posen. Through friendship with Wilhelm Löwenthal, he became a correspondent for Vossische Zeitung in 1881. The initial membership list turned over to the police contained the names of twenty-five merchants, seven newspaper editors, five students, six women without occupations, three writers with university degrees, two medical doctors, two bankers, one factory owner, and one Inspektor. The Jewish identity of most of these individuals is suggested by last names. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p.10. Editors included Rudolf Elcho (Berliner Volkszeitung), Max Schonau, Ferdinand Gilles, Hugo Polke, G. Lewinstein, Lina Morgenstern (Hausfrauen-Zeitung), Hardwig Köhler-Kegel (Deutschen Arbeiter-Auslandes), and Richard Schmidt-Cabanis. Another editor at the Volkszeitung, Georg Ledebour joined in 1883. Hirsch sat in the Reichstag in 1869 for the Progressive Party, and in 1879 Loewenthal served as the party’s delegate (Wahlmann) for the Berlin districts of Halle’schen Thor and Schützenstrasse. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15131.

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fig. 7: A ball of the Berlin Free Press Association, featuring members of the Freethought Association Lessing: Richard Schmidt-Cabanis, Guido Weiss, Rudolf Elcho, Robert Schweichel, and Lina Morgenstern (Courtesy: Bavarian State, Die Gartenlaube, 1877, 368–369).

congregations without ceasing to be Jews.70 Unwilling to follow Bismarck’s turn to the right, Lasker made continued support of liberalism, including secularization of the schools and public life, the grounds for forming a “Secession” from the National Liberal Party in 1880.71 The inability of liberals to realize their aims under the umbrella of the Bismarck government gave added impetus to German efforts to form autonomous Freethought organizations. Just one month before the International Freethought Congress convened in Brussels in August 1880, Bismarck’s new conservative-clerical coalition made concessions to the Catholic Church in exchange for Center Party support, a turn that the liberal papers had been fearing for some time (see Fig. 8). August Specht’s freigeistig magazine 70

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The 1873 Church-Leaving Law provided Jews the right to leave their congregations, but only as part of an “exit from Judaism.” Honigmann, Austritte aus der jüdischen Gemeinde, 11. Lasker drafted the Secession’s declaration, including this statement on religion, which appeared in August 1880: “More than for any other country, for Germany denominational and religious freedom is the foundation of domestic peace. This must be guaranteed and structured by independent law making. Its execution may not be made dependent on political interests. The inalienable rights of the state must be retained and the school may not be subordinated to clerical authority.” Quoted in Wentzcke, Politische Briefe, 357.

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fig. 8: “The honest shepard” (Bismark) says to the new Pope, “if you turn my sheep from black ones to black-white ones, I’ll travel to Canossa.” In other words, Bismark would drop his persecution of the Catholic Church if the Center Party (black) supported a new Catholic-Conservative (black-white) coalition. (Courtesy: Univeristy of Heidelberg, Kladderadatsch, 1878, no. 43.)

Menschenthum lamented this event as Bismarck’s “walk to Canossa,” evoking the image of Kaiser Henry IV’s humiliating supplication to Pope Gregory VII in 1077.72 Specht used his journal to call “for all freethinking elements to close ranks against the reactionary deluge, which with the help of clerical temptation threatens to become a flood.”73 Not surprisingly, Menschenthum applauded the Secession’s attempt to “sustain Falk’s policies in church and school.”74 In April 1881, Specht and Ludwig Büchner, the popular science author who had achieved international notoriety during the “materialism controversy” of the 1850s, gathered together German-speaking freethinkers in Frankfurt am Main to form the Deutscher Freidenker-Bund. Lasker’s trajectory into opposition was typical not just of the attitude of liberal Freethinkers as a whole, but of the shifting political allegiances of the bulk of Jewish voters as well. Historian Jacob Toury has argued that German Jews overwhelmingly favored Lasker’s National Liberal Party in the 1860s and

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Menschenthum, no. 27, July 4, 1880. Bismarck had opened up the Kulturkampf with the remark, “we are not walking to Canossa.” From the article “Schacherpolitik” (peddler’s politics), the title of which refers to Bismarck’s lessening of Kulturkampf in exchange for Center Party support. Menschenthum, no. 33 (August 15, 1880): 135. Menschenthum, no. 37 (September 12, 1880): 151.

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fig. 9: Eduard Lasker, liberal parliamentarian and patron of the Freethought Association Lessing (Courtesy: Bavarian State, Die Gartenlaube, 1873, 132).

1870s.75 Although German Jews were cautious about the precedent set by discriminatory legislation aimed at Catholics (all four Jewish members of the Reichstag refused to vote for the “Jesuit Laws” in 1872),76 most supported the secularizing agenda of the Kulturkampf. Its abandonment by the National Liberal Party in 1880 contributed to the sudden shift of Jewish votes to the Progressives and Secessionists (who united in 1884 in the Freisinnige Partei). Lasker’s association with Freethought corresponded not only to his political opposition to Bismarck, but also to his understanding of how best to respond to antisemitism. He shared the reigning left-liberal interpretation that held antisemitism to be a political ploy to undermine liberalism.77 The solution to antisemitism was, for Lasker, even more resolute liberalism and secularization.

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Whereas most German Jews supported the National Liberals until 1878, Berlin Jews had principally supported the Progressive Party. See Toury, Orientierungen, 182. Michael Gross, “Kulturkampf and Unification. German Liberals and the War against the Jesuits,” CEH 30 (1997): 545–566; Alexander Joskowicz, “Liberal Judaism and Confessional Politics of Difference in the German Kulturkampf,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 50 (2005): 177–198. In a Reichstag debate of November 1880, Progressive spokesman Eugen Richter said, “they hit the Jews, but mean the liberals,” while Franz Mehring claimed that the chief target of Stoecker’s antisemitism was the “communal dominance of the Progressive Party in individual large cities [. . .] especially Berlin.” Oertzen, Stoecker, 223; Mehring, Herr Hofprediger Stöcker der Socialpolitiker. Eine Streitschrift (Bremen: C. Schünemann, 1882), 86.

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In the run-up to the 1881 Reichstag elections, Lasker persuaded some influential Jewish leaders to provide financial support for the electoral campaigns of “decided liberals.” In a letter to the director of Frankfurt’s prestigious Jewish Philanthropin school, Lasker welcomed the struggle with antisemitism as an opportunity to cleanse liberalism of its dross.78 If strident defense of secularization was one hallmark of liberal Freethought, another was strict maintenance of polite liberal habitus against the raw and subversive aspects of plebian secularism, whether emanating from Free Religion or socialism. At the festive opening night of the Lessing Association, the literary scholar and Kulturkritiker Otto von Leixner gave a keynote speech on “the lack of ethical perspectives in art, literature and criticism” in which he attacked “the powers that currently dominate spiritual life: materialism, pessimism and frivolity that mock all ethical sensibility.”79 Thus the first public target of Berlin Freethought was not clericalism but the materialism associated with socialism and Berlin Free Religion.80 A genteel atmosphere was also cultivated at the largest annual event of the Berlin Freethought Association, its January celebration of Lessing’s birthday. In 1883, 250 guests appeared at the City Hotel, where they were treated to tableaux vivantes from Lessing’s dramas, followed by a “very poetic and dignified performance, in which humanity crowned the bust of Lessing and the good graces ‘truthfulness, justice, tolerance and love’ that had guided the poet through life were called forth again to reconcile the children of men.”81 Another indicator of the liberal bourgeois habitus occupied by the founders of Berlin Freethought was that many were, as Lessing had been, active freemasons, including Loewenthal, Schmidt-Cabanis, and Lasker. Across Europe, liberal masonic lodges had become chief sites of the integration of Jews and non-Jews and, not coincidentally they formed the chief organizational matrix from which sprang the International Federation of Freethinkers.82 Members of the Berlin FRC disparaged the political timidity of the Freethought Association Lessing under Loewenthal’s leadership, which corresponded to the unpolitical start of the DFB as a whole.83 Police observation 78

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Eduard Lasker to Hermann Baerwald, September 12, 1881, reprinted in Wentzcke, Politische Briefe, 383. The defeat of the new antisemitic parties at the polls in the elections of 1881 led Lasker, like many liberals, to falsely assume that antisemitism was a “phantom” that had passed. As reported in the Freireligiöses Sonntags-Blatt, edited by Schaefer’s local rival, the Progressive Free Religious preacher Heinrich Sachse. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 15. Lasker and Loewenthal supported Max Hirsch’s “antisocialist” German Workers Congress in 1882. On May 2, 1883, Hirsch reminded Lasker of his offer to cover “from the funds at your disposal” half of the 750 marks of debts left by the Congress, most of which was owed to Wilhelm Loewnthal’s publishing house. Eduard Lasker papers, Bundesarchiv, N2167/132. Lasker, Schweichel, Hirsch, and Loewenthal all took active part in the 1883 celebration. Volkszeitung, no. 19, January 24, 1883; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, pp. 106, 178. See comments in Menschenthum, vol. 9, no. 27 (July 4, 1880): 112. On January 22, 1882, an undercover police agent observing the Berlin FRC reported the following opinion heard at the congregation: “The [German] Union of Freethinkers will probably share the fate of the International Freethinkers Congress in Brussels and London and not initiate anything

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reports on Lessing’s early years reveal no public political protest against antisemitism or anticlerical attacks on Stoecker’s Christian Social movement or the Catholic Church. Given the participation of important local political figures, the quietism of Lessing suggests the difficulty that left-liberals had in coordinating a political response to clerical antisemitism. Among other factors, this self-censorship may be attributed to the dilemma that many liberals and liberal Jews faced after 1878. Although Bismarck’s new coalition had split the National Liberals and opened the door to increased antisemitism, liberals still identified with the Prussian-German state and were leery of appearing disloyal or risking association with Social Democracy.84 Loewenthal held out the hope of returning to the good graces of the government in his drive to recruit members for Lessing from the Progressive “Waldeck” Association. In a May 1881 speech there, Loewenthal prognosticated a future in which an extraparliamentary secularizing organization such as the Freethinkers Union would impact government policy: “When we are a great number in the Union, the government will have to make concessions to us. [. . . It] will not disrupt us, but finally support us.”85 In addition to their different political and social orientations, Freethought and Free Religion were also divided on the issue of confession. At the outset the Freethinkers were at pains to cast their organization as more secular than Free Religion. Max Nordau, who was both a corresponding member of Lessing and a participant in the founding congress of the German Union of Freethinkers, accused Free Religion of being too caught up in “the habits of confessionalism” and argued that the truly modern, independent man of science had moved beyond the need for such religious forms.86 Despite such radical posturing, there was, however, a conservative element in the Freethought position on confession. Freethinkers rejected the amendment proposed by the Free Religious preacher Carl Scholl, “who declared it to be a moral obligation of each Freethinker to quit the church, as long as it appears practical given the personal circumstances of the person concerned.”87 The delegates voted this

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or exert any influence. Until now the local affiliate association Lessing can be considered a purely social association, which displays no activity and restricts itself to meetings that are of no interest.” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 38. On the “unpolitical” nature of the DFB at its inception, see Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 85. According to Peter Pulzer, Jewish liberals shied away from political agitation against antisemitism. Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority 1848– 1933 (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 99. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15567, p. 153. When Loewenthal told the assembled Freethinkers that Lasker had declined his election to Lessing’s board following his election to the Reichstag, Loewenthal expressed his understanding for Lasker’s decision to “dedicate himself to the state,” which ultimately was “in the interest of the association and the good of the nation, for the benefit of which Lasker has always acted.” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 26. Nordau, Die conventionellen Lügen, 35. The minutes of the DFB meeting as reprinted in 120 Jahre organisierte deutsche Freidenkerbewegung (Gotha: Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, Kreisverband Gotha, 2001), 8.

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proposal down not because they had already overcome confession, but because they, as liberal bourgeois men, did not want to be forced to give up their respective confessions. In fact, it is not without a certain irony that most liberal members of this anticlerical organization remained official members of the churches and synagogues. It was not until a church-leaving movement sprung up after the collapse of the Bülow coalition in 1909 that leading bourgeois Freethinkers and Monists such as Wilhelm Ostwald and Ernst Haeckel finally did leave their confessions.88

Wilhelm Loewenthal: Freethought, Confession, and Ethics It may be assumed then that the Berlin Jews who joined Lessing hoped to find in Freethought an adequate vehicle for responding, in a moderate but forthright manner, to the problems of confessionalism and antisemitism without having to renounce the confessional identity important to them as liberals and as Jews. Nonetheless, the “Jewish Question” of German secularism appeared here too, refracted in debates carried out between Wilhelm Loewenthal and representatives of the largely non-Jewish national leadership of Freethought over the question of whether Freethought implied acceptance of naturalistic monism as a universal worldview. By following the public actions of Wilhelm Loewenthal, we discover how his resistance to the philosemitic pressure to “convert” to this worldview corresponded to his articulation of ethics as a solution to the confessional problem. Loewenthal addressed the problem of worldview and religious intolerance head on at the April 1881 founding congress of the German Union of Freethinkers, when Loewenthal asked the delegates to formally adopt a clear statement on “tolerance,” in part to counteract the accusation made by some that Freethinkers erected dogmas of their own, “for example the dogma of Darwinism.” The resolution he submitted the following day read: “The German Union of Freethinkers declares [. . .] any intolerance directed against any type of honest spiritual endeavor to be incompatible with its principles.” In the language of the day, “tolerance” was also a code word for opposition to antisemitism. Loewenthal repeatedly stressed the importance of tolerance, through speeches and the choice of the eighteenth-century playwright Gottfried Ephraim Lessing as a namesake for the Berlin Freethought association. For Lessing was not merely the author of Der Freigeist and an early proponent of reason, deism, anticlericalism, and political progress: he was also the friend of

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As a testament to the liberal resistance to confessionlessness, among the 10,000 parliamentarians who sat in German legislatures between 1871 and 1918, there was not one Christian liberal and only one Jewish liberal who became “confessionless.” Thus, almost without exception, dissidents were socialists. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben, 216.

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Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and author of “Nathan the Wise,” which George Mosse called the “Magna Carta of German Jewry.”89 The delegates in Frankfurt rejected Loewenthal’s proposal with the explanation that tolerance “is self-evident” for Freethinkers. Religious tolerance was, however, not self-evident for most Freethinkers. As we saw in the second chapter, Freethought may have supported freedom of conscience, but most Freethinkers remained intolerant of the survival of any religious dogmas alongside their humanist, monist, natural scientific Weltanschauung. When Center Party leader Ludwig Windthorst argued in parliament in 1880 that Catholics deserved full tolerance because they fought for truth just as much as liberals, the editor of the Freethinker’s house journal Menschenthum called it an “audacious slap in the face of truth.” For, he continued, “intolerance is not a daughter of truth, but a daughter of lies and error. Real truth is – as Feuerbach says – tolerant, because it is sure of itself, because it knows that at bottom nothing can oppose it, because it recognizes itself in the other, also in error, because it is convinced that life can represent the infinite unity of being only in infinite multiplicity and difference.”90 For the Freethinker, then, religions could be tolerated by positivist science as long as they did not claim to be true. The rejection of Loewenthal’s resolution on tolerance also corresponded to the failure of national Freethought to publicly commit itself to the defense of the communal rights of Jews in Germany. Numerous articles were published on the “Jewish Question” in Menschenthum. Although uniformly condemning antisemitism, many of these articles began with caveats that let the reader know that the author acknowledged the grievances of their antisemitic opponents. Some intimated, in a philosemitic fashion, that the solution to antisemitism was for Jews to cease to be Jews.91 Freethinkers, and later monists,

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Lessing was the local hero of liberal Berlin Jews. Their efforts to erect a memorial statue to him during the 1880s can be seen as a direct response to that decade’s antisemitism. Liberal associations with strong Jewish participation commonly adopted the name “Lessing,” such as Berlin’s largest freigeistig masonic lodge and a liberal Volkshochschule with a Jewish founder. Ludwig Lewin, “Zur Geschichte der Lessing-Hochschule. Berlin 1914–1933,” Berliner Arbeitsblätter für die Deutsche Volkshochschule, no. XI (1960): 1–48; George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), 15. “Glossen zu einer Kulturkampf-Debatte im preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus,” Menschenthum, vol. 9, no. 27 (July 4, 1880): 109–111. Several articles appeared in Menschenthum in 1880 and 1881 that conformed to Schaefer’s philosemitism. They saw in antisemitism an attack on “freedom of thought” and “modern progress.” Although condemning the “Judenhetze,” one writer cautioned readers not to be blind to the many shortcomings of the Jews, “which do not appear sympathetic to the Germanic spirit and temperament.” Fritz Schütz, the former editor of Menschenthum who had since emigrated to the United States, reported on his disputation with a Reformed rabbi in Milwaukee, in which the rabbi finally confessed to not believing in God. The fact that he still prayed was, for Schütz, proof of the external nature of the Jewish religion with its obedience to empty laws. A. Naumann, “Der Echte Ring” (October 10/17, 1880): 194–195; Anon., “Zur Judenhetze” (April 17, 1881); Schütz, “Reformjudenthum” (February 6, 1881): 61–62.

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portrayed the adoption of a positivist, materialist-monist worldview as an honorable way for Jews to exit their “confession.”92 Having failed to persuade the national organization of his position, Loewenthal took the struggle against monist Weltanschauung and religious intolerance to his organizing efforts in Berlin. At his first attempt to recruit members for the Lessing Association in May 1881, the observing police officer noted that Loewenthal told the members of the Waldeck Association “that no one has to leave the religious community to which he belongs, if he wants to join the [German Freethinkers] Union,” before going on to critically discuss “modern Darwinism and the ‘unbidden echoers’ of Darwin.”93 Addressing a crowd of 500 listeners in 1883, Loewenthal reserved for Freethinkers the right to criticize confessional creeds, but affirmed that “we never want to reach into the spiritual life [Gefühlsleben] of others with a rough hand, and only when it devolves into intolerance will we oppose it.” Furthermore, he concluded, “we are far from taking religion from the people, as we are often accused.”94 During discussions in the Lessing Association, Loewenthal was consistently challenged by adherents of the materialist, monist Weltanschauung, most notably by the vice chairman, Baumeister Gustav Kessler. A police protocol from early 1882 records one such argument, which began after Loewenthal’s commentary on a lecture by the radical Protestant minister Albert Kalthoff,95 who earned the approval of many freethinking Berliners for his forceful attacks on Adolf Stoecker. Loewenthal had argued “that all religion comes together in one point, thus religion must be universal, all confessions must have the same rights, none may rise above the other.” He demanded “coexistence on an entirely religious, but confessionless foundation.” In the discussion that followed, Kessler objected to this view and suggested that others in the association shared his opinion that “‘God’ [is] a hypothesis that is not necessary” and took instead a viewpoint “based on force and matter [that] can disregard religiosity.” One of the association’s active members, Sussmann, tried to mediate, stating that he “too confesses to these [Kessler’s] principles,” but added that “the Jewish religion does not contain an ideal person,” suggesting

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See, for example, Edgar Herbst, “Bedenken gegen den Austritt aus der Religionsgemeinschaft unter den Juden,” Das monistische Jahrhundert, vol. 2, no. 41 (January 10, 1914): 1166–1169. After audience members defended Darwinism, Loewenthal said by “echoers” he certainly was not referring to Ludwig Büchner or Free Religious preacher Karl Voigt, two leaders of national DFB. Police report of May 5, 1881, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15567, p. 153. Police report of meeting March 20, 1883, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 124. Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906), relieved of his duties as a pastor in 1879, founded the Protestant Reform Association in Berlin, later becoming a minister at the liberal Bremen Martini Congregation. Jewish leaders of the FRC feared that Kalthoff might upstage the Free Religious and become the champion of Berlin’s liberal Jews. Report of November 30, 1879, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15042, unpag. Kalthoff’s biography took a decidedly secularist turn. He spoke at the Freethought Association Lessing in Berlin in 1882 and was elected the first chairman of the German Monist League shortly before his death.

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thereby that its abstract notion of God was compatible with Kessler’s monist materialism. Trying to placate his opponent, Loewenthal offered a definition of religion as “simply the worship of the unknown in the undiscovered universe. God as a personal, harshly punishing God – he naturally did not share this childish viewpoint.” But Kessler persevered; he was not willing to agree to “these hazy conceptions of religion and God.” This for him was too soft, too conciliatory: “If everything that is ideal is to be God, this he could support, but a certain religion, a positive God, who stands above nature, that he denies. The priests have packaged up morality as religion with great cleverness in order to secure their influence and dominion.” This exchange reveals the ongoing tension within the secularist camp between materialist and idealist versions of monism. Kessler’s reference to Büchner’s book Force and Matter and his crude anticlericalism place him in the camp of the materialists, whereas Loewenthal’s understanding of religion as a positive form of human self-understanding and spiritual development echoes his identification with D. F. Strauss and suggests an affinity with contemporary neoKantian philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Alois Riehl, both of whom were later active in the Ethical Culture movement.96 In addition to their different political trajectories – Kessler soon outed himself as a “red” Democrat and eventually joined the SPD, whereas Loewenthal went on to support Max Hirsch’s antisocialist workers’ movement – the two men were divided by their anticonfessional perspectives. Kessler’s resolute demand for a single worldview corresponded to the philosemitic expectation of national Freethought that Jews should abandon their religion as a means of overcoming Jewish difference.97 Against this worldview, Loewenthal proposed ethics as a system that remained pluralist even while it sought to satisfy the positivist requirements of the age.

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Volkhard Krech, “From Historicism to Functionalism: The Rise of Scientific Approaches to Religions around 1900 and their Socio-Cultural Context,” Numen 47, no. 3 (2000): 252–253. Some Jewish freethinkers, such as Max Nordau, were ardent advocates of this worldview, and others sought to establish a Jewish pedigree in its production, most often by holding up Spinoza’s substance theory as the first concrete expression of philosophical monism. Freethinkers Waldeck Manasse, Jakob Stern, and Benno Borchardt wrote and lectured on Spinoza. Alexander Bragin made Spinoza the focal point of an entire freigeistig tradition of Jewish thought with ancient origins: “The fire once lit did not extinguish; it smoldered throughout the entire post-Talmudic era, it sparked up in Abraham Ibn Ezra, and become a blinding flame in the person of Baruch Spinoza.” Alexander Bragin, Die freireligiösen Strömungen im alten Judenthume. Ein Beitrag zur jüdischen Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1896), 79. A former rabbi, Jakob Stern (1843– 1911) found a bridge between Judaism and atheism in Spinoza’s substance theory, of which he was the SPD’s foremost scholar. Jakob Stern and Heiner Jestrabek, Vom Rabbiner zum Atheisten: ausgewählte religionskritische Schriften (Aschaffenburg; Berlin: IBDK-Verl., 1997). On Spinoza’s influence in secularist circles, see Tracie Matysik, “Spinozist Monism: Perspectives from within and without the Monist Movement,” in Weir, Monism, 107–134.

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Loewenthal’s hostility to exclusive worldview was a relatively new development that coincided with the rise of antisemitism. In his book Confessionless Religion of 1877, Loewenthal had already developed his essential position on ethics as the “fundamental truth, which could provide a measure for all cases [and] serve the determination of all human actions.” This work was full of optimism about the conceptual and legal space that the church-leaving law of May 1873 opened for the foundation of a new, confessionless religion. “The Prussian May Laws,” he wrote, “shine out in the Kulturkämpfe of our century as a truly heroic deed that signifies quite literally the entrance into a new, better era, like the coming of a beatifying spring.”98 With this act, the state had indicated that it would permit “us, the advocates of science and free thought” to enter the “struggle for existence” with the same right to spiritual battle as the other confessions. He envisioned the formation of small congregations of “spiritually and socially high-standing men,” who would “build the solid tree trunk from which must spring glorious buds, [and] destroying the indolence of halfthinking on its victory march, lead the good and the weak on the same righteous path [. . .] and eventually bring the thoughtless mass to knowledge and thus to true life.”99 When Loewenthal launched the Lessing Association in 1881, he was clearly seeking to implement this elitist model for change, as he was through his ongoing involvement in freemasonry. But he was now taking aim rather less at the confessions and rather more at confessional thinking within the secularist camp. A clear indication of this shift was the redefinition of the theme for an international essay contest sponsored by the Lessing Association. When the contest and a 500-mark prize were first announced in June 1881, the theme was “the best principles of a unified worldview based on logical premises.” The term “unified worldview” was so overdetermined by that point that the contest would almost certainly have harvested numerous proposals for a positivist, monist system with an anticlerical orientation. In December of the same year, Loewenthal declared that the theme had been changed to “the best formulation of moral laws to guide conduct in the relations of human life.”100 This switch was in keeping with “[t]he main task of the association,” which Loewenthal defined as “the struggle against every brutalization whether of belief or nonbelief.”101 The focus on ethics was not a turning away from Loewenthal’s earlier quest for religious unity. He told a fellow Freethinker that “[w]hat was to be substituted for

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Wilhelm Loewenthal, Die confessionslose Religion (Berlin: Elwin Staude, 1877), 88. Loewenthal, Die confessionslose Religion, XIV. The contest was advertised internationally, and contestants were allowed to submit essays in English, French, Italian, or German. The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art (1882): 141. Police report on meeting of December 2, 1881, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 26.

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religion” was precisely the idea behind the essay theme.102 Rather ethics was provided as an alternative to both religion and worldview, which nonetheless acknowledged the right of each. According to the police protocol of his March 1882 talk “on the ethical element in Freethought,” Loewenthal defined ethics as “the science of morality.” He distanced this science from religion by claiming that good and evil are relative, that is, not subject to a transcendental moral law. He then re-grounded morality as ethics in a universal law of development. “The speaker called progressive elaboration [Vervollkommnung] and development the first ethical law. All existence is progress, thus all good founded in progress.” He concluded, “we have an ethics that is not worse than any other science.”103 Loewenthal did not leave behind any lengthy elaborations of his own science of ethics, but it is clear that, like many other thinkers of his day, he was working the ground between empirical science, Kantian idealism, and historicist conceptions of the progress of spirit through successive cultural and religious manifestations.104 Despite his criticisms of dogmatic Darwinism, the theory of evolution furnished him with the scientific and temporal undergirding to which he could affix both the differentiations of religions and their future convergence in a science of ethics. According to Max Nordau, Loewenthal understood religion to be a product of man’s “prescient knowledge of the aim of evolution,” making “the instinct of development – the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge – identical with the religious need.”105 Ethical science was, for Loewenthal, the point at which the dialectic between the social drives of humanity and its evolving religious conceptions became a conscious process. In his 1887 textbook on the educational dimension of social hygiene, Loewenthal called the aim of ethical instruction in schools “to perfect as much as possible the person in the framework of his human essence, to raise him in the consciousness of his relationship to the whole, [and] as much as possible to make him, as one can put it, ideal-like, godlike.”106 Thus, rather than reject religion, Loewenthal saw it as the crucial arena for the development of human society.

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The winner of the prize, Privatdozent Georg von Gizycki, was announced by Eduard Lasker at the Lessing Festival in January 1883. At a later meeting, it was reported that sixty-five essays had been received but that some had been rejected out of hand because they were written from a Social Democratic perspective. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, pp. 17, 26, 82, 106, 136. Report of March 28, 1882, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 65. On the relationship of positivism to the development of philosophies of ethics in the 1880s and 1890s, see Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject, 41–42; Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland 1831–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983); Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 338. Wilhelm Loewenthal, Grundzüge einer Hygiene des Unterrichts (Weisbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1887), 103.

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The historical record does not allow us to delve deeper into Loewenthal’s conception of “real idealism” (which he also referred to as “ideo-realism”) as a science that would produce ethics from the empirical study to the history of religion within a developmental model of human society. There are other, betterknown professional philosophers who elaborated ethics in the terrain between positivism and Kantian idealism to greater effect. What Loewenthal’s combination of practical and theoretical work does show, however, is how much the discourse of ethics owed to the efforts of many liberals, and particularly the Jews among them, to find a means of overcoming confessional division through science that did not eradicate the right to subjective affiliation with religious and cultural communities. As such, it points out the importance of secular Jewish responses to antisemitism, philosemitism, and secularism in the emergence of the discourse of ethics in the 1880s.107

The Convergence of the Lessing Association with National Freethought In the end, Loewenthal’s effort to build Berlin Freethought upon a foundation of tolerance and ethics failed, and by 1884 the Lessing Association was moving lockstep with the national leadership. By this time, Loewenthal had taken a chair as professor of hygiene in Laussane, and most of the original notable members of Lessing no longer appeared at meetings. The organization was still recruiting many Jews, but overall its confessional and social profile was changing. Non-Jews began to predominate, and representatives of professions previously absent, such as artisans and even workers, appeared on the rolls. The simmering down of the “Antisemitism Controversy” in 1882 and 1883 may have lessened the perceived need of Jewish secularists to have Freethought respond directly to the issues raised by antisemitism. At the same time, concern for the international plight of Jews, particular in Russia, where bloody pogroms had begun in 1881, may have contributed to a weakening of some Jewish members’ interest in secularism as a means of countering persecution. In 1882, police noted the high interest of Lessing members in the “Relief Committee” to aid Russian Jews, which was probably related to the Berlin branch office of the Alliance Israélite Universelle that coordinated care and transport for fleeing Jews.108 By the early 1890s Loewenthal and fellow former Lessing member Sigismund Simmel had joined the Alliance and played an active role in the Jewish Colonization Society founded by Baron Maurice de

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Against such contextual aspects of the Jewish contribution to secular philosophies, David Biale has stressed the deep historical roots of secularism in medieval and early modern Jewish thought. David Biale, “Not in the Heavens: The Premodern Roots of Jewish Secularism,” Religion Compass vol. 2, no. 3 (2008): 340–364. Police extract, Berlin, May 24, 1882, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 87; Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 171.

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Hirsch. On behalf of Hirsch, Loewenthal traveled to Argentina, where he purchased land to settle Russian Jewish refugees.109 Meanwhile new political conflicts were emerging. Whereas in the first years the association had been dominated by figures of Berlin’s liberal establishment, beginning in March 1883 police began to notice the increased attendance of some of Berlin’s leading Democrats, who were also members of the FRC. This correlates with the rapprochement between Democrats and the left wing of the Fortschrittspartei, which eventually led to the formation of a short-lived Democratic Party in 1884–1885. Both the Waldeck and Lessing Associations were gathering points for left-liberal discontents in Berlin. In December 1883, Kessler told a liberal voters association that he did not consider himself a Progressive, and that he had only joined because he had hoped the group would “raise the old Democratic banner up high.”110 In May 1885, the apothecary Otto Friederici111 assumed leadership of the organization. He had recently become a member of the Free Religious Congregation and soon advanced to head that organization as well, serving as chairman of both organizations until Lessing was dissolved under police pressure in April 1887. Under Friederici, the Berlin Freethinkers moved to a more aggressive anticlericalism. Increasingly the lectures were constructed around the stark contrast of dogmatic religion and modern popular science. The visiting head of the DFB, Ludwig Büchner, drew a crowd of 700 to his speech on “the religious and the scientific view of the world [Weltauffassung]” in March 1886, in which he claimed that “[t]he conflict between religion and science is presently so great that a crisis is unavoidable. The blinders have fallen from the eyes of humanity and the political conditions will emerge, where no one will need to hesitate to freely speak out his opinion.” He closed with an appeal to democratic humanism: “The atheist also believes in a God, not a wrathful one, but rather in universal humanity. The last goal of our spiritual movement is [expressed in] five words: freedom, education, prosperity for all.”112 Another popular Freethought speaker of the years 1885 and 1886 was Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi,113 known to police as a “traveling agitator” and a

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Alan Astro, Yiddish South of the Border (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 19. Report of December 17, 1883, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 168. Otto Friederici (ca. 1841–1913), apothecary; attended A. T. Wislicenus’s lectures as student in Berlin; board member of Freethought Association Lessing in December 1882 and later of the national DFB; became secretary of the Berlin FRC in 1883, and emerged as a compromise candidate between social democrats, democrats and liberals as chairman of FRC in February 1886; elected to city council in 1877, chaired its accounting committee in 1890s; active supporter of cremation and anti-vaccination movements; cofounder of the Anti-Immunization Association of Germany in 1885. Menschentum, vol. 42, no. 7 (1913): 32. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 225. Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi (1833–1910), writer, Catholic, daughter of a physician, finished schooling at thirteen, completed her first novella at age fifteen, several dramas produced on stage; marriage at nineteen to an unsuccessful businessman, who set up paper factory in

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“fanatical devotee of the atheistic creed.” She drew large crowds of different social classes and of both sexes to talks such as “The circulation of matter is the soul of the world,” “The human as product of his education,” “Death and cremation,” and “Women’s rights are human rights.” Police files contain an anonymous letter to the king denouncing HenrichWilhelmi as “an atheist, raised in the Catholic Church,” who “causes great discontent through her speeches, in which she claims: ‘There is no God – hence also no divine right.’ The undersigned requests that His Excellency will cause an end to be put to the unbidden activity of this lady, who agitates against the government.”114 The police agreed with this characterization of the new radicalism of German Freethought, as expressed in the Berlin speeches of Büchner and Henrich-Wilhelmi. Their open attacks on church, God, and king and their willingness to address the “social question” led to police reprisals and censorship. Numerous Berlin Freigeistige were arrested on charges of blasphemy and lese majesty, including Henrich-Wilhelmi in 1890. This led the Volkszeitung to fulminate against “the first auto da fé against a woman in the new version of the German Empire.”115 Concern with the “social question” brought on the first major crisis of Freethought. At the Stuttgart Freethought Congress of May 1886, the former rabbi and recent Social Democrat, Jakob Stern, launched an open attack on liberal Freethought. The title of his talk, “half and full Freethought,” set the terms of the ensuing struggle for control of the movement over the next half century. For Stern, “Half” Freethinkers were those who, like D. F. Strauss, focused solely on the spiritual fetters laid by the churches, turning a blind eye to the social and political fetters that were the real hindrance to cultural progress. The liberal rejection of partisanship in the realm of culture was, for Stern, a sign of their subservient monarchism: “they have long ago ceased to respect heaven, but faced with political authorities they remove their hats, kneel down and worship them.”116 “Full” Freethinkers were those who moved beyond the materialism of empirical science and acknowledged the primary importance of economic materialism and the struggle of the working class to change social conditions.117

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Granada; traveled Germany and the United States in 1880s as a Freethinking publicist; spent two months in jail for public blasphemy; joined the Berlin FRC in 1886. Elke Gensler, “Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi – Unglaube ist der erste Schritt zur Lebensweisheit,” Diesseits, no. 87 (2009): 28–31. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 14133, p. 2. The Volkszeitung, no. 175, July 30, 1890. The responsible editor at that time was the former Freethinker Georg Lebedour. Jakob Stern, Halbes und ganzes Freidenkerthum: Zeit- und Streitschrift, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: J.H. W. Dietz, 1890), 5. According to Stern, “half” Freethought ignores “social organization” and expects salvation from morality (i.e., humanity, alone). This Stern called “Humanitätsduselei.” Stern, Halbes und ganzes Freidenkerthum, 16. Prior to leaving Judaism, Stern had pseudonymously authored a

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Police commonly assumed that socialists entered Freethought and Free Religion to compensate the loss of Social Democratic organizations shut down as a result of the “Socialist Laws.” A look at the members of Lessing, however, shows that, if anything, the movement flowed in the opposite direction. As had been the case for Free Religion since the 1860s, Freethought was a conduit for Progressives and Democrats into Social Democracy. In the years 1886–1891, a host of Berlin secularists, including Lessing members Waldeck Manasse, Ewald Vogtherr,118 Georg Ledebour, and Gustav Kessler, joined the SPD and went on to become important local and national leaders of the socialist movement by the early twentieth century. The unrepentant Democrat G. S. Schaefer took the occasion of his first and only speech at Lessing on February 12, 1887 to a crowd of 400 to shoot back at this growing socialist threat within Freethought. He directed his venom against those workers who had replaced the Christian hope for “an Eldorado in heaven” with an equally lazy expectation of earthly wealth through socialism. According to Schaefer, true progress depended on the proliferation of “right thinking,” which was achieved by individual struggle for self-improvement and self-help. Schaefer provided three examples of healthy egoism to illustrate his defense of classic liberal-democratic doctrine: the development of one’s inner character, the care of one’s body through naturopathic medicine, and the accumulation of personal wealth.119 To prove the last point Schaefer stated that he had no pity for those who had recently sold their investments at a loss because of the general fear of war. They had failed to think properly and understand that the war scare was but an election maneuver of the Bismarck government. The police interpreted this comment as an insult to the government and used it as a pretext to declare Lessing to be a political organization, which, according to the Prussian association laws, brought with it a host of restrictions, including the exclusion of women from participation in meetings or public functions. This restriction, in particular, led Lessing’s board two months later on April 21, 1887, to officially dissolve Berlin’s first Freethought organization.120

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brochure demanding that Jews eliminate all “walls of separation” between themselves and nonJews, including the Saturday sabbath, kosher laws, and endogamy. He justified this through theological unitarianism: “the individual religions are for us like the colors of the rainbow, through which the sunshine of the religious idea manifests itself.” Jakob Stern, Religiöse Scheidewände: Ein Wink in der Judenbewegung von Leo Rauchmann (Zürich: VerlagsMagazin [J. Schabelitz], 1881), 29. Ewald Vogtherr (1858–1923), son of the Deutschkatholisch preacher, attended Realschule then apprenticed in commerce; speaker and religious instructor in Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life until 1890; lectured at Freethought Association Lessing in March 1887 and joined the Berlin FRC in June; later edited Die Geistesfreiheit for the UFRC and coedited Der Freidenker; socialist, elected to Berlin Council 1890–1900, Reichstag 1893–1898, 1912–1918, 1920 (USPD); state secretary in the Reichsmarineamt during the revolution of 1918–1919, justice minister in Braunschweig 1922–1923. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 265. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, pp. 265–275.

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Until 1905 there would be no new Freethought organization in Berlin. The primary reason for this was that the FRC and Schaefer’s spin-off Humanist Congregation were both corporate members of the DFB and covered all tasks of Freethought organizations. All of the most important members of these congregations were also prominent figures in national and international Freethought. The lines of convergence between these two forms of secularism were such that their national organizations were run after 1901 in personal union by the Breslau Free Religious Preacher Gustav Tschirn (1865–1931), before the two finally fused in 1921 in the Volksbund für Geistesfreiheit (People’s Union for Spiritual Freedom). In the early 1920s, the FRC discussed changing its name and becoming the local chapter of the left-wing socialist Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker (Community of Proletarian Freethinkers). Instead it merely added the suffix “community of Freethinkers.”

The German Society for Ethical Culture Although defeated within Freethought and Free Religion, the banner of ethics was carried forward by, among others, Georg von Gizycki, the Berlin University philosopher who had won the 1882 Lessing essay competition, and Court Astronomer Wilhelm Foerster,121 who had founded Berlin’s premiere popular science institute Urania in 1889. The two spearheaded the formation of a new organization in Berlin in October 1892 that made ethics its core mission: the German Society for Ethical Culture (Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur or DGEK).122 As Foerster later recalled, two events of 1891 prompted them to begin exploratory meetings with “a number of high-minded Jewish men” and Moritz von Edigy, a retired lieutienant colonel who had become the self-styled prophet of nondenominational Christianity.123 The first event was the visit to Berlin by Felix Adler, who was promoting Ethical Culture as an international movement. The second was the controversial draft Prussian School Law proposed by the new Minister of Culture von Zedlitz-Trützschler. By codifying and extending the de facto reconfessionalization of the public schools that had followed Falk’s demission in 1879, Zedlitz’s law would have had particularly negative consequences for liberal Jews, who did not want their children 121

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Wilhelm Foerster (1832–1921), privy counsellor, director of the observatory, Protestant, Esperantist. Georg von Gizycki, Grundzüge der Moral: Gekrönte Preisschrift (Leipzig: Wilhelm Friedrich Königliche Buchhandlung, 1883). Gizycki’s 1875 dissertation reveals his early interest in the philosophical consequences of natural science: Georg von Giyzcki, Versuch über die philosophischen Consequenzen der Goethe-Lamarck-Darwin’schen Evolutionstheorie. InauguralDissertation (Berlin: Carl Lindow, 1875). For a history of debates over ethics that begins with the founding of the DGEK, see Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject. Wilhelm Foerster, Lebenserinnerungen und Lebenshoffnungen (1832 bis 1910) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911), 226, 13. Among the prominent Jewish founders of the DGEK were Hermann Cohen, Max Hirsch, and Samuel Kristeller.

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segregated in Jewish schools.124 Thus, like the Lessing Association, the formation of the DGEK was prompted by a conservative assault on secular traditions that contained within it an antisemitic barb. Unlike Freethought and Free Religion, the DGEK represented a new type of organization that meant to influence German society, religion, and politics from the highest social echelons. It self-consciously stylized itself as an “aristocracy of the spirit,” and in the list of thirty-two original members a number of prominent professors were intermingled with representatives of true aristocracy. These elites clashed with more plebian Berlin secularists at the founding meetings of the organization in October 1892, which were open to the public but for which voting privileges appear to have been restricted to registered members.125 Although Foerster remembered that “the meetings were always attended by several hundred people, among them also Social Democrats and even some of the people then decried as raging anarchists,”126 the minutes of these meetings reveal that the majority of those uninvited guests who spoke in opposition were, in fact, representatives of local or national Free Religion.127 The intention of this group to contest the program of the organizers was expressed right at the outset, when someone “from the floor” challenged the election of the meeting chair and secretary and proposed instead two members of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation: chairman Otto Friederici and science popularizer Wilhelm Bölsche.128 The meetings turned into a three-day skirmish between radical secularists and the liberal ethicists. The differences of opinion on worldview and religious tolerance that had separated Loewenthal and Kessler, and yet been contained within Freethought, now provided the conceptual framework by means of which Ethical Culture defined and defended itself against the mainstream of organized German secularism. The debates during the course of these founding meetings

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Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civic Equality (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 126. In 1891, 91.2 percent of all Catholic children and 95.6 percent of all Protestant, but only 31.2 percent of all Jewish children received instruction in a public school of their own confession. The push for greater clerical influence over the schools was in keeping with the Cabinet Order of May 1, 1889, which expressed the new emperor’s wish to “make the elementary schools useful in counteracting the spread of socialist and communist ideas.” Lamberti, Elementary School, 96, 157. Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 20, 1892), 5. Foerster, Lebenserinnerungen, 228. Of the forty-seven persons recorded as discussants in the first four days of the founding meeting were five members of the Berlin FRC (Schaefer, Vogtherr, Manasse, Friederici, and Günther), two national Free Religious leaders (Preachers Schneider and Voigt) and the noted monist Ernst Haeckel. There remained only four persons not directly affiliated to Berlin Freigeistigkeit (Carl Grünberg, Petersdorf, Buchholz, Köhn) who made “socialist” or “anarchist” statements. Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 20, 1892), 5–32. Mitteilungen, 5. In the months leading up to the founding of the DGEK, Bölsche’s Freie Bühne had already criticized the elitist profile with which the Ethicists were making their public appeals. For a description of the social composition of the DGEK, see Chapter 3.

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produced clear articulations of how the now-antagonistic parties proposed to heal the confessional divisions of the German polity. By examining three of these, we can summarize the supraconfessional options circulating in the wider secularist scene at the end of the nineteenth century. The first solution was proposed by Moritz von Egidy (1847–1898), who announced that he had decided not to officially join the DGEK. Although he and the Society shared the same goals, he felt that ethics was not enough to fulfill the yearning of the German people for “true religion.” Egidy was the charismatic leader of “United Christianity,” which called for a spiritual renewal of Germany through a refounding of Christianity as a “movement” outside the walls of the churches. Egidy defined religion as a preconscious spiritual unity, from which all confessions and worldviews issued.129 Although his Christianity placed him clearly outside of secularism, his definition of religion had a broad appeal among liberal and avant-garde Freigeistige and coincided with the beginning of a more positive reception in these circles of an undogmatic Christianity. Egidy had a particularly strong influence on early twentieth-century völkisch thinkers. Although Edigy did have some Jewish admirers, he considered “Christianity the most perfect religion,” thus implicitly excluding non-converted Jews from the respiritualized Volk.130 The next solution to the confessional split was offered by sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, one of the key figures of the DGEK. He picked up on ideas articulated a decade earlier by Loewenthal and proposed a science of ethics as a common basis for moral action that could encompass rather than eliminate the various confessions. He proposed that the DGEK accept adherents of all religions and acknowledge as “a scientific truth” that “morality was independent of religion, superior to it and did not necessarily develop through it.” This meant “that the atheist could be just as moral or even more [moral] than the adherent of any faith in God.” In other words, adherents of ethics as science would have to be willing to objectify their moral beliefs and subject them to scientific scrutiny. For Tönnies, this submission to the scientific method meant, for instance, that ethicists would have to accept nonreligious explanations of religious phenomena, because “moral behavior, like any other event, is the consequence of causes, and [. . .] the causes of moral conditions are grounded in the general social conditions.” Ultimately Tönnies thus understood ethics to be a subfield of his own discipline of sociology. Through sociology he believed the Ethical Society could 129

130

On Egidy’s postsecular definition of religion that included atheists as “believers,” see notes on a speech given in Berlin, Berliner Zeitung, no. 180, April 17, 1894. In his 1890 manifesto Ernste Gedanken, Egidy provided a humanistic definition of religion as “the preservation of the divine spark which glows originally in every man,” and which is “a germ of love.” His movement aimed to raise humanity to replace the church: “This one God dwells in the heart of every man; his House is therefore mankind.” Moritz von Egidy, Serious Thoughts (London: Luzac & Co., 1891), 1–3. Egidy’s spiritual humanism was compatible with both cosmopolitan and nationalist-völkisch political agendas, Dissidenten, 122–126; and Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 47–50.

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rise above the divisive politics associated with the “social question” and arrive at objective social policies. Such policies might involve some personal and even social sacrifices, for, as Tönnies warned his listeners, he “regarded as essential the transformation of the system of ownership and laws of property.”131 In the discussion following his speech, the Free Religionists and Freethinkers present promptly attacked Tönnies for his idealistic belief that a science of religion might lead the reactionary churches and classes to abandon their grip on key institutions. In these attacks a third position on confession was articulated. Georg Schneider and Karl Voigt, Free Religious preachers in Mannheim and Offenbach, respectively, stated that the organization would have to take a clear anticlerical position in order to achieve its aims. The Social Democratic city councilor and leading member of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation Ewald Vogtherr denied the possibility of overcoming confessional division by mere liberal tolerance. “[T]he Society will have to show its colors regarding the confessions,” he demanded. “Either Protestant, Catholic, Jew or none of the three!”132 This outburst sums up the dominant secularist position on confessionalism. It called for strict anticlericalism to disempower or destroy the confessions rather than fuse them via ethics, while at the same time constituting secularism ex negativo as a partisan formation within the struggle of the confessions. The “German Darwin” and later founder of the Monist League Professor Ernst Haeckel appeared on the third day and argued similarly for the clear division of ethics from traditional religion, for “[o]nly ethics is religion for us!” In his eyes, scientific ethics was identical with scientific Weltanschauung, and the practical path to the promotion of ethics lay in an intensification of the anticlerical struggle.133 Wilhelm Foerster responded critically to Haeckel with the words: “[w]hen it comes to Weltanschauung we all get a little jittery.” Although willing to “greet Prof. Haeckel as a brother in ethicis, he was in no way in agreement with his worldview.” The following day, Foerster unrolled a criticism of worldviews from an ethical perspective, accusing them of contributing to rather than solving the confessional and party-political division of society. Whether economic or natural scientific (i.e., Marxist or monist), worldviews necessarily provided the false answer to the “social question,” which he called the “riddle of the sphinx.” Only a nonpartisan ethical position could address the suffering of the masses without preparing the ground for socialist revolution. “[A]s can be proven historically,” he concluded, “a philosophical or natural-scientific worldview in no way guards against a return of [inquisitorial] atrocities.” This is only 131

132 133

Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 20, 1892), 7. Tönnies’s famous work of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, offered a sociological theory of modernization with elements of cultural criticism. Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 20, 1892), 22. Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 20, 1892), 20.

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achieved through “the cultivation of true humanity, the feeling of solidarity with the happiness and suffering of all.”134 Despite its critique of worldview, Ethical Culture manifested the same tensions over philosemitism as the other secularist organizations examined thus far. In his first public talk after the founding of the DGEK, Wilhelm Foerster spoke on “the ethics of nationalism and the Jewish question,” telling listeners why he considered Jewish participation of vital importance to the success of the DGEK. Antisemitism was a manifestation of the contemporary malaise inflicted on Germany by chauvinistic, militaristic nationalism, and reconciliation with Jews would be a key part of its cure. At the same time, he believed the Jews were equally in need of a cure. He equated Jewish separatism with exclusive Jewish nationalism and declared: “as supporters of ethical culture, we call to the Jews: do not organize amongst yourselves, rather join with us against all evil, also in your own ranks, against German and against Jewish nationalism.” During the discussion, in which Schaefer and Max Hirsch and several leading liberal Jews participated, it was proposed that the DGEK issue a declaration against antisemitism. Foerster rejected the proposal because it would “have no great value for the outer [world], because the Society and this meeting are comprised in large measure of Jews, as he expressly recognizes and welcomes.”135 Although the conservative press indeed interpreted the DGEK as a front for liberal-Jewish anticlericalism, Foerster’s statements again demonstrate the ambivalence that constituted secularist philosemitism.136 Ethical Culture addressed the confessional quandary of freethinking liberals, who wished to overcome confessionalism without abandoning their respective confessions. An ethics produced through the comparative analysis of the moral content of different religions would rise above religion. It promised a means of modernizing the religions and ending confessional struggle between them without calling on one to submit to the other. (The ethicists were decidedly less ecumenical in their treatment of “primitive” religions, which were at that time widely interpreted as inferior antecedents to monotheistic religions.) Science or the scientific method appeared as the mediator and new authority.137

134 135

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Mitteilungen, 21, 28–29. Participants in the discussion included Schaefer, Engel, Obert von Gizycki, Schriftsteller Stern, Prof. Löw, S. Kristeller, Sanitäts-Rat Zimmermann, Dr. Lütgenau, Dr. Max Hirsch, Dr. Albert Levy, and Jaffe. Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 2 (March 2, 1893): 48–49. Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung, October 28, 1892. The article suggested that the liberal Jewish leadership of the DGEK had initially used the reputation of prominent non-Jewish figures as figureheads and subsequently discarded them. See the comments by DGEK cofounder on such antisemitic argumentation, in Ferdinand Tönnies, Nietzsche-Narren in der “Zukunft” und in der “Gegenwart,” vol. 1, “Ethische Cultur” und ihr Geleite (Berlin: Ferd. Däumlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1893), 32. On antisemitic inflections of the animal rights debate in the early DGEK, see Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject, 35–38. On the third meeting day, Foerster said, “we want to ethicize the churches. That will not happen quickly, we are the weak ones at present, and they have more power than ever. We do not want to

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Confessional affiliation, so essential to the social honor of nineteenth-century liberals, remained untouched. By subjugating Darwinian-inspired natural scientific Weltanschauung and socialist Weltanschauung to the same conditions as the churches, ethics managed to appear as a new liberal perspective “above the parties.”138 Although they eschewed politics, the early members of the DGEK had a clearly defined partisan position when it came to their intimate enemies among the Freethinkers, Social Democrats, and Anarchists.139 The organization used control of membership to exclude would-be usurpers from the ranks of other secularist organizations. Ultimately, however, the sharp opposition to Freethought was lessened after the former teacher and future speaker of the Humanist Congregation Rudolf Penzig140 became the Society’s director in 1903. Under his aegis the DGEK was reconciled with other secularist organizations and began to take part in coordinated common political campaigns, such as the effort to establish secular schools.141 Conclusion Germany’s evolving political and confessional crisis of the last third of the nineteenth century reframed the “Jewish question” together with the question of secularism. This chapter has taken in turn the public statements of antisemites, philosemitic secularists, and liberal Jewish secularists, and shown that the answers each group proposed to the “Jewish question” contributed in a different manner to the confessionalization of German secularism. As a way of concluding this chapter, I would like to show how these findings confirm but also challenge

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allow ourselves to be drawn into enmity and also not forget what religion contributed and still contributes to cultural development.” Mitteilungen, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 20, 1892): 22, 23. A key trope of German political discourse regularly invoked by the monarchy, the churches, and the liberal parties, the phrase “above the parties” reflected a distaste for partisan politics. See James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the 19th-Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Tönnies, Gizycki, and Wilhelm Förster sought some communication with the socialist community; however, when a leading member of the DGEK, Lily von Gizycki (later Braun), actually backed the SPD in 1895, she was forced to leave. The strategic position of the DGEK against socialism is expressed in the 1893 committee report that called for a “popular ethical literature” directed “against so-called practical materialism and anarchism, against the delusional teaching of the right of the superman (Übermenschen), etc.” Mitteilungen, vol. 2, no. 2 (January 1894), 15–16; Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject, 179. Rudolf Penzig (1855–1931): son of a Protestant minister; studied theology and philosophy in Breslau and Halle; left Protestant church in 1878; lost school position at the Schnepfenthaler Philanthropin; became secretary of the DGEK in 1893 and chairman around 1900; successor to G. S. Schaefer as speaker for the Humanist Congregation; cofounder of Freie Hochschule; educational reformer; freemason. Susanne Enders, Moralunterricht und Lebenskunde (Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 2002), 254, Geistesfreiheit (1930), 34–35. Groschopp, Dissidenten; Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject, 98; Enders, Lebenskunde, 150–167.

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recent studies on the place of the “Jewish question” in the literature on political secularism mentioned in the Introduction to this book. The common assumption in this emerging literature has been that the negotiations over Jewish emancipation helped constitute key aspects of the modern nation-state and liberal public sphere. Dagmar Herzog and Aamir Mufti have thematized the ambivalence at the heart of the philosemitism, by which liberals affirmed through commitment to Jewish assimilation the universality of state, nation, and public sphere, but then condemned the persistence of Jewish difference as a challenge to this very universality.142 This tension between the assimilation of and the hostility to minority difference provided, according to political philosopher Wendy Brown, a differential through which the modern state and civil society developed the concept of tolerance. She describes tolerance as a discursive practice that extended rights to Jews while placing them on notice that these rights could be withdrawn if they did not adhere to majoritarian expectations. A tolerated minority is thus one subject to regulation and the threat of intolerance.143 This tolerance forms an axiom of secular governance and played a key role in extending the hegemony of the state and liberalism over the nation. Our investigation has confirmed this finding insofar as it has shown that essentially all actors in the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” criticized Jews within the framework provided by the discourse of tolerance. Adolf Stoecker’s opening salvo in 1879 was an admonishment to German Jews to be “a little more modest, a little more tolerant,” whereas philosemites such as G. S. Schaefer and Theodor Mommsen spoke of Jewish “excesses.” Even liberal Jewish critics of anti- and philosemitism such as Hermann Cohen and Fritz Mauthner urged fellow Jews to assimilate more fully with German culture and eliminate their “negative peculiarities.”144 Pressure for Jewish emancipation lined up with the expectation that national unity would involve the overcoming of confession. Yet, although this logic was widely shared across the political and religious spectrum, it did not lead to a binary ordering of religious conflict or to the extension of the hegemony of liberalism, as the recent studies discussed in the introduction have suggested. 142 143

144

Herzog, Intimacy; Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 1–90. Brown writes: “Political and civic tolerance [. . .] emerges when a group difference that poses a challenge to the definition or binding features of the whole must be incorporated but also must be sustained as difference: regulated, managed and controlled. . . . [I]n their association and in the racialization of their identity, Jews do pose such a threat; tolerance is the mantle cast over their emancipation to contain it.” Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 71. Hermann Cohen assured Treitschke that German Jews would continue to rid themselves of the “negative peculiarities” of their people. Quoted in Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 100. In the mid-1880s, Mauthner had penned a novel set in his native Bohemia describing the heroic struggle of a sole Protestant German against the onslaught of crude Catholic Czech nationalists. Between the fronts Mauthner placed an ambivalent turncoat in the form of the Jewish pub owner, who speaks German but claims to be Czech when it suits him. Der letzte Deutsche von Blatna (Berlin: Ullstein, n.d.).

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Instead, each anticonfessional model and each solution to the “Jewish Question” deepened confessional antagonisms in Germany. By arguing that the bulk of German Jewry had switched its faith from monotheism to materialist humanism, antisemites sought to expose the universalist claims of both liberal secularity and radical organized secularism to be particularistic creeds that had no right to be tolerated. The response of philosemites such as G. S. Schaefer was to reassert the key tenets of liberalism, namely tolerance and the separation of church and state, while at the same time demanding Jewish assimilation within the secularist fold. This demand had always been present in German secularism but became more urgent as anxieties of national disintegration spread across the political and religious spectrum in the wake of the Kulturkampf and its failure. Those influential Berlin Jews who formed the Lessing association in 1881 believed that Freethought offered a means of upholding secularism without having to leave their confessional identification as Jews. Yet, even in Freethought, liberal Jews were pressured to confess the materialist-monist worldview. Against this pressure, Wilhelm Loewenthal, and later the founders of the DGEK, promoted ethics. Ethics provided a second-order perspective that enabled them to analyze the monist worldview in the same frame as religion. It is no coincidence that this decisive critique of worldview appeared in secularist organizations with a strong Jewish membership. According to literary scholar Aamir Mufti, the liminal position that Jews were assigned in the imagined national communities of the modern era destined Jewish intellectuals to be preeminent critics of the myths of nationalism.145 The same appears to be true of the Jewish critics of secularist worldview. Whereas resistance to the exclusion of their community from the nation prompted Jewish thinkers to demystify and thereby “secularize” the nation – this is Mufti’s conclusion – resistance to philosemitism prompted Jewish Freethinkers and Ethicists to demystify the monist worldview by revealing it to be as much dogma as science. In so doing, it may be said that they “secularized” radical secularism. Jews did not, of course, occupy the only position predisposing them to criticize worldviews. Many liberals, non-Jews and Jews alike, saw in secularism a threat to their bourgeois identity. Politically, they identified in the monist worldview a vehicle for the integral nationalism of Haeckel, or, more worryingly, the socialist universalism of Vogtherr. Although the Jewish and liberal Ethicists were able to demystify Freethought and Free Religion and expose them to be a “fourth confession,” it would be false to leave the DGEK in its selfproclaimed position “above the parties.” The discourse of ethics emerged from a desire not to debunk the dream of national spiritual unity, but to reformulate it. 145

Mufti, a scholar interested in modern Muslim critics of the secularism of the “Hindu” Indian state, sees himself working in a critical tradition that stands on the shoulders of Jewish thinkers from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to Heinrich Heine and Moses Mendelssohn. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 89.

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Ethical Culture remained trapped, like Freethought and Free Religion, by the premise that a new and universal Bekenntnis beyond the confessions was necessary to produce national unity. By positing a unity prior or subsequent to the confessionally divided nation, anticonfessionalism of any stripe only exacerbated confessional tensions. Thus, each model of overcoming confession within the secularist tradition, beginning with the rational Christian dissent of the Deutschkatholiken, proceeding to a monist-atheist Weltanschauung, and ending with a science of ethics, was effectively re-inscribed into the confessional system that it could not change. Within the confessional paradigm, the notion that inner Bekenntnis could be separated from exterior Konfession was an illusion. Criticism, too, was trapped by the logic of confession, as revealed in the following announcement made by the editors of the Egidy movement’s journal Ernstes Wollen in June 1900: We are leaving [. . .] the “struggle for worldview,” for “confession” – because every worldview, however emancipated it might be, is for us just a confession among the other confessions – and are taking the last conceivable step, to the highest unified worldview, alongside which and above which there can be for us humans no other: the worldview for which religion and art flow together.146

Made without a trace of self-irony, this statement deconstructs itself. Each new mode of unification could only recreate the failure of that which preceded it. The problem lay not with the solution but with the framing of the question.147 Each failed solution to the “confessional question” contained within it a failed solution to the “Jewish question.” This was of course also true of the solutions proposed by Jewish secularists themselves. As antisemitism rose in the waning years of the First World War, Georg Zepler (1859–1925), a Jewish physician and sometimes socialist who led Berlin’s Union of the Confessionless (Bund der Konfessionslosen), proposed the following: “If the most personal interests of the individual are taken into account, the best solution to the Jewish question would result from the legal exit [Austritt] from Judaism and the legal entry [Übertritt] into confessionlessness. This conversion implies no sacrifice of the intellect, as [is the case] with baptism.”

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Regina Deutsch and Heinrich Driesmann, “Pfingsten,” Ernstes Wollen. Herausgegeben von Mitarbeitern der früheren Versöhnung M. von Egidys (1899), 67. The Egidy movement can be taken as representative of the blossoming field of what might be termed the “postrational” or “postsecular” sects that populated Berlin in the last two decades of the Kaiserreich. The philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach related the decline of Weltanschauung after the Second World War to the “renunciation” by political pragmatists of efforts to ground justification for action. In other words, one had not solved the problem of Weltanschauung, but one simply stopped posing the question. Herbert Schnädelbach, “Weltanschauung,” in Lexikon zur Geschichte und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1971): 842– 843, 843.

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Zepler then suggested that those Jews who did not want to reject their heritage could join together in a “society for confessionless [people] of Jewish background,” thus implicitly recreating the confessional differences that confessionlessness was to eliminate.148 In 1899, the Jewish publicist Karl Kraus approached the problem of confessionlessness from another direction. Responding to a reader’s suggestion that he use the pages of Die Fackel to promote a “confessionless religion” as a means to overcome antisemitism and establish religious peace, Kraus argued that even if one could dream up a “common religion of the educated” that mediated “between the teachings of all existing churches,” it could never compete with real religions. Just as the artificial languages Volapük and Esperanto pretended to be world languages but lived in the shadow of international English, Ethical Culture was a type of “moral Volapük” destined to remain a muddy sect incomparable to the world religions that “actually unite wide segments of modern humanity.”149 Despite his advocacy of monism and anticlericalism, Max Nordau, too, struck a pessimistic note when considering confessionlessness as a means for secular Jews to end discrimination. He recounted how the Austrian church-leaving law of 1869 had not only failed to damage the confessional system, but had ironically reinforced the connection of secularism and Judaism in the minds of antisemites. Those Jews who took advantage of the church-leaving law found that few Christians followed suit, making “confessionless and Jewish nearly synonymous.” Thus, when students registering at the University of Vienna answered the usual question about religious affiliation with “confessionless!,” the university registrar customarily responded “with a goodnatured smile” and the comment, “Why didn’t you just say straight out that you are a Jew!”150

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Privatweg, no. 2 (August 1918): 33. The Bund der Konfessionslosen was an offshoot of the Komite Konfessionslos. Die Fackel, no. 14 (August 1899): 16–17. Nordau, Die conventionellen Lügen, 34.

7 Secularism in Wilhelmine Germany

The early twentieth century marked a second high point in the organizational and political history of German secularism. A new generation of secularist intellectuals appeared on the scene and helped shape the reform movements of the era. For many of them, monism became the watchword of the day. The first explicitly monist organization, the Giordano Bruno League, was founded in Berlin in 1900, and in 1906 the German Monist League was launched in Jena by biologist Ernst Haeckel. The influence of monism can be traced via figures such as Helene Stoecker and Magnus Hirschfeld into prewar feminist and homosexual rights circles. Other monists took up leading posts in Germany’s social reform associations and pacifist organizations, as well as avant-garde artistic movements. Given the proliferation of secularist reform experimentation, it would demand too much of the reader to cover the period between the founding of the German Society for Ethical Culture and the First World War with the same level of detail that has been dedicated to the period between 1845 and 1892. Instead, this chapter provides a general picture of Wilhelmine secularism through a chronological comparison that highlights continuities and changes in the confessional dimensions of secularism, as laid out in the first four chapters. By comparing, in turn, constitutional questions, worldview, social factors, and politics, the chapter seeks to capture the key developments of this period, while at the same time summarizing and reflecting on the findings of the book as a whole.

the confessional framework By allowing its citizens to become “confessionless,” yet retaining intact the traditional privileges granted to the Christian confessions, the “Dissidents’ Law” of March 1847 had created a constitutional space for the “fourth confession.” It was a measure designed to defend the confessional foundation of the 253

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Prussian state, which nonetheless acknowledged in law the forces of secularism and liberalism. Most of these constitutional arrangements survived into the unified German state, which is testimony to the semi-democratic system of governance that Bismarck had forged. The parliaments were free to regulate the rights of the citizen, but they were not able to infringe upon the rights of the state and by extension the state churches. The Reichstag declared Jewish emancipation in 1869 and the state governments liberalized church-leaving laws in 1870s, but these measures did not end state discrimination against Jews and dissidents. Right up to the collapse of the monarchy in 1918, the courts routinely upheld the state’s right to exclude dissidents from state service and force their children to attend mandatory Christian religious instruction in school. “The principles of the state are confessional,” read an 1893 court ruling against a worker from the Berlin suburb of Adlershof, who had sought to remove his child from religious instruction. “In the field of public instruction,” it explained, “the state has retained for itself sole dominion. Thus it cannot be assumed that the freedom of religious practice granted in Article 12 of the Constitution removes the religious requirements demanded by the Civil Code [Landrecht]. Freedom of religion is a right of the individual, religious instruction is a state matter.”1 The endurance of such confessional structures until 1918 speaks to the failure of nineteenth-century German liberalism to make significant inroads into the prerogatives of the monarchic state after 1878. However, there is evidence that the state, too, became increasingly bound to a status quo in which organized confessional groups jealously guarded their interests. Its efforts to alter the uneven distribution of confessional goods in the Wilhelmine period were hampered if not always hindered by ensuing public debates and protests, in which the quadriconfessional dynamic of the confessional field became manifest. A few examples may suffice to illustrate this. Following the expiration of the “socialist laws” in 1890, the kaiser looked to religious education as a means to counteract the socialist menace. His Minister of Culture von Zedlitz-Trützschler sought to roll back the secularization of the schools, which, as we saw in the last chapter, prompted Jewish and secularist liberals to form the DGEK. Public protest led to the scrapping of proposed legislation, but the state pursued elements of his policies in practice. The Berlin Schulkollegium, a body dominated by state and church officials, imposed a ban on the secularist confirmation classes of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in the early 1890s. The congregation was never able to overturn this decision, but it did use it for public protest. This took the form of a calculated violation of the ban. Rather than pay the ensuing fine, the confirmation teacher Bruno Wille2 had himself arrested 1 2

Reichsbote, February 19, 1893. Bruno Wille (1860–1928), author, educator, and political activist; became active in Democratic and socialist circles as a student and took an active part in the literary associations of the Berlin naturalists; joined the Berlin FRC October 16, 1888, shortly after first speech there, and became the most frequent speaker and chief religious teacher in 1890s; editor of Der Freidenker; founder of

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and the congregation began a media campaign portraying Wille as a martyr for freedom of conscience. In a public act of protest that also revealed his penchant for humor, the later chairman of the congregation and well-known socialist radical, Adolph Hoffmann, registered his dissident children for Jewish religious instruction.3 Another constellation of alliances across the quadriconfessional field became possible following the announcement in 1903 that the state intended to lift elements of the 1873 Jesuit Laws. This prompted the Monist Ernst Haeckel to join with confessionally organized members of the Protestant League to form the Anti-Ultramontane Reichsverband in 1906–1907.4 A further example is provided by the protests inadvertently caused by the decision of the Prussian state to rationalize the income stream of the Protestant church in 1905 and replace the various fees for clerical services with a yearly tax based on individual earnings. This led to anger among nonpracticing church members and a dramatic rise in the number of church leavers, above all in Berlin, where the FRC had been campaigning for church leaving since the 1890s.5 Campaigns in 1906–1907 and 1910–1914 led thousands of Germans to leave the churches.

worldview Monism constituted the essential worldview of nineteenth-century German secularism. The first generation of Free Religious leaders in Berlin had arrived at a philosophically and theologically eclectic but recognizably monistic worldview around 1850, and by 1870 the second generation had achieved a more solid epistemological foundation in materialistic monism. Largely in keeping with Ernst Haeckel’s formulations of that time, this generation assumed that the natural sciences held the key to opening the book of nature and marveling at the unity of existence, the harmony of morals, and the beauty presumed to be contained within. This worldview met with some stiff resistance in Wilhelmine Germany. The German Society for Ethical Culture directly challenged the secularist belief that natural science itself produced a single worldview. Similar criticisms are found in the writings of philosopher Heinrich Rickert, the sociologist Max Weber, and others, who argued that worldviews constituted a system of thought based on

3

4 5

numerous organizations, including Freie Volksbühne, Giordano Bruno League, and Freie Akademie. Left the SPD following his leadership of the communitarian-anarchistic revolt of the “Jungen” in the early 1890s. Bruno Wille, Aus Traum und Kampf: Mein 60jähriges Leben (Berlin: Kultur-Verlag, 1920). Die Post, November 11, 1895, no. 314; Eckhard Müller, “‘Los von der Kirche!’ – Der ‘ZehnGebote-Hoffmann,’” in Diesseits (2/2008): 30–33. Müller-Dreier, Konfession in Politik, 265–267. Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 280–281.

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value and not on empirical truth.6 Yet the Ethicists’ abstention from worldview was of short duration, and academic efforts to neutralize naturalistic worldview did little to curb the increasing public demand for worldview. Rather, such criticisms were symptomatic of the proliferation of worldviews, which prompted Fritz Mauthner to jest in 1910 that “whoever does not have his own worldview today, must be a very poor blighter indeed.”7 This fin-de-siècle vogue for “worldviews” points to the importance of secularism in the history of modern political ideas. Secularists had pioneered the term’s use at mid-century to link natural science, ethics, and politics to the search for alternatives to Christian theology. Nonetheless, the question still remains as to the impact on secularism of the rising competition over the definition of worldview. Did worldview pluralism shake the epistemological security of secularists, who generally adhered to a binary understanding of the “old and the new” worldview, as formulated prominently by Eduard Baltzer and D. F. Strauss? The short answer is that despite their reception of the worldview variations offered by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and eventually Freud, secularists defended their faith in natural scientific monist materialism with remarkable doggedness. Indeed, around 1900 a series of new organizations were founded with the aim of consolidating monist worldview and propagating it to a wider public. The sudden worldwide popularity of the term “monism” was to a certain extent a direct result of the success of Ernst Haeckel’s manifesto Die Welträtsel, which was translated and published as The Riddle of the Universe in 1900. By some accounts, this book was the most popular work of science hitherto published in Germany, where 300,000 copies had been sold by 1914.8 Asserting that monism could crack the key “riddles” of science and philosophy, the book heralded a coming age when natural science would solve modern society’s most vexing issues. Part of the appeal of Haeckel’s version of monism was that by insisting that all matter has spirit, it half denied its own mechanistic materialism. Monism was a broad church in Wilhelmine Germany, and other monisms were on offer that sought to overcome Haeckel’s mechanism. Scientific philosophers and philosophizing scientists, inspired by the theories of Gustav Fechner, sought to bring a more neutral monism to scientific inquiry, primarily in the growing field of psychology. Prominent scientists, such as Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Wundt, and Richard Avenarius, undertook experiments in the physiology of perception, and psychophysical parallelism was considered on the

6

7 8

Max Weber, “Die Grenznutzlehre und das ‘psychophysische Grundgesetz’.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, edited by Johannes Winckelmann, (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988): 384–399; Heinrich Rickert, “Psychologie der Weltanschauungen und Philosophie der Werte,” Logos IX, 1920–1921: 1–42. Fritz Mauthner, “Weltanschauung,” in Wörterbuch der Philosophie: 430. Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 25.

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philosophical side by the likes of William James and Bertrand Russell.9 Wilhelm Wundt gave clear expression to the monistic impetus that drove this research when he wrote that one of his chief life aims had been to establish the connection between Welterkenntnis and Weltanschauung, or as he puts it, between empirical science and “philosophical contemplation of the whole.” Against the reigning worldviews of materialism and theism, which had their origins in immanent and transcendent conceptions of god, he sought a “unified worldview,” which “finds its necessary substrate in the sensory world and [finds] in the spiritual world the living form of this substrate as given in human consciousness.”10 These thinkers were widely received by secularist intellectuals internationally. Mach’s “empirio-monism” became so influential among Bolshevik intellectuals that Lenin devoted an extensive theoretical book to its refutation.11 However, the most outspoken Monist scientist to emerge from this generation was chemist Wilhelm Ostwald,12 who launched his public career as a monist in 1895 at the Congress of Physicians and Natural Scientists in Lübeck. The annual meetings of this society had been the chosen site of confrontations between monists and anti-monists since 1872, when physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond famously declared that natural science had limits, and that as a sign of their maturity, natural scientists were duty-bound to declare “ignorabimus” – we will not know – when confronted with the “world riddles.” In his Lübeck speech “On overcoming scientific materialism,” Ostwald took on du Bois-Reymond’s “ignorabimus” as a reflection not of the limits of science, but rather the limits of the mechanistic worldview. The solution was not to reject monism (i.e., the promises of a unitary conception of all being and of substance), but rather mechanism, which understood only matter and motion. Ostwald proposed in its place a new scientific worldview, called energetics, which understood reality as comprised, not of matter, but of different manifestations of energy.13 Ostwald’s departure from the disciplinary confines of the field of physical chemistry and his foray into natural philosophy earned him sharp rebukes from leading scientists and caused serious strain on his scientific reputation.14 Yet rather than retreating from energetics, Ostwald took it outside the university, 9

10 11 12

13 14

Katherine Arens, Structures of Knowing: Psychologies of the Nineteenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). Wilhelm Wundt, Erlebtes und Erkanntes (Leipzig: Kröner, 1920), 125. Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1972). Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932), son of a cooper, Protestant; church exit around 1910; professor for physical chemistry in Leipzig between 1887 and 1906; Nobel Prize 1909; actively propagated artificial languages, world organization, international norms, and pacifism; became the chairman of the Monist League in 1911. Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus (Leipzig: Veit, 1895). Public criticism came from such distinguished scientists as Wilhelm Wundt, Max Planck, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Max Weber. Eckard Daser, “Ostwalds Energetischer Monismus” (Dissertation, Constance, 1980), 6; and Max Weber, “‘Energetische’ Kulturtheorien,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze: 400–426.

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wrapped it in secularism, and sought out new audiences via popular science. Having won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his now largely abandoned work in chemistry, Ostwald became the perfect candidate to assume leadership of the Monist League in 1911. The popularity of monism after 1890 reflects the crisis but also the further elaboration of materialism. The term “materialism” had developed a bad taste in the mouths of those members of the educated middle classes alienated from traditional religion but repelled by socialism. Monism promised to overcome materialism without violating the principles of empiricism. By claiming that spirit and matter were coextensive, monists could deliver religious goods without appealing to the supernatural. As Haeckel put it in his programmatic declaration of 1892, monism was to form “a bond between religion and science.” In this vein, Bruno Wille urged Haeckel in 1899 to bring monism to German secularists in order to overcome the “simplistic negation, such as dominates the Free Religious and Freethought movement,” and to “trump the rotten religions of faith with [something] positive.” This meant “a worldview and view of life that satisfies religious sensibility as much as reason. Also the heart and head must reach a monism, religion and science must become one.”15 Over the course of the 1890s, Wille and his friend and fellow naturalist writer Wilhelm Bölsche had moved from a harsh atheism to a growing interest in mysticism. Yet they never turned their backs on materialism. Thus Bölsche republished the work of the early modern mystic Angelus Selesius (1905) at a time when he was churning out biographical works extolling Darwin, Büchner, Humboldt, and Haeckel. The Giordano Bruno League founded by Wille and Bölsche went the furthest of any of the Berlin secularist associations in embracing the spiritualistic elements of fin-de- siècle siecle monism. It presented itself to the public as an invented cult, and its founding meeting was staged as an eclectic pastiche of romantic imagery, paeans to science and art, and rituals hinting at monasticism and Eastern religions. At least two members of the Bruno League went on to become prophets of their own cults. The theosophist Rudolf Steiner later founded the highly influential Anthroposophical movement, while Eugen Heinrich Schmitt became “master” of the obscure Community of Gnostics.16 A number of völkisch thinkers, such as publisher Wilhelm Schwaner (1863–1944), also participated in the monist movement. They turned monist ideas away from universal

15 16

Bruno Wille to Ernst Haeckel, July 14, 1899, EHH, Ernst Haeckel papers. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt, Dr. (1851–1916), studied in Berlin; lost position with Hungarian ministry of justice due to Tolstoyan essays. Wrote an article for Johann Most’s anarchist paper Freiheit in 1880, “Christianity and Communism,” and later advertized there for his pamphlet The Cause of Crystal Forms. Prüfer, Sozialismus, 334. Rocker, Most, 468. Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, Vienna 1994, X. Bd, 253–254. Wer Ist’s, 1912, 1420. On the Berlin Community of Gnostics, Pierre Ramus papers, International Institute for Social History, no. 460–463.

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humanism toward the idea of a spiritualized nation, and sought in the renaissance of German pagan traditions a religion specific to the race.17 There are numerous examples in the history of secularism that demonstrate that the simultaneous pursuits of esoteric spiritualism, racial religion, and positivist science were not incompatible. All three operated within the monist framework of spiritualized matter. Nonetheless, at crucial junctures, advocates of life reform and spiritualism were called to order and the dominance of positivism over spiritualism was reasserted. Thus, when Bruno Wille used his editorial control of Der Freidenker to promote Steiner’s theosophical ideas in 1902, he was sternly rebuffed by his readership.18 Even within the mystically inclined Giordano Bruno League, Steiner’s theosophy with its belief in the reincarnation of individuals and races eventually went too far. A 1905 programmatic pamphlet declared that “neither faith healers nor incarnated” should expect to find “spiritual sustenance” in the association, which was dedicated to “the simple drive for truth of European science” and which searched for “the unity of all life in a single, eternal principle.”19 In the end, romanticism, irrationalism, and spiritualism were tolerated within organized secularism only as an elaboration, but not as a contradiction of the essential faith in scientific progress and rationality. The tension between neutral monism and materialist monism could largely be contained within the movement, but spiritualism was often excluded and relegated to private consumption. If Wilhelmine religiosity outside the churches was “peripatetic,” as Thomas Nipperdey argued, this applied only to individual secularists, not to their organizations.20 The primacy of scientific materialism also manifested itself at the other end of the secularist spectrum among those socialists gathered in the Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (Zentralverband proletarischer Freidenkervereine or ZpF). They pilloried the idealism of the bourgeois “Sport-Freidenker,” who “want to replace the sermon of the priest with the lecture of the professor, transform church ceremonies into secular ‘hours of edification’ in which one gets intoxicated on the platitudinous chatter of vulgar monism, this vogue of bourgeois enlightenment.” The proletarian Freethinkers, by contrast, wanted “to do away with the idea of God.” For them, true monism 17

18 19

20

On the influence of a spiritualized understanding of Haeckelian monism on Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious: Richard Noll, The Jung Cult. Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 40–57. On the racial spirituality of Steiner, see Helmut Zander, “Anthroposophische Rassentheorie. Der Geist auf dem Weg durch die Rassengeschichte,” in Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne: Entwürfe “arteigener” Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundetwende, Stefanie v. Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht eds. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001): 292–341, 301. Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung, 105–106. Wolfgang Kirchbach, Ziele und Aufgaben des Giordano Bruno-Bundes, vol. 6, Flugschriften des Giordano Bruno-Bundes (Schmargendorf bei Berlin: “Renaissance” Otto Lehmann, 1905), 21–22. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 2, 524–527.

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had to include the overcoming of the dualism of class, that is, it meant the incorporation of Marxian social theory and class struggle. Yet, preliminary research reveals that these “proletarian” Freethinkers of the Wilhelmine period did not rely on Marxism for the totality of their worldview. Like their “bourgeois” counterparts, socialist Freethinkers considered the propagation of scientific materialism to be the cornerstone of their positive message for the German public. Many socialist leaders, such as the revisionist Eduard David, concurred that workers should begin with the classics of scientific materialism as a first step in their education as future socialists.21

secularist sociology The investigation of the sociology of secularism in Chapter 3 pointed to the importance of two forces acting upon those nineteenth-century Kleinbürger engaged in petty commercial and artisanal trades, and who made up the bulk of the Free Religious congregations. On the one hand, these groups felt they belonged to the town citizenry (Stadtbürgerschaft), a corporate identity shared with the wealthier middle classes. At the same time, however, their status as Bürger was being challenged by the class polarization that was driving a wedge through the town citizenry. Radical secularism proved to be a means by which Kleinbürger could contest the growing authority of the bourgeois elites. Social polarization not only structured the relationship of secularism to its environment: it also manifested itself within secularism. From the very beginning, state repression and internal pressures for more radical de-Christianization led to a repeated exodus of socially higher standing groups from the Berlin Free Religious Congregations. All of the breakaway congregations that formed in 1845, 1859, 1876, and 1886 were constituted by theologically and politically more conservative individuals, who, on average, were wealthier than the congregation’s core membership. Class differences also expressed themselves in the friction between the Freethought Association Lessing and the Free Religious Congregation and in the founding conference of the DGEK. It was precisely this social polarization that Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche described to Ernst Haeckel in 1899 in a series of letters laying out a strategy to reintegrate German secularism through “a united wave” of monism. “It is extremely difficult to grasp Freethought in its totality, once one is thinking of some kind of unification,” wrote Bölsche. “In the ideas, the general worldview, thousands and thousands are in agreement. But then come the social and other barriers,” which pitted middle-class liberals, that is the “huge segment [of the population] that is freethinking inside, but which belongs to social classes that are oriented upwards in the political fabric,” against the “lower popular classes.” “It can scarcely be overlooked (no matter how one thinks politically) that despite their political convictions [the lower classes represent] a huge mass 21

Steinberg, Ideologie, 140–142.

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of heads with the highest desire for knowledge and who present the monist worldview an interior tabula rasa regarding the church.” The liberals feared contamination by association with this group. As a frequent lecturer at the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, Bölsche himself had had the opportunity to witness the alarmed reaction of liberals who, having strayed into the FRC, were seized by the anxious feeling “we’re going into a social-democratic association.”22 Haeckel was well placed to bridge the growing gap between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” secularist organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the great success of Die Welträtsel, he attracted a significant international following among middle-class liberals and working-class socialists alike. Even Vladimir Lenin and Franz Mehring, two radical socialist intellectuals otherwise skeptical of monism, found words of praise for this work as a “weapon in the class struggle.”23 Had Haeckel accepted the presidency of the German Union of Freethinkers offered to him in 1900, he might have helped expand this alliance of working-class and middle-class associations.24 Yet, although he appeared at the 1904 International Congress of Freethinkers in Rome to proclaim his theses on the foundation of a monist association, he chose to launch the German Monist League in 1906 as an elitist organization largely comprised of educated professionals: high-school teachers, physicians, engineers, and writers. And despite their own clear-sighted sociological analysis and the cachet they enjoyed in socialist circles, when Wille and Bölsche formed their own monist organization, it was no less elitist. The board of directors and members of the Giordano Bruno League included not a single worker or recognized socialist. When the Berlin chapter of the Monist League was founded in 1907 and the Giordano Bruno League merged with it, the result was a colorful mix of middle-class life reformers, bohemian intellectuals, and technocratically minded professionals. Although this makeup indicates that the new monist organizations failed to halt the social polarization of German secularism, it would be shortsighted to judge their success or failure on the composition of membership alone. In fact, Bölsche blasted the traditional approach of liberals, who only recruited from their own milieu. He suggested to Haeckel that it would be a mistake to follow the example of the DGEK, which thought it could build a movement by simply announcing the formation of a new organization, “renting a green table with a water bottle on top and twelve chairs around, and printing up envelopes with a nice address.” Rather, Bölsche proposed a monist cultural offensive driven by a magazine for making “propaganda” and “popular lectures with monistic 22

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Letter of March 30, 1899, Rosemarie Nöthlich, ed., Ernst Haeckel - Wilhelm Bölsche Briefwechsel 1887–1919 (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2002), 96–101. Mehring’s review was approvingly cited by Lenin, Empirico-Criticism, 423. Daniel Laqua, “‘Laïque, démocratique et sociale’? Socialism and the Freethinkers’ International,” Labour History Review, vol. 74, no. 3 (2009): 257–273.

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content.” Such propaganda could also reach individuals cut off from the secularist mainstream, who lived in Christian-dominated small towns, which he referred to ironically as “in partibus infidelium.”25 The organizational efforts of the generation of young monists around 1900 reveal an awareness of two interrelated developments that would become typical of twentieth-century metropolitan society. First, secularist intellectuals stressed their dislocation both from liberal society and from the socialist movement. They depicted themselves not as organic intellectuals, who identified with the milieu they organized, but rather as outsiders, whose claim to leadership was based on technical knowledge or charismatic calling. One of the primary functions of the Giordano Bruno League was to provide a public stage on which its leaders could claim to represent an intellectual avantgarde. The monist leaders of 1900 typified the “free-floating” quality of modern intellectuals later identified by sociologist Karl Mannheim.26 Unaffiliated with any particular group, they circulated and crossed the boundaries of a divided society. Indeed, in the 1890s Wille and Bölsche traveled a speaking circuit that took them in any given week from workers’ education associations to the Free Religious Congregation and from West Berlin reform associations to avant-gardistic literary clubs. Politically, they bounced from democracy to socialism to anarchism in the space of a single decade.27 Second, Bölsche and his colleagues were aware that the secularist audience no longer formed a single mass. Bölsche’s “propaganda” model of 1899 was aimed at an audience that was divided socially and comprised isolated individuals in an anonymous modern media market. The way secularist intellectuals conceived of their publics had changed since Johann Jacoby had spoken of the Democratic publicist in 1857. Although Bölsche would have seen himself as a good practitioner of Jacoby’s optical system, in which the secularist publicist transformed science and politics into a radiant worldview that illuminated and organized the masses, Bölsche could no longer envisage an audience unified by the mental and social proximity of the urban commercial and artisanal classes. Thus he sought to disseminate a unified worldview uncoupled from associational unity. Along with social polarization, functional differentiation also contributed to the diversification of Wilhelmine secularism. Specific elements of the ethical program of secularism were picked up in a host of new social and life reform movements. The new associations dedicated to cremation advocacy, pacifism, women’s rights, nudism, vegetarianism, temperance, clothing reform, artificial

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Latin: among the infidels. Letter of March 30, 1899, in Nöthlich, ed., Briefwechsel, 96–101. Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics, and Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 84–85. On Wille and Bölsche’s bohemian community, see Rolf Kauffeldt and Gertrude Cepl Kaufmann, Berlin-Friedrichshagen: Literaturhauptstadt um die Jahrhundertwende: Der Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis (Boer Verlag: Grafrath, 1994).

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languages, and land reform displayed a high degree of intellectual and personnel overlap with Freethought and Monism. There were also centripedal forces at work in German secularism. In 1906, the Frankfurt industrialist Arthur Pfungst (1864–1912), who was both a Buddhist and an influential secularist, called for a “union of free spirits,” and the German Union of Freethinkers (DFB) issued a similar declaration at its annual conference. The first umbrella organization for secularist organizations was announced the following year and duly constituted in 1909 as the Weimar Cartel.28 In Berlin, ethicist Rudolf Penzig, land reformer Adolf Damaschke29 and others sent around a circular calling for a “centralization” of the city’s secularist organizations to counteract the “fragmentation of spiritual life.”30 By 1910 a Culture Cartel (Kulturkartell) of Greater Berlin had been formed and continued to coordinate Berlin organizations until at least 1920. Local Kartells were also founded in other centers of “bourgeois” secularism such as Munich and Frankfurt am Main. The Monist League also sought to integrate German secularism and bring the many reform movements under its wing. Its journal (The Monist Century) declared in April 1913 that because monism “was not only a method of thought and life but also a cultural aspiration,” the journal has “not limited itself to natural science and natural philosophy – the basis of our worldview – but has systematically attempted to incorporate one realm of life after another into its work. Monism appears more and more as the organizing principle of all practical cultural work, even if the inner connections between thought and action, between science and economics, between ethics, technology and politics are not clear in the general consciousness, also not among all monists.” Ostwald enumerated the League’s chief areas of operation at that time as: natural science and medicine, technology, school reform, the protection of mothers and sexual reform, land reform, pacifism, temperance, and the cooperative movement.31 The countervailing tendencies of diversification and social polarization, on the one hand, and cooperation and unification, on the other hand, also characterized developments in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, which remained the largest single secularist organization in Wilhelmine Germany. Class and political division had led to the bitter split within the congregation in 1886, when the Democratic coterie around Speaker G. S. Schaefer was ousted and replaced by a new board of directors largely sympathetic to Social Democracy. This new 28

29

30 31

Max Henning, Jahrbuch des Weimarer Kartells 1912: Ein Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegung Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 1912). On the Weimarer Kartell, see Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung and Groschopp, Dissidenten, 181–187. Adolf Damaschke (1865–1935), trained school teacher; leader of German land reform and naturopathy movements; editor of Frei Land and Naturarzt. Wrede and Reinfels, Das geistige Berlin, 64. Dortmund Stadt- und Landbibliothek, Julius Hart papers, no. 2866. Das monistische Jahrhundert. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung und Weltgestaltung, vol. 1 (April 5, 1913): 13.

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leadership of the congregation brought a whiff of class struggle into the 1904 congress of the DFB when its delegates challenged the League’s electoral modus. Instead of the existing system, which favored the “bourgeois” organizations by providing individual votes for wealthier members and functionaries, the Berliners proposed to redistribute votes to reflect the relative size of each congregation. This would have effectively handed power to those Freethought chapters with many working-class members, in particular to the Berlin FRC with its claim to over 10,000 members. When their proposal was rejected, the Berlin FRC withdrew from active participation in the DFB, having the year before already left the national Union of Free Religious Congregations for similar reasons.32 This episode foreshadowed future conflicts in German Freethought. Following renewed debate over vote distribution at the 1908 DFB Congress in Frankfurt, a number of socialist chapters, mostly in the Rhineland, Saxony, and Thuringia, withdrew from the DFB to form the ZpF. In the columns of its robustly anticlerical journal Der Atheist the ZpF attacked bourgeois monists and the churches alike. Yet, significantly, the Berlin FRC did not join the ZpF. Instead, it rejoined the “bourgeois” German Union of Freethinkers and by 1915 was cooperating in the Berlin Kulturkartell.33 Several factors may help explain this. First, unlike the ZpF chapters that were often dominated by union leaders, the Berlin FRC retained a heterogeneous social makeup that included many professionals and intellectuals, particularly in its leadership.34 Second, its tradition of merging Free Religious traditions with elements of radical Freethought may have made the crude anticlericalism of the ZpF unappealing. Finally, its leaders figured in the leadership of national and international Freethought and stood in communication with Haeckel and other prominent secularists. As a result, the ZpF did not gain a toehold in the capital prior to the war, a development that laid part of the foundation for a postwar rivalry between two socialist Freethinking associations, the Berlin-based Association of Freethinkers for Cremation (Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung) and the Community of Proletarian Freethinkers (Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker), the follow-on organization to the ZpF, with its center of power in Saxony and Thuringia.

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“Protokoll der 21. Hauptversammlung des deutschen Freidenkerbundes zu Eberfeld am 9.10.1904,” Der Freidenker (1904): 157–158. According to Horst Groschopp, the Berlin FRC did not initially join the Berlin Kulturkartell. However, when it was refounded in 1915, its membership included the FRC, DMB, Humanist Congregation, Bund der Konfessionslosen, and the Kulturbund Asgard. Die Freie Gemeinde: Mitteilungsblatt der Berliner Freireligiösen Gemeinde und ihrer Ortsgruppen, January–March 1916. Groschopp, Dissidenten, 194. The FRC board members (including leading socialists) in December 1918 were a book dealer (Adolph Hoffmann), a carpenter, a carpenter master (Heinrich Peege), an editor (Ernst Däumig), a merchant, a roofer, and a woman without occupation. LAB B Rep. 042, no. 8981, p. 2.

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politics and secularism Whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or secularist, the formation of confessional organizations between the 1830s and 1870s were protopolitical events, and the boundaries of politics and religion remained fluid in the partisan formations of the period. As we saw in Chapter 4, the political positioning of secularism followed the social divisions of the urban society. Although the secularists’ worldview and their secularizing policies found many liberal supporters within the dominant urban commercial and educated elites, the secularist organizations themselves were more often than not closely identified with radical Democracy. By the mid 1880s, Democracy had been effectively eliminated in the struggle between left-liberalism and socialism. If the Wilhelmine political system was pillarized, as M. Rainer Lepsius proposed, what was secularism’s place within it? The answer is mixed. On the one hand, in terms of party policy, the liberal parties and the SPD distanced themselves from secularism, which suggests that the political left was emancipating itself from religious conflict. On the other hand, there is evidence that the quadriconfessional field continued to inform the evolving political system. The drift of political liberalism away from organized secularism was gradual but persistent. Already in 1882, police noted that the Berlin FRC had lost its last explicit friend in the Prussian Parliament when the Progressive deputy Albert Träger decided not to run for reelection.35 In October 1912, the liberal politician and Tübingen professor Walter Goetz noted the absence of any of his party colleagues at the recent meeting of the International Federation of Freethinkers in Munich, which “some time ago, would have been visited overwhelmingly by those who belong to political liberalism. We recognize with joy that today German political liberalism remains quite distant from Freethought.” Having been overcome in “the leading intellectual stratum,” secularist ideas “today find their last echoes in the lower strata of the nation.”36 Goertz’s statement speaks of the alienation of many liberals from the sort of bald materialism and anticlericalism espoused by most Freethinkers.37 Whereas in post-1848 Germany, popular science had appeared as a form of knowledge particularly suited to the project of extending liberal cultural hegemony over the urban classes, by the turn of the century most liberals no longer found the oppositional credentials of secularism attractive or its cultural capital of much worth. As was shown in Chapter 3, this alienation from secularism correlated to a narrowing of the liberal political base and a coming to terms with the loss of broad segments of the lower-middle and working classes to the socialists. 35 36 37

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15045, unpag. Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, no. 548, October 26, 1912. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

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Yet secularism was present in another corner of the liberal movement broadly defined. Historians have tied the emergence of the Wilhelmine social reform movements to a crisis of German liberalism, whereby many young bourgeois intellectuals spurned the traditional liberal parties for what Thomas Mann referred to as an “unpolitical” orientation. They sought power through Kultur, which became a catchword of the decade before the First World War. The calls for greater rights (including corporate voting rights) for the self-appointed “bearers of culture” (Kulturträger) speaks to the desire to turn the imagined cultural hegemony of liberal intellectuals into real political power.38 Hopes for liberal political dominance rose with the formation of the so-called Bülow Bloc in the run-up to the 1907 Reichstag election. When Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow dropped the Center Party from his coalition and went to the polls with a coalition of Conservatives, National Liberals, and Left-Liberals, he set the stage for a renewed Kulturkampf atmosphere.39 The rising tide of Protestant-liberal popular anticatholicism stimulated the resurgence of secularist politics. The political winds shifted dramatically in July 1909, when the “Bülow Bloc” collapsed and the new chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, cut the left-liberals adrift and reestablished the Bismarckian coalition of the Conservatives and Center Party. Joint opposition to this “black-blue bloc” made political alliances possible between socialists and left-liberals. Secularists figured prominently in the intense negotiations between socialist revisionists, cultural intellectuals, and liberal politicians. A new radical party, the Democratic Union (Demokratische Vereinigung), was formed and, in the run-up to the 1910 Reichstag elections, leading revisionists such as Free Religionist Paul Löbe and Monist Heinrich Peus urged fellow socialists to also support the Democrats. As was the case with all previous Democratic parties, this one mobilized a group of “brave officers” but no army, leaving it an ineffectual force in the political realm.40 The Monist League itself followed the leftward turn of 1909. A public debate sponsored by the League in Berlin in 1910 on the question “Did Jesus live?” signaled a shift from anticatholicism toward a broad anti-Christian campaign. In December 1910, Haeckel announced his withdrawal from the Protestant Church, and the following year the League became the chief sponsor of the Committee of the Confessionless, an alliance of liberal monists and socialist Freethinkers who waged a four-year campaign to encourage mass desertion from the state churches. The high point of this campaign came in 1913, when pairs of prominent “bourgeois” and “socialist” dissidents appeared on six open-air stages around Berlin to denounce the state churches. A crowd of several thousand was drawn to the joint appearance of the Monist

38 39 40

Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur; Repp, Antipolitics. Smith, German Nationalism. Rosa Luxemburg’s characterization. Quoted in Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 142.

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League’s chairman, Wilhelm Ostwald, with the socialist firebrand and future founder of the Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht.41 Officially, Wilhelmine Social Democracy took a position of neutrality and distance toward secularism, not dissimilar to that of the left-liberal parties. As we saw in Chapter 5, the public outcry over Johann Most’s church-leaving campaign of 1878 had led party leaders to back away from anticlericalism. During the 1891 party congress in Erfurt, Wilhelm Liebknecht subjected Freethinking socialists to biting ridicule, and in 1914 the party leadership intervened to squelch socialist participation in the Berlin church-leaving movement. Yet the church-leaving movement points to a notable difference between the socialist and liberal relationship to secularism. Whereas there was not one liberal parliamentarian among the leading secularists who appeared at large open-air meetings in autumn 1913, there were three socialist deputies among the speakers. And, according to press coverage and police reports of the church-leaving declarations signed, workers made up the bulk of the audiences of these events. It is thus not surprising that the liberal and conservative press chalked up this campaign to the socialists.42 The confessional marking of socialism is clearly shown by the public religious affiliation of elected parliamentarians in the Wilhelmine period. Among the 443 deputies elected to the Prussian parliament in 1913, eight identified their religious affiliation as “dissident,” “Free Religious,” or “confessionless.” Of these, only one represented the left-liberal Progressive People’s Party; the remaining seven, including Adolph Hoffmann and Karl Liebknecht, constituted the majority of the ten-man Social Democratic faction.43 This trend was sustained in the Weimar Republic when most socialist, nearly all communist, but no liberal deputies identified as dissidents, Free Religious, or confessionless. Two conclusions can be drawn from this. On the one hand, it speaks to the significant power base that secularist leaders maintained within the socialist milieu. On the other hand, it shows that the de facto confessional identification of the socialist party with religious dissidence had actually increased over time. Leading socialists who defended the party plank “religion is to be a private matter” applied this only to others; for their constituents and for themselves they did not shy away from public identification with dissidence.44 In dissidence, religious and political oppositions overlapped. Religious dissent carved out the space within the confessional system that socialists had come to occupy, while at the same time the macrostructures of social-political milieus and party politics shaped the location in which secularism operated. 41 42

43

44

Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 263–298. “Die falschen Apostel,” Die Post, no. 546, November 21, 1913; “Der Kirchensturm,” Hamburger Nachrichten, morning edition, January 7, 1914. Among the other delegates were 306 Protestants, 120 Catholics, and 9 Jews. A. Plate, ed., Handbuch für das Preußische Abgeordnetenhaus: 22. Legislaturperiode von 1913 ab (Berlin: Preußische Verlagsanstalt, 1914), 348. See discussion in Weir, “Vergemeinschaftung.”

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As these macrostructures shifted, so too did the place of organized secularism. From the revolution of 1848 to the 1870s, Free Religious preachers had held prominent positions in the democratic and left-liberal parties, but by the end of the Wilhelmine period it had become largely impossible to be both a liberal deputy and an avowed secularist.

Epilogue: German Secularism after 1914

Writing before the First World War, theologian Ernst Troeltsch had predicted the demise of Freethought. Its philosophical basis had, he claimed, “completely broken down in the face of modern historical relativism and amid the clash of the great philosophical systems,” leaving Freethought “a shallow illusion now finally dispelled.”1 Subsequent events would prove Troeltsch wrong. Following the war, Freethought rose to become a mass organization within the socialist milieu and by the mid-1920s had over half a million members. The anticlerical wave of 1929 and 1930 marked a highpoint of German secularism comparable in its historical significance to the wave of rationalist dissent in 1845. This points to the continued importance of confessional field in the Weimar Republic and in its eventual collapse. The war permanently divided the “bourgeois” secularists. Some, such as Haeckel and Ostwald, abruptly dropped their advocacy of pacifism and became active campaigners for the German war effort. The bulk of the Monist League, by contrast, soon opposed the war, and Berlin Monists formed the nucleus of Germany’s most prominent antiwar organization, the Bund Neues Vaterland (Union for a New Fatherland). Unable to thwart this turn of his organization, Ostwald resigned his presidency in 1915, and Haeckel and Bölsche also distanced themselves from the Monist League. War also divided socialist secularists. A minority were carried away by nationalism and supported the war. Heinrich Peus went so far as to become an advocate for what he termed “social monarchy.”2 However, secularists were more prominent in the growing SPD opposition. FRC chairman Adolph Hoffmann used his seat in the Prussian parliament as a bully pulpit to excoriate the Protestant church for its open support of the war. He and former Freethinker Georg Ledebour led the

1 2

Troeltsch, “Free-Thought,” 121, 22. “Sozialmonarchist Peus,” Leipziger Volksstimme, September 30, 1916.

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German delegation to Bad Zimmerwald in Switzerland in 1915 to meet with Vladimir Lenin and other internationalists opposed to war.3 Secularists formed a notable presence in the organizational nucleus of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD). At war’s end, Berlin Free Religionists attained leading posts in the revolutionary power-sharing government that matched representatives of the Majority and Independent Socialists. Hoffmann was appointed Co-Minister of Culture in Prussia and quickly attempted to dismantle the confessional system by announcing a total separation of church and state and the removal or religious instruction from school. The resulting uproar from both state churches led the Majority Socialists to reverse this decree and paved the way for the compromises of the Weimar Constitution. Another Berlin Free Religious leader, Ernst Däumig, became co-chairman of the USPD between 1919 and 1920.4 He was the party’s chief theorist of the council movement and delivered the left wing of his party to the Comintern and into a union with the much smaller Communist Party (KPD) in December 1920. The new constitution agreed to in Weimar in 1919 formally ended religious discrimination within the state, but central structures of the confessional system were retained, such as the state support of religious instruction in schools and state collection of church taxes. This failure to fully secularize the German state meant the continuation of those prewar conditions that fostered the secularist pattern of petition and protest. The clause of the constitution that foresaw granting church-like status to associations that cultivate a worldview opened the prospect but provided no guarantee of the extension of the confessional privileges to secularists. With the slow drift of the Weimar political system to the right, petitions from secularists were increasingly unsuccessful, such as that made by Germany’s largest Freethought association to the Prussian state in 1930. It was in order to evaluate this application that the Prussian Ministry of the Interior had commissioned the report from theologian Helmuth Schreiner, in which he asked, quite appropriately, whether they deserved consideration as a “fourth confession.” Whereas Wilhelmine secularism largely managed to straddle the political and social gap between its socialist and liberal wings through the intellectual dominance of the latter, the most striking change in the Weimar period was the collapse of liberal secularism. Those nationalist Monists who had left during the war generally did not return to the secularist organizations, and several drifted 3 4

Angelica Balabanoff, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung 1914–1919 (Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1928), 14. Ernst Däumig (1866–1922), journalist, originally Protestant, dropped out of Gymnasium in Halle and joined the French Foreign Legion for five years and served in Africa and Indochina; upon returning to Germany he served five years in a cavalry battery in Metz; became a socialist in 1900, editor at Vorwärts in Berlin in 1910; became active in the FRC and gave frequent lectures there during the war; cochaired the USPD from December 1919; and was elected to the Reichstag in 1920. Todd Weir, “Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Daumig,” German History 28 (2010): 143–166; David Morgan, “Ernst Däumig and the German Revolution of 1918.” CEH 15, no. 4 (1982): 801–813.

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into the growing völkisch camp. The remaining national leaders of the Monists, Free Religious, and Freethinkers issued statements linking their organizations, if only in spirit, with the aims of socialism.5 Some former Monist League intellectuals, such as sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, educational reformer Kurt Löwenstein, and chemist Paul Krische, went a step further and joined the socialist parties. More research is needed to determine the success of their efforts to import Monist reform projects into the vibrant Weimar workers’ culture movement. Closer analysis is also required of two developments that by the late 1920s were simultaneously driving the tremendous growth of German secularism and plunging it into a deep internal crisis. In fact, secularism may have been undergoing the most significant transformation since its founding. First, the cremation insurance business that had started in 1905 as an auxiliary service for Berlin secularists had proven so successful that it came to overshadow and dominate the established secularist organizations. Historian Jochen-Christoph Kaiser has asked provocatively whether the decision of the Berlin Association of Freethinkers for Cremation (VFF) to increase its secularist propaganda in the mid-1920s was not driven by the need to defend its status as a voluntary cultural organization, which had thus far allowed it to evade state regulation of its insurance policies.6 Was, in other words, secularism becoming the window dressing for a socialist commercial enterprise? Second, after 1928 the Communist Party assigned many party members to join the VFF in an effort to wrest control of the organization from the Social Democratic leadership and gain access to its financial resources. In the process, the Communists sought to split anticlericalism from the propagation of materialist-monist worldview, and substitute Marxism-Leninism in the place of the latter.7 This late-Weimar crisis of Freethought reveals an important quality that had marked German secularism up to this point. Although thoroughly political, German secularism had been an essentially autonomous, self-organizing movement rooted in worldview and anticlericalism. Commercial interests and party rivalries clearly threatened this quality of Freethought. Yet even the intrusion of 5

6

7

At the 1927 conference of the Monist League, philosopher Friedrich Jodl defined monism as socialism to the extent that it is “evolutionism.” In 1932, the leader of the German Free Religionists, Carl Peter, argued that their Jugendweihe book was necessarily different from that used by the socialist Freethinkers, but nonetheless, “breathes a purely socialist tendency.” Nöthlich et al., “Weltbild oder Weltanschauung?” 66; Circular of the Volksbundes für Geistesfreiheit, February 23, 1932, Harndt papers. Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 180. Originally founded in 1905 as a small auxiliary to Berlin Free Religion and Freethought, the VFF changed its name twice in the late Weimar Republic. In 1927, it merged with its more ideologically oriented Leipzig rivals in the Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker (Association of Proletarian Freethinkers) and took the name Verband für Freidenkertum und Feuerbestattung. In 1930, as part of its rejection of communist radicalism and reorientation toward the “bourgeois” Freethinkers, it changed its name to the moderatesounding Deutscher Freidenkerverband. Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 164–172.

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these “external” forces into secularism can be usefully analyzed through the heuristic concept of the “fourth confession.” The cremation insurance business and the Communist Party were drawn into the confessional field because of the goods available there. Cremation had been propagated since the 1870s by secularists as a hygienic alternative to Christian burial, and one that put the human body back into the circulation of elements rather than trying to conserve it for the apocalypse. The development of a lucrative business shows that cremation had become widely accepted as a cost-effective and fitting last rite of passage for socialists. The Communist Party’s effort to take over the socialistdominated Freethought associations was driven not only by the strategic value of their members and their dues: the Party was also keenly interested in the political potential of anticlericalism. Just as Johann Most had discovered in 1878, the incendiary nature of public attacks on Christianity and state churches was well-suited to radical ultraleft politics. Steered by the Comintern, aggressive anticlericalism became a central aspect of the shift in international communist strategy in 1928. By 1930 the destruction of churches in the Soviet Union and the echoes of these actions on the streets of Berlin provided a religious dimension to the civil war atmosphere that Germany was entering. The quadriconfessional dynamics of conflict are also revealed in the conservative politics of the years 1930 to 1933. Although Protestant–Catholic confessional tensions continued to manifest themselves at this time, the more explosive confessional flashpoint was arguably the conflict over secularism. In early 1930, the otherwise deeply anticatholic leader of the Bavarian Stahlhelm, Colonel von Lenz, saw in the struggle against godlessness a chance for the “religious-moral rebirth of our people” and proposed that his veterans’ organization join in struggle with “both confessions in closest cooperation.” In his response, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich agreed with Lenz that “the foundations of Western civilization are threatened by Bolshevism on either side of the German borders and that cultural Bolshevism in its rough or fine form has already sunk roots into our people.” Whether Russian Bolshevism succeeds in ruling the world, he concluded, would be decided in Germany.8 Antisecularism became a key binding agent for formations on the right that were promoting authoritarian solutions to the deepening political crises in Germany and, indeed, across Europe.9 And, as in 1848 and 1879, Jews were again identified as part of the secularist camp. The formulation of Protestant theologian Emanuel Hirsch, made two years after joining the NSDAP in 1932, illustrates a long line of continuity going back to Adolf Stoecker and Ernst

8

9

Lenz to Dr. Veit, President of the Protestant Lutheran Church in Bavaria, February 11, 1930, EZA 7/3568, p. 57; Faulhaber to Lenz, February 28, 1930, in Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917–1945, vol. 1, Ludwig Volk, ed. (Mainz: Grünwald, 1975), 486–487. On the European dimensions of the antisecularism, see Stéphanie Roulin, Un credo anticommunist: La commission Pro Deo de l’Entente internationale anticommuniste, ou la dimension religieuse d’un combat politique, 1924–1945 (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2010).

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Wilhelm Hengstenberg: “When later the human history of the nineteenth century is remembered, one will understand Marxism as the product of a GermanJewish mixed marriage and as an example of the inner impossibility of Jewish emancipation on the soil of a Christian Volk. Perhaps Bolshevism will even be designated an unbelieving aberration of the Jewish religion.”10 The religious dimension of the collaboration of the Christian Churches and National Socialism has been the subject of significant recent scholarship.11 However, the history of secularism points to the significance not of a religious, but rather of a confessional basis of collusion. The affirmation of “positive Christianity” in the 1920 program of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) reflected the party’s commitment to an ecumenical struggle against secularism and Judaism. Hitler repeatedly placed his party’s position on religion in a quadriconfessional context. At a party rally in Munich in 1927 he stated that “[t]hey have accused us of being against the church, [of being] bad Christians or not Christian at all. If one understands only Konfession under Christianity, then we are indeed bad Christians. But if the word of the Lord is authoritative, then we are the best. We National Socialists refuse to bring confessional strife into our ranks. [. . .] We serve Christ better than those [i.e. the Catholic Center Party, T. W.], who conclude electoral alliances with Marixsts, atheists and Jews.”12 Supraconfessionalism and antisecularism also featured prominently in Hitler’s attempt to situate his party within the loose alliance of antidemocratic forces that met in Bad Harzburg in October 1931. Comprising conservatives, veterans’ organizations, and National Socialists, the “Harzburger Front” was a preview of the alliance that would bring Hitler to power some fourteen months later. In his own speech at Bad Harzburg, Hitler cited the Weimar state’s protection of the Freethinkers as a proof of its weakness, and a sign of its essential inability to take sides in the struggle between the nationalist worldview that “sees in religion a necessary foundation for the ethical, moral education of the people” and the left-wing worldview that “declares the category of God as non-existent.” It would be intolerable, he concluded, if these “worldviews of a political nature became petrified, as we have experienced with our confessions.

10

11

12

Emanuel Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage im Spiegel philosophischer und theologischer Besinnung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934), 24. I am grateful to Robert Ericksen for this translation. On the deformation of Protestant theology as a result of its encounter with eugenics and völkisch thought, see Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus; Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). For an argument about the role of Christian belief in the orientation of leading Nazis, see Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Adolf Hitler, “Rede auf NSDAP-Versammlung in München 24.5.1927,” Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. II/2, ed. Bärbel Dusik (Munich, Saur: 1992), 314–319, 317–318.

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In Germany, either communism or nationalism must rule.”13 To demonstrate the NSDAP’s ability to act ruthlessly against secularism, Nazi ministers rolled back key aspects of Weimar secularization when they joined coalition governments in Braunschweig and Thuringia in 1931 and 1932. In the Reichstag, National Socialists vied with the conservative German Nationals to appear as the party that would wipe out Freethought. After the election victory of their coalition on March 5, 1933, the Nazis made good on their threats to neutralize Judaism and secularism, that is, the third and fourth confessions. In mid-March, the SA stormed the Berlin headquarters of the German Freethought Union (Deutscher Freidenker Verband DFV). The political leadership was removed, its propaganda arm liquidated, and the cremation insurance business transformed into a nonpolitical operation. Rooms in the DFV’s central office were turned over to a leader of the German Christian movement of the Protestant Church, who set up a bureau for processing the readmission of Freethinkers into the Church.14 The Monist League was likewise disbanded.15 The April 7 law “for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” which banned Jews from holding state office, effectively reversed the deconfessionalization of the state that had occurred in 1918 and 1919. Not all secularist organizations were banned by the Nazis in 1933. Some were subject to the “carrot and stick” policy referred to as coordination (Gleichschaltung). In order to avoid the fate of the DFV, the Free Religious Congregations distanced themselves from socialism and Freethought and pushed their ideological commonalities with the new rulers to the foreground. The national leadership asked the congregations to drop “incitement to class struggle and ungerman attitude” and, by June 1933, decided to place the movement “in the service of the German national community [Volksgemeinschaft].”16 The Free Religious sought protection through an alliance with Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, a Tübingen professor of religious studies who enjoyed good connections to top SS leaders. On July 29 and 30, 1933, the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) was formed under Hauer’s leadership.17 In Berlin, the leading socialist families of the Free Religious Congregation fought off an attempted takeover in July 1933 by a group that announced the introduction of the “Führer principle,” but then introduced the same measure 13

14

15 16 17

Adolf Hitler, “Rede auf Versammlung der ‘Nationalen Opposition’ in Bad Harzburg, 11.Okt. 1931,” in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. IV/3, ed. Christian Hartmann (Munich, Saur: 1999), 123–127, 126. Peter Noss, “Diakonie oder Ideologie: Das Berliner Evangelische Johannesstift in der NS-Zeit,” in Sozialer Protestantismus im Nationalsozialismus, eds. Norbert Friedrich and Traugott Jähnichen (Münster: LIT, 2003), 69–82, 76–77; Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 333fn. Nöthlich, et al., “Monistenbund,” 47. Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 87. Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 88; Nanko, “Das Spektrum völkisch-religiöser Organisationen von der Jahrhundertwende bis ins ‘Dritte Reich’,” in S. von Schnurbein and J. H. Ulbricht, eds., Völkische Religion: 201–226, 225.

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themselves in a general assembly of the FRC on September 11, 1933.18 The minutes to this meeting indirectly record the pressures exerted by the new regime. Central tenets that had remained constant between 1859 and 1933 were abandoned by near-unanimous vote and, as the minutes note, “without discussion.” The congregation’s democratic constitution was replaced by the “Führer system,” the word “deutschgläubig” was substituted for “freireligiös” in its statutes, and it was renamed the “Congregation of German Faith.” Overcoming the primacy of “faith,” it will be recalled, formed the core of G. A. Wislicenus’s scientific-theological critique of the orthodox Christian position in 1844. It now appeared in the name of a congregation that only two years before had declared itself to be “atheistic.”19 Although the combination of Germanic monism and anticlericalism made Hauer’s movement attractive to the SS, the movement came under pressure in the summer of 1934 because the congregations were rumored to harbor “Marxists.” The Free Religious cooperation with the German Faith Movement collapsed, leading Minister President Hermann Göring in November to ban the Union of Free Religious Congregations in Prussia.20 This marked the formal end of the association that had existed since 1859, though it did not end Free Religious activity in the “Third Reich.” The UFRC chairmen Carl Peter and Georg Kramer joined with the völkisch philosopher Ernst Bergmann to found a new magazine, Deutsches Werden, in August 1935. Out of the readership of this magazine was formed the Community of German National Religion (Gemeinschaft Deutsche Volksreligion) in 1937, an association that organized many former Free Religious Congregations.21 More research is needed into the role of Free Religion in the history of völkisch thought. However, Bergmann’s belief that only a natural religion could “liberate the German national soul from the centuries-long tragedy of church schism and the weight of a half-assimilated foreign religion” resonates with some of the hopes raised by the early Deutschkatholiken.22 The attractiveness of Free Religion to certain elements within the party leadership points to the paradox in Nazi antisecularism. The concept of worldview used by Hitler, Goebbels, or Himmler was indebted in many ways to the secularist tradition they sought to erase. Furthermore, and again similar to

18 19

20

21

22

Die Geistesfreiheit, vol. 42, no. 9 (1933): 123. Protocol of the meeting on September 11 is reprinted in: Geschichte der Freireligiösen Gemeinde Berlin 1845–1945 (Dortmund: Humanitas, 1981), 76–80. Matthis Pilger-Strohl, “Eine deutsche Religion? Die freireligiöse Bewegung – Aspekte ihrer Beziehung zum völkischen Milieu,” in S. von Schnurbein and J. H. Ulbricht, eds., Völkische Religion: 342–366, 365. In May 1939, the Gemeinschaft Deutsche Volksreligion had 11,000 members. In 1942, there were 17,000 in 40 congregations and 78 “centers of support.” By the end of 1944 total membership had reached 18,000. Deutsches Werden ceased publication in September 1941. Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 92. Ernst Bergmann, Die Deutsche Nationalkirche (Breslau: Hirt, 1933), 9. This work was placed on the Vatican Index in 1934 together with Arthur Rosenberg’s Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.

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secularism, National Socialist supraconfessionalism contained its own confessional dynamic, which came to the fore once the party had neutralized the members of the third and fourth confessions and begun to turn on the first and second confessions (i.e., the state churches). The “Church Struggle” (Kirchenkampf) led to higher levels of church-exit than had been achieved at the height of socialist-secularist agitation in 1913, 1920, or 1930.23 Yet, despite their own monist affinities and anticlericalism, völkisch hardliners in the NSDAP eschewed any association with dissidence and instituted the term “gottgläubig” for their own post-confessional religious identity. Unlike all other contestants in the confessional struggle, the National Socialists had the power and ruthless will to suppress their competitors. By denying dissidents access to the public sphere and through the disenfranchisement, exile, and finally murder of German Jews, the National Socialists decided the battle between what they perceived to be the nationalist forces of religious order and the liberal, socialist, Jewish and secularist forces of religious disintegration. The subsequent struggle against the churches remained incomplete, and ultimately showed that even Nazi supraconfessionalism did not escape the conundrum of confession. In fact, some gottgläubig National Socialist functionaries referred to themselves as a “third confession.”24 Ultimately, it may be argued that it was the postwar settlement of Germany and Europe rather than National Socialist religious policy that ushered in the greatest transformation of Germany’s confessional field. The massive migration caused by the war and its aftermath significantly diluted confessional milieus. Most important for the struggle between secularism and Christianity, the politics of Germany’s division prevented a return to the confessional antagonisms that had characterized the period prior to 1933. Although Freethought was not allowed to reconstitute in East Germany, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) embraced the negative and eventually also the positive policies of German secularism. Congruent with “building socialism,” the SED suppressed the churches and engineered the secularization of the population. After having been rocked by the popular uprising of June 17, 1953, the regime mined the secularist tradition for some community-forming culture. It instituted the Free Religious confirmation or Jugendweihe as a national ritual and presented each child with a monistically inspired picture book of materialistsocialist worldview bearing the suggestive title Universe Earth Man (Weltall Erde Mensch). By the 1980s, the East German churches had become the main sites of political opposition, and thus, somewhat ironically, the former state churches came to assume the dissident position held by secularist associations in the Kaiserreich. In West Germany, confessional disputes were by and large tabled in the interest of anticommunist solidarity. Even though state privileges for the Catholic and 23 24

Church exit in Germany exceeded 400,000 annually between 1937 and 1939. Klaus v. Eickstedt, Christus unter Internierten (Neuendettelsau: Freimund, 1948), 36.

Epilogue

277

Protestant Churches survived in West Germany, they failed to stimulate significant secularist activity. The refounded Free Religious, Monist, and Freethought associations remained small and quiescent as compared to the Weimar era. Weltanschauung and anticlericalism had been discredited by the Nazi defeat and were now closely associated with the communism that threatened from the East. In an atmosphere where the slogan “No experiments!” won elections, utopianism of the secularist variety lost its currency. The politics of consensus around the social market economy, democracy, and moderation represented a deep change in the framework that had sustained the confessional field. The terms of German reunification in 1990 brought Freethinkers an unexpected windfall. When the West German constitution and laws were extended to the East, the confessional structures, including religious instruction in schools, were also imported. The large number of East Berlin schoolchildren, whose parents or grandparents had left the churches, now had the right to religious instruction in the schools according to their “confession.” The German Freethinkers Association (Deutsche Freidenkerverband), which had been providing alternative ethical instruction in West Berlin on a modest scale since the early 1980s, suddenly had the opportunity to hire a slew of ethics teachers, whose salaries were paid from state coffers.25 Now called the Humanist Association (Humanistischer Verband), Berlin Freethought has come to partake of some of the essential goods that defined the confessional field of the nineteenth century. Yet, despite the jump in the number of students receiving ethical instruction and the continued popularity of the Jugendweihe, there has not been a significant swell in the number of organized secularists. Contemporary Germans are apparently disinclined to turn to secularist organizations for the “cultivation” of a worldview. In 2004, an observer from the Protestant Church noted with a hint of Schadenfreude that “[a]fter having observed growing secularization with glowing approval for some decades, they now threaten to collapse with the eroding importance of the churches.”26 Might German Freethought share with the state churches the fate of becoming a “welfare” religion in two senses, that is, one that increasingly focuses on providing educational and social services while becoming itself more dependent on state support?27 This double convergence of organized secularism and the Christian churches may be taken as a final indication of the need to understand secularism within the context of the confessional field.

25

26

27

Students receiving ethics instruction in Berlin schools rose from ca. 2,000 in 1990 to 33,374 by May 2001. See “20 Jahre Lebenskunde in Berlin,” in Lebenskunde: Informationsbrief für Eltern (May 2001): 4. Andreas Fincke, “Der verlängerte Arm einer herrschenden Partei – Vor 15 Jahren wurden die DDR-Freidenker gegründet,” Materialdienst 6/2004. See also Andreas Rosenfelder, “Ehre sei niemandem in der Höhe: Woran glaubt, wer nicht glaubt: Wird der Atheismus in Deutschland zur dritten Konfession?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 286 (December 7, 2004): 36. The term “welfare religion” was used by sociologist David Martin at the 2003 conference at the University of Frankfurt am Main. “Religiösität in der säkularisierten Welt.”

Appendix

Membership Statistics of the Principal Secularist Organizations

table a: Membership in the Free Religious Congregations Year 1845 (May) 1846 (March) 1847 (Oct.) 1848 (end) 1852 1858 1860 1865 1871 1875 1878

1

2

Berlin1 Dues-paying members

Estimated “Souls”

Germany2 Estimated members

1,400 2,264 2,723 2,857

681 891 776

1,581–1,975 2,230 2,385 2,605 3,145

70,000–80,000 100,000–180,000

23,000

Statistics on members taken from annual reports of Berlin FRC in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15033–15053; Kampe, Geschichte, vols. 1–4, passim; Harndt papers (1926–32); statistics on “souls” taken from annual entries in Städtisches Jahrbuch. Estimates on the total number of Deutschkatholiken in Germany in 1847 vary from 70,000 (Graf, Deutschkatholizismus, 66) to 80,000 (Annette Kuhn, “Deutschkatholiken,” TRE, vol. 8: 559–566). In February 1848 there were ca. 10,000 members of the Protestant Free Congregations. Shimoda, Volksreligiosität, 279. C. Mirbt estimates that together the Lichtfreunde and DK had reached 150,000 around 1850, Mirbt, “Deutschkatholicismus,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 4, 672–675. This figure is likely based on Tschirn’s estimate of 150,000–180,000, Geschichte, 46. For figures after 1860: Tschirn, Geschichte, 110, 193; Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 38, 68; Groschopp, Dissidenten, 89; Drews, “Die freien religiösen Gemeinden,” 484–527; Henning, Jahrbuch, 113.

279

Appendices

280 table a: (cont.)

Year 1880 1882 1884 1887 1890 1894 1896 1899 1903 1910 1926 1932

Berlin Dues-paying members 838 845 920 1,077 1,747 2,488 3,372 4,211 3,600

Estimated “Souls”

3,251 5,211 9,078 10,983 12,590 ca. 11,000 16,270

Germany Estimated members

21,000

24,200 27,500 40,000 (1912)

2,120 2,667

table b. Membership in Freethought Associations3 Year

Berlin

1881 (May) 1882 (April) 1883 (March) 1914

56 97 139

National Freethought

800 6,000

table c. Membership in the German Society for Ethical Culture (DGEK)4 Berlin 1892 (Nov.) 1893 (Jan.) 1894 (Jan.) 1895 (Jan.) 1912

3

4

611 987 1,026 450

Germany 552 780 1,445 ca. 800

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15130, p. 11; Volkszeitung, April 21, 1883, no. 91; Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 353; Henning, Jahrbuch, 70. Mitteilungen, vol. 2 (1894), no. 1, 3; no. 2, 43; Henning, Jahrbuch, 37, 46.

Appendices

281

table d: Membership in the German Monist League (DMB)5 Year

Berlin

1907 1912 1913 1920 1929

550

Germany 500 6,164 5,929 ca. 5,000 3,200

table e: Membership in the Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung (Association of Freethinkers for Cremation) and Follow-Up Organizations VfFF/DFV6 Year

Berlin

Germany

1905 1910 1913 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926 1928 1931

12

12 39 477 738 1,102 3,322 59,829 261,565 386,351 417,460 581,059 547,128

224,316 226,369 187,192

table f: Membership in the Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF)7

1910 1912 1913 1914

5 6

7

Chapters

Members (Reich)

61 90 107 121

3,265 4,479 5,436 6,115

Berlin

16

Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 120; Monistische Monatsblätter, April 1920, vol. 8, no. 3. Protokoll der Vereins-Generalversammlung am 19., 20. und 21. September 1924 (Berlin: Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung, 1924), 3; and Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 354. Statistics for 1926, Humanistischer Verband Deutschland Archive F 103/2. Dieter Fricke, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1869 bis 1917, vol. 2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1987), 1031–1032.

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Index

Cursive numerals indicate pages with short biographies in the footnotes. Abarbanell, Adolph, 143, 148, 154, 204, 221, 224 Adler, Felix, 224, 243 Adorno, Theodor, 118 Allgemeines Landrecht. See Prussian Civil Code Alliance Israélite Universelle, 239 Alsace-Lorraine, 187 Altgeld, Wolfgang, 213 anarchism, 169, 262 Anderson, Margaret, 10, 195 Anthroposophy, 258 anticatholicism, 3, 11, 40 anticlericalism, 1, 21, 104–105, 133, 166–169, 187, 193, 195–200, 207, 240, 264–265, 271–272, 275–276 as ideology critique, 128 Anti-Dühring, 166 Anti-Jesuit Laws, 188 antisemitism, 27 anticatholicism, 213 godless Jewry, trope of, 209 racial, 212, 218 secularism and, 218 Antisocialist Congress of 1877, 196 Anti-Ultramontane Reichsverband, 255 apostolic Christianity, 36, 54, 72 Apostolic Confession, 33, 70, 72, 197 criticism of, 29, 48, 50, 71, 103 defense of, 33, 34, 55, 198 apostolic spirit, 72 Arbeiterverein Democratic, 162–164, 165 Progressive, 151, 152, 155, 161–162, 180, 185 Social Democratic, 164

Argentina, 240 aristocracy, 112, 134, 244 Arnim, Adolf Heinrich von, 45, 47, 48 Arnoldi, Bishop, 39 artificial languages, 257, 263 Esperanto and Volapük, 243, 252 Artisans’ Association. See Handwerkerverein Asad, Talal, 12, 16 Association for School Freedom, 185, 189 Association for School Reform, 147 Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life, 194, 204 atheism, 5, 25, 63, 65, 102, 103, 104, 117, 122, 128, 193, 199, 215, 216, 217 Augsburg Confession, 33 Austria, 52, 81, 82, 176, 181 ban on Deutschkatholizismus, 40 Kulturkampf in, 176 Austro-Prussian War, 176 Avenarius, Richard, 256 Awakening, 35, 72 Baader, Ottilie, 6, 203 Baden, 8, 40, 151, 189 Bainbridge, William, 103 Baltzer, Eduard, 36, 90, 98, 142, 202 conflict with Protestant Church, 56 Jugendweihe, 94 on Jewish Congregations, 223 popular science, 89 Progressive Party, 171

293

294 Baltzer, Eduard (cont.) Revolution of 1848, 78 vegetarianism, 88 worldview, 85, 104, 256 baptism, 29, 45, 47, 55, 62, 70, 71, 83, 94, 251 Bavaria, 16, 36, 40, 81, 164 Bebel, August, 19, 142, 158, 167 church exit, 193 natural science, 160, 193 relations with Democrats, 102, 157, 158, 163 religious politics, 192, 196, 200 view of Free Religion, 203 Behnsch, Ottomar, 74, 78 Berends, Julius, 49, 50, 62 Bergmann, Ernst, 275 Berlin peculiarities of secularism in, 24–25 University of, 165, 167 Berlin Confession, 70 Berlin Declaration of August 1845, 52 Berliner Freie Presse, 159, 194 Bernstein, Aaron Berlin Society for the Reform of Judaism, 89 founder of Volkszeitung, 146 Gesellschaft der Freunde, 224 popular science, 89 Bernstein, Eduard, 155, 158, 163 church exit, 200 Democratic activities, 162, 163 on antisemitism, 212 secularist affinities, 164–167 Bethmann-Hollweg Moritz August von, 54, 141 Theobald von, 266 Beyond. See Jenseits Bezirksvereine, 120, 149 and political protest, 180, 185 as political power base, 148, 157 popular science, 120 Bible, 34, 38, 46, 74, 75, 196 Biedermann, Karl, 188 Biron, Michael, 101 Bismarck, Otto von, 254 and liberals, 144, 176 great turn of late 1870s, 27, 132, 154, 174, 195, 201, 207, 216, 228, 232 Kulturkampf, 187–188 Blackbourn, David, 9, 173, 195 Blanc, Louis, 161 Blaschke, Olaf, 15, 19 blasphemy, 168, 169, 199, 203, 241 Bloch, Ernst, 118

Index Blum, Robert, 51, 52, 75, 78, 79 Bluntschli, Johann Caspar, 196 Bollenbeck, Georg, 10 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 69 co-founder of Giordano Bruno League, 69, 258–262 Ethical Culture, 244 mystical monism, 258 popular science, 91 wartime nationalism, 269 Bolshevism as Judaism, 273 as secularism, 272 Bonifatius Association, 114 Borchardt, Bruno, 167 Borutta, Manuel, 11, 178 Boruttau, Karl, 101 Bourdieu, Pierre educational field, 117 religious field, 19–20 sociology of religion, 111 Brandenburg, 43, 113, 194, 283 Brandes, Georg, 132, 143, 225 Braß, Otto, 24 Brauner, Robert, 46, 72 pantheistic monism, 84–88 police persecution, 81–83 political orientation, 82 Braunschweig, 274 Breslau Confession, 71 Breslau, 25, 39, 41, 43, 47, 81, 148, 217, 220 University of, 85, 96, 248 Britain, 7, 9, 30, 59, 72, 81, 114, 152 Brown, Wendy, 249 Bruggemann, Karl Heinrich, 49 Bruno, Giordano, 5, 62, 86 Büchner, Ludwig, 2, 90, 166, 235, 258 co-founder of Union of Freethinkers, 69, 101, 229, 240 Democratic politics, 156, 158, 171 materialism, 92, 236 popular science, 193 Büchsel, Carl, 38 Buddhism, 263 Bülow, Bernhard von, 266 Bund der Konfessionslosen, 251 Bund Neues Vaterland, 6, 155, 269 Bunsen, Christian Carl Josias von, 55, 59, 139 burial, 47, 55 Free Religious, 94, 202 versus cremation, 272

Index Canitz, General von, 52 Canossa, 229 Catholic Church position on mixed marriage, 33 response to Deutschkatholiken, 40 secularization of 1803, 16 ultramontanism, 32 Catholic emancipation in Britain, 30, 37 Center Party, 15, 18, 173, 178, 192, 195, 201, 229, 266, 273 and Moabit Klostersturm, 182 antisemitism, 210 Central Association in Prussia for the Welfare of the Working Classes, 150 Central-Verein in Preussen für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen. See Central Association in Prussia for the Welfare of the Working Classes Chartism, 8 Christian rationalism, 2, 26, 30, 65, 67 confessional formulae, 34, 37, 63, 98 humanist criticism of, 70–81 origins of Free Religion in, 8 Christian State, 17, 21, 83, 136, 197, 219 antisecularism and, 7, 24, 184 antisemitism, 218 Judaism and, 58–63 redefinition of, 30 Christkatholisch congregations. See Deutschkatholisch congregations Christkatholisch versus Deutschkatholisch, 46 Church of Christ, 72 church taxes, 63, 199, 270 church-leaving laws Austrian of 1869, 252 Prussian of 1847. See Religious Patent of March 1847 Prussian of 1873, 63, 190, 191, 200, 227, 237, 254 Saxon of 1870, 193 church-leaving movement of 1878, 200, 267 of 1906-1914, 233 city council of Berlin, 50, 123, 145, 148, 157, 169 city government of Berlin, 46, 47 support of Lichtfreunde, 52–53 civil marriage, 146, 189, 197, 214 Clark, Christopher, 60, 201 clothing reform, 262 Cobden, Richard, 12 Cohen, Hermann, 134, 243

295 Neo-Kantian philosophy, 236 response to antisemitism, 217, 249 Cologne Cathedral, 36 Cologne Troubles, 32 Committee of the Confessionless, 266 Communist Party, 270, 271 confession Bekenntnis versus Konfession, 33–35 juridical usage of, 16–17 statistics, 17 confessional field, 20 cold war impact on, 276–277 confessionlessness in, 30 confessional state. See Christian State confessional system freedom of conscience in, 30, 254 modifications of 1919, 29, 66 confessionalism, 1, 33 confessionalization theory, 14–15 monoconfessional societies, 14 quadriconfessional model, 18–23 triconfessional model, 18 conservatism, 191 antisemitism and, 63, 198, 210, 213, 244 Christianity and, 7, 10, 30, 33, 35, 59, 78, 197, 214 parliamentary, 141, 195, 266 revolution and, 78, 83 Constantinople, 82 constitution, 58 conversion, 36, 43 church-leaving as, 64, 65, 251 Jewish resistance to, 226 to Free Religion, 93, 223, 225 to secularism, 209 to Social Democracy, 157 to worldview, 27 cooperatives, 149, 152, 158, 160, 162, 167, 263 Cracow, 176 cremation, 21, 240, 241, 262, 271, 272, 274 crystals, 86 cultural hegemony, theory of, 11, 12, 175 cultural Protestantism, 10, 19 culture war. See Kulturkampf Czerski, Johannes, 40, 71, 93, 142 dispute with Ronge, 46, 71–73 influence in Berlin, 46, 71 support by Protestants, 47, 72 Damaschke, Adolf, 263 Darwin, Charles, 193, 258

296 Darwinism, 86, 124 Daum, Andreas, 69 Däumig, Ernst, 270 David, Eduard, 260 deism, 55, 60 Delbrück, Adalbert, 145 Democratic movement, 8, 26, 137 historiography, 153–154 pacifism, 155 pantheism, 83 social politics, 155–156 Democratic People’s Party, 147, 155, 156, 158, 179 Demokratie. See Democratic movement Der Dissident, 91, 119 Dethier, Philip Anton, 46, 71, 82 Deutsche Freidenkerverband. See Freethinkers, German Union of Deutsche Glaubensbewegung. See German Faith Movement Deutsche Volksverein, antisemitic, 211, 215 Deutschkatholisch Congregations. See also Free Religion Baden, 41 Berlin, 43–47, 102, 106–114 Berlin Council of 1847, 75, 242 Braunschweig, 41 Bremen, 41 Breslau, 29, 40, 43, 45, 56, 74, 75, 76, 78, 84 Darmstadt, 78 Frankfurt am Main, 41, 107, 127 Hessen, 41 Königsberg, 93 Leipzig, 76, 89, 102, 160 Leipzig Council of 1845, 46, 76 Lübeck, 41 Mannheim, 62 Mecklenburg, 41 Nassau, 41 Nauen, 43 Saxony, 41 Stettin, 82 Württemberg, 41 developmental thinking in secularism, 38, 50, 52, 74, 75, 85, 86, 99, 123, 139, 158, 184, 196, 224, 236–238 Diesterweg, Adolf, 49 Dissidents movement, 193 Dissidents’ Law. See Religious Patent of March 1847 Dittmar, Louise, 69 Dominicans, 177, 181

Index Douai, Adolph, 101 Dowling, John, 40 Dresden, 194 Drews, Paul, 102 Droste-Vischering, Clemens August von, 33 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 257 Dühring, Eugen, 165–166 Dulk, Albert, 51, 114, 166, 171 Dumas, Georg, 143, 144, 147, 154, 157, 194 Duncker, Franz, 50, 146, 153, 156, 204 owner of Volkszeitung, 146 Progressive Party involvement, 145 school reform, 147, 184, 185 unions, Hirsch-Duncker’schen, 150 Duncker, Max, 37, 146 Eckardt, Ludwig, 156, 161, 179 Edigy, Moritz von, 243, 245, 251 Eichhoff, Wilhelm, 162 Eichhorn, Karl Friedrich, 49 increasing suppression of dissenters, 45–48 on Jewish nationality, 61 uneven treatment of confessions, 31 Einstein, Albert, 90 Elcho, Rudolf, 147, 227, 228 Eley, Geoff, 9 Ender, 93 Engels, Friedrich, 122, 136 England. See Britain Enlightenment, early, 5 established churches. See state churches Ethical Culture confession and, 27, 252 German Society of, 5, 243–248 origins of, 225 social aspects, 133–135 ethics confession and, 233–252 secularist, 4, 88, 97, 99–100 Eulenburg, Friedrich Albrecht zu, 180 Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 34, 35, 38, 52, 58, 59, 74, 78, 206 Evangelischer Verein, 199 Falk, Adalbert, 195, 201 Falkson, Ferdinand, 59, 62, 222, 225 Faulhaber, Cardinal Michael, 272 Fechner, Gustav, 87, 256 feminism. See women’s movement Feuerbach, Ludwig, 38, 68, 69, 79, 85, 234 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 138

Index First International. See International Workingman’s Association First World War, 253, 269 Foerster, Bernhard, 211 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm, philosemitism of, 218 Foerster, Wilhelm, 243 criticism of worldview, 246 on Jewish nationalism, 247 popular science, 243 Force and Matter, 2, 236 Fortschrittspartei. See Progressive Party fourth confession heuristic usage of, 21, 27 France, 7, 14, 20, 33, 72, 155 Franco–Prussian War, 155, 162 Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, 78 Free (Protestant) Congregations. See also Free Religion Halberstadt, 57, 84 Halle, 57 Hamburg, 70 Königsberg, 6, 57, 62, 96, 137, 143, 155, 220 Magdeburg, 56, 57 Marburg, 41 Nordhausen, 84 Free Religion banning in 1934, 275 cooperation with völkisch movement after 1933, 274–276 ethical debate, 99–100 Jewish conversion to, 224–225 notables in, 142–144 secularization of, 75–96 Free Religious Congregations Berlin, 5, 130–132, 137, 142–144, 146, 179, 183, 189–191, 219, 225, 227, 244, 254, 260, 261, 264, 274 Breslau, 94, 185, 205, 220, 243 Magdeburg, 94, 102, 147, 194 Mannheim, 94 Stettin, 102 Union of, 2, 93, 221, 264 freemasonry, 196, 224, 231, 237 Freethinkers, German Union of, 2, 69, 130, 132, 147, 232, 263, 264, 277 founding meeting, 233 social composition, 261 Freethinkers, International Federation of, 265 Freethought as welfare religion, 277 German reunification of 1990, 277

297 proletarian, 22, 259, 264 social aspects, 132–133 Freethought Association Lessing, 132–133, 243 Freie Bühne, 133 Freie Volksbühne, 255 French Revolution, 100 Freud, Sigmund, 256 Fricke, Dieter, 170 Friederici, Otto, 240, 244 Friedrich the Great, 38 Friedrich Wilhelm III, 32, 53 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, 7, 26, 31, 140 defense of confessional state, 58–59 opposition to rationalism, 39, 50, 51, 53 Patent of March 1847, 54–58 religious beliefs, 35 Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis, 147, 167 Friends of Light. See Lichtfreunde Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 109, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 169, 196, 202, 203 Free Religion in early socialism, 109, 159–163 Gall, Lothar, 112, 115 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 7, 147, 161 Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker, 264 Gerlach, Leopold von, 34 Gerlach, Ludwig von, 34, 64 Gerlach, Otto von, 34 German Christian movement, 274 German Faith Movement, 274, 275 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 40 Gesellschaft der Freunde, 224 Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung. See Society for the Propagation of Popular Education Giordano Bruno League, 69, 253, 255, 258–262 Gizycki, Georg von, 243 Glagau, Otto, 126, 208, 216 Glassbrenner, Adolf, 51 Gnadau, 37 Gneist, Rudolf, 146, 183, 187 Goebbels, Joseph, 275 Goegg, Amand, 161 Goetz, Walter, 265 Gogarten, Friedrich, 14 Göring, Hermann, 275 Gotha, 93 gottgläubig, 64, 276 Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, 8, 136 Gregory XVI, Pope, 32 Groschopp, Horst, 9 Gross, Michael, 178

298 Gustav Adolf Association, 50, 114 Gymnasium versus Realgymnasium, 117, 123, 125 Haeckel, Ernst, 90, 118, 261 anticatholicism, 255 church exit, 233, 266 founder of Monist League, 3, 253, 258, 260 Freethought, 261 influence on socialists, 193, 264 naturalistic monism, 3, 26, 86, 92, 255 on Ethical Culture, 246 politics, 124 popular science, 69 publications, 67, 256 wartime nationalism, 269 world riddles, 67, 86, 256 Halbbildung versus Bildung, 117–119, 125–128 Halberstadt, 81 Halle, 36, 48, 51, 132, 227, 248, 270 University of, 34 Hamburg, 153 Handwerkerverein, Berlin, 121, 146 politics, 50, 51, 149, 151, 194, 199 popular science, 120, 152 proximity to FRC, 130 Harndt, Adolf, 129 Harndt, Ewald, 24 Hartmann, Eduard von, 191, 195 Harzburger Front, 273 Hasenclever, Wilhelm, 166, 196, 204 Hatzfeldt, Sophie von, 143 Hauer, Jakob Wilhelm, 274 Haym, Rudolf, 37, 49, 57, 146 Hecker, Friedrich, 51 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 38, 68, 71, 217 Hegelianism, Left, 2, 25, 38, 50 Heine, August, 171 Heine, Heinrich, 123 Heinsch, August, 164, 202 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 34, 38, 52, 63, 273 Henrich-Wilhelmi, Hedwig, 240, 241 Herzen, Alexander, 161 Herzog, Dagmar, 17, 249 Hess, Moses, 69 heterodoxy, 13, 20 Hieronymi, Wilhelm, 78, 97, 158 Hildebrand, Karl, 125 Himmler, Heinrich, 275 Hirsch, Carl, 162 Hirsch, Emanuel, 272

Index Hirsch, Maurice de, 240 Hirsch, Max, 127, 152–153, 172, 196 Ethical Culture, 243 Freethought, 227 popular science, 121 Progressive politics, 162 unions, Hirsch-Duncker’schen, 151 workers’ education, 158 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 253, 271 Hirsekorn, C. A., 154 historical progress. See developmental thinking Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland, 191, 214 Hitler, Adolf, 273–274 Höchberg, Karl, 166 Hödel, Max, 201 Hofferichter, Theodor, 53, 84, 105 cooperation with Jewish liberals, 220 pantheism, 77 popular science, 89 Progressive Party, 171 Revolution of 1848, 79 socialism, 154 Hoffmann, Adolph, 203, 255, 264, 267, 269 Hölscher, Lucian, 16 Holy Roman Empire, 16 Holy Spirit, 73, 80 Holyoake, George, 3–4, 12–13, 152 homosexual rights movement, 22 Hübinger, Gangolf, 10, 19 Hugo, Victor, 161 humanism, 26, 38, 63, 76, 81, 85, 97, 100, 101, 124, 161, 172, 186, 222, 240, 250, 259 Humanist Congregation, 96, 143, 243, 248, 264 Humanistischer Verband, 277 Humboldt Academy, 121, 132, 152, 203 Humboldt Associations, 91 Humboldt, Alexander von, 89, 91, 121, 123, 186, 258 Humboldt-Hain, 186 Humboldt-Museum, 123, 186 ignorabimus, 257 Ihrer, Emma, 6 immanence, 25, 85, 104, 257 Inner Mission, 23, 114, 198 intermarriage. See mixed marriage International Peace League, 161 International Workingman’s Association, 162 Italy, 7, 14 Itzstein, Johann Adam von, 51

Index Jacobson, Hermann, 93, 194, 224 conversion to Deutschkatholizismus, 224 leader of Free Religion, 93, 144, 204 Jacobson, Israel, 93, 224 Jacoby, Johann, 137–140 followers in Berlin FRC, 142, 154 Free Religion, 62 monism, 138 pacifism, 161 secularist politics, 140, 262 Social Democracy, 157, 169 James, William, 257 Jastrow, Ignaz, 134 Jenseits versus Diesseits, 79–81 Jesuits, 181, 186, 189 Jewish Colonization Society, 239 Jewish emancipation and Deutschkatholiken, 61 confessional opposition to, 59, 220 law of 1869, 209, 254 Jochmus, Ida, 44 Jodl, Friedrich, 134 Johann, crown prince of Saxony, 51 Judaism, 5 Berlin Reform Congregation, 61 confession and, 64 Society for the Reform of, 6, 61 Jugendweihe, 94, 276 Jung, Carl, 259 Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph, 271 Kaiser, Wolfram, 10 Kalthoff, Albert, 235 Kampe, Ferdinand, 45, 76, 79, 80, 85, 89, 105, 288 historian, 43 in Revolution of 1848, 79 Kampffmeyer, Paul, 167 Kant, Immanuel, 38, 68, 87, 138, 140, 155, 195, 217 Kessler, Gustav, 138, 158, 227, 235, 236, 240, 242, 244 Ketteler, Bishop Wilhelm von, 158 Kirchenkampf of 1930s, 276 Kleinpaul, Karl, 70, 74 Klemich, Oskar, 194 Koch, Ignaz, 74, 77 Koch, Robert, 134 Kochhann, Heinrich Eduard, 145 Kocka, Jürgen, 115 Kögel, Rudolf, 198, 199, 201 Konfession. See confession

299 Königgratz, Battle of, 176 Königsberg, 40, 153, 155, 225 Kosmos, 90 Köthen, 6, 37, 38, 48 Kramer, Georg, 275 Kraus, Karl, 252 Krausnick, Heinrich Wilhelm, 46, 47, 53 Krebs, Phillip, 80 Krebs, Robert, 161–162 leadership of Arbeiterverein, 161 Moabit Klosterstum, 180–182 workers’ movement, 158 Krische, Paul, 271 Kulturkampf, 9, 15, 26, 201 and secularization theory, 13 antisemitism and, 208–216 Freethought and, 132 liberal hegemony, 206 Kulturkartells, 263, 264 Kurhessen, 41 laïcité, 7, 19 land reform movement, 263 Lange, Friedrich Albert, 145 Langerhans, Paul, 50, 134, 143, 146, 148, 182 as a Jacobyite, 154, 170 Free Religious leadership, 143, 146 Moabit Klosterstum, 180 Progressive Party involvement, 144, 145, 148 relation to Protestant Church, 146 Lasker, Eduard, 22, 230, 232 antisocialism, 231 freemasonry, 231 on antisemitism, 212, 231 on Halbbildung, 126 patron of Berlin Freethinkers, 227, 230, 238 Secession, 201, 228 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 158, 160 Ledebour, Georg, 147, 158, 226, 227, 242, 269 Leeden, Karl van der, 143, 154, 155, 185, 189 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 195 Leipzig, 49, 51 Leipzig Confession of 1845, 71 Leixner, Otto von, 231 Lenin, Vladimir, 257, 261, 270 Lenz, Hermann von, 272 Lepsius, M. Rainer, 18, 265 lese majesty, 199, 241 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 208 Levy, Morten, 169 Lewald, Fanny, 139

300 Lewinger, Edmund, 179 liberal hegemony. See cultural hegemony liberalism. See also Progressive Party anticatholicism and, 10, 11, 178 antipolitics and, 266 confession and, 34 crisis of 1877, 197 Jewish emancipation and, 63, 221 political dominance in Berlin, 52, 144–152 Protestantism and, 15, 49, 52, 174 secularism and, 12, 144–152 secularism as threat to, 124, 265 town citizenry and, 114, 115 Lichtfreunde, 6 Berlin, 49–51 Breslau, 48, 49, 50 founding of, 37 Halle, 25, 37 Königsberg, 49 Magdeburg, 29, 37, 78 Lidtke, Vernon, 193 Liebig, Justus, 193 Liebknecht, Karl, 267 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 102, 159 church exit, 200 on Freethinkers, 3 relations with Democrats, 163 Liegnitz, 43 life reform, 22 Lippert, Julius, 204 Löbe, Paul, 266 Loewenthal, Wilhelm, 80, 132, 226 ethical philosophy, 233–239 freemasonry, 231 involvement in Jewish resettlement, 240 leader of national Freethought, 233 liberalism, 232 London, 168, 205 Löwe, Wilhelm, 153 Löwenstein, Kurt, 271 Lübbe, Hermann, 13 Luther, Martin, 40, 70, 191 Mach, Ernst, 256 Magdeburg, 34, 37, 45, 48 Magistrat. See city government of Berlin Mah, Harold, 206 Makower, Hermann, 204 Manasse, Waldeck, 127, 128, 208, 209, 236, 244 Social Democatic politics, 242 speeches in FRC, 127, 128

Index Mann, Thomas, 266 Mannheim, Karl, 262 Manteuffel, Edwin von, 198 Manteuffel, Otto von, 81 Märkisches Kirchenblatt, 179, 180 Marr, Wilhelm, 212, 218 marriage, 36, 47, 55, 59, 94 Marx, Karl, 69, 256 materialism controversy of 1850s, 92 scientific versus historical, 241, 260, 271 Mauthner, Fritz, 226, 256 May Laws of 1873, 189, 237 May, Ludwig, 142, 148, 154, 180–182 Moabit Klosterstum, 180, 181 Mayer, Gustav, 170 McLeod, Hugh, 14 Mehring, Franz, 200 as Democratic journalist, 147, 155 as socialist, 158 on antisemitism, 230 on Haeckel, 261 on Jacoby, 138 on Kulturkampf, 191 Meisel-Hess, Greta, 6 Menschenthum, 97, 99, 101, 229, 234 Merker, Dr., 49, 50, 51 Metternich, Klemens von, 52, 54, 59 Metzner, Thomas, 109, 147, 159, 162, 169, 172, 203, 204 Free Religion in early socialism, 109, 164 in Berlin FRC, 110 Meysenbug, Malwida von, 6 microhistory, 23 milieu theory, 18 Mill, John S., 161 mixed marriage, 20, 116 Jewish-gentile, 59, 62, 146, 180, 225, 273 Protestant-Catholic, 33, 39, 43, 59 Moabit Klostersturm, 176–183 antisemitism and, 210 liberal press involvement, 179, 186 Mohrenklub, 165 Moleschott, Jacob, 92, 120, 138, 217 Mommsen, Theodor, 145, 168, 224, 226, 249, 289 philosemitism, 223 monasticism, 183, 258 monism, 3 and materialism, 92 antihumanism, 100 cognition, 87

Index energetic, 257 idealistic versus materialistic, 86, 96–102, 138 vitalism and, 86 Monist League, German, 3, 6, 67, 69, 235, 253, 261, 266, 269, 271 Monistenbund. See Monist League, German Morgenstern, Lina, 148, 226, 227, 228 Most, Johann, 159, 194, 196, 198–200, 205 secularist affinities, 167–169 Mufti, Aamir, 249, 250 Mühler, Heinrich von, 186, 188 Müller, Anton Mauritius, 43, 71, 72, 73 Müller, Eduard, 177, 186, 210 Mulsow, Martin, 5 Munich, 35, 125, 263, 265, 272, 273 Na’aman, Schlomo, 160 Napoleonic era, 16 Nathan the Wise, 208, 234 National Liberal Party, 132, 144, 145, 176, 183, 188, 192, 194, 201, 206, 207, 216, 228, 266. See also liberalism Secession of 1880, 230 National Socialism, 273–276 nationalism, 247 and confession, 35 Nationalverein, 146, 149, 150, 156, 225 Naunyn, Franz Christian, 44, 50 Nauwerck, Karl, 49, 50 Nees von Esenbeck, Christian, 75, 76, 78, 85, 86, 87, 89, 154 neo-humanism versus naturalistic humanism, 123, 127, 167 Neo-Kantianism, 166, 217, 239 New Era, 140, 141, 142, 150 New York, 40, 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 256 Nipperdey, Thomas, 18, 173, 259 Nordau, Max, 227, 238 Freethought activities, 227 monist worldview, 3 on confessionlessness, 252 on Free Religion, 232 North German Union, 60, 176 Nowak, Kurt, 14, 18 nudism, 262 Oertel, 141 Old Catholics, 20 Old Lutherans, 20, 32, 59 Olmütz, Punctation of, 81 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 7

301 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 257, 267 church exit, 233 monist activities, 257–258 wartime nationalism, 269 Otto, Louise, 6 pacifism, 6, 155, 161 Palatschek, Sylvia, 44 pantheism, versus atheism, 85, 258 Paulsdorff, Friedrich, 119, 152 Peace of Augsburg, 31 Peace of Westphalia, 30, 31, 55 Peege, Heinrich, 129 Penzig, Rudolf, 248, 263 Peter, Carl, 275 Peus, Heinrich, 167, 266, 269 Pfungst, Arthur, 134, 263 Phillips, Adolf, 147 philosemitism pressure for conversion, 223 secularism and, 218–239 phrenology, 120 Pietism, 35 Pinn, Carl, 128 Poland, 46 police surveillance, 24, 203 Pommerania, 40 popular science, 2, 89–96, 126, 137, 193, 258 positivism, 239 postcolonial theory, 11, 174 Pringsheim, Rudolf, 143, 154, 224 Progressive Party, 26, 123, 153 See also liberalism newspapers, 146 Protestant Church, 14, 36 conservatives in, 33–36, 38 General Synod of 1846, 54 Union of 1817, 32 Protestant freedom, 34, 38 Protestant League, 15, 18 Protestantenverein, 114, 146, 185 Prüfer, Sebastian, 107 Prussia, 16, 20, 24, 29, 30, 31, 39, 47, 48, 52, 55, 56, 63, 77, 82, 176, 180, 198, 270 Prussian Civil Code of 1794, 16, 30, 55 Prussian Diet, 58, 81, 183, 211, 267 Prussian Parliament of 1848, 78 psychophysical parallelism, 87, 256 Quidde, Ludwig philosemitism, 218

302 Rahden, Till van, 22 Ranke, Wilhelm, 118 Rau, Heribert, 89, 91 Reformation, 15 Reichenbach, Andreas, 171 religion of humanity, 61, 76, 89, 223 religion, essentialistic definitions of, 18, 103 religious field, 19, 111 religious indifference, 277 Religious Patent of March 1847, 29, 30, 54–58, 59, 63, 64, 77, 105, 191, 193, 253 republicanism. See Democratic movement revisionism. See Social Democracy Revolution of 1848, 8, 22, 49, 136 Rhineland, 32, 41 Richter, Eugen, 153 Rickert, Heinrich, 255 Riddle of the Universe. See Welträtsel Riehl, Alois, 236 Risorgimento, 7 Roller, Heinrich, 161 Rome, 40, 179 Ronge, Johannes, 5, 45, 46 founding of Deutschkatholizismus, 39–40 women’s movement, 44 Rosenberg, Hans, 8, 195 Rossmässler, Emil, 90 Democratic politics, 78, 158, 160, 171 popular science, 89, 91 Rubenow, W., 142 Runge, Heinrich, 49, 50, 145, 146 Rupke, Nicolaas, 91 Rupp, Julius conflict with authorities, 55, 57 cooperation with liberal Jews, 62, 137, 220 pacifism, 6, 155 philosophy, 96 Progressive Party, 102, 171 Russell, Bertrand, 257 Russia, 28, 225, 239, 272 Sachse, Heinrich, 147, 171, 194, 204, 231 Said, Edward, 11 Salvation Army, 114 Sänger, Karl, 127 Saxony Kingdom of, 40, 48, 193 Prussian Province of, 6, 37, 49 State of, 264 Scarpa, Ludovica, 50 Schaefer, Georg Siegfried, 21, 96 1880 visit with Most, 205

Index anticatholic agitation, 180 anticlericalism, 184 atheism, 102 conflict with socialists, 202, 204, 205 Democratic politics, 154–156 Freethought, 242 naturalistic ethics, 99–100 philosemitism, 219–224 salary, 110 school reform, 147, 185 training as a schoolteacher, 111 views on eduation, 127 Schäffle, Albert, 196 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 35, 68, 76, 86 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 38, 71, 185 Schmidt, Heinrich, 104 Schmidt-Cabanis, Richard, 226, 227, 228, 231 Schmitt, Eugen Heinrich, 258 Schneider, Georg, 246 Scholl, Carl, 62, 101, 232 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 195, 256 Schramm, Carl August, 155, 158, 165 Schreiner, Helmuth, 27, 270 Schröder, Winfried, 5 Schulze-Delitzsch, Hermann, 138, 171, 172 educational politics, 123, 152 Kulturkampf, 189 Lichtfreunde, 146 Progressive Party leadership, 145, 153, 156 Progressive workers’ movement, 146, 160, 161, 204 self-help, 151 workers’ cooperatives, 150, 151, 158, 167 Schünemann-Pott, Friedrich, 101 Schütz, Fritz, 97–99, 101 Schwaner, Wilhelm, 258 Schweichel, Robert, 143, 155, 158, 226, 227, 228 Schweitzer, Johann Baptist von, 162 secularism and biography, 23 anticlerical versus anti-Christian, 183–187, 206 definitions of, 3–5, 11–13 neutralization of, 14 paradoxes of, 21, 28 state churches and, 4, 64 versus Freethought, 4 secularity, 13 secularization as ideology, 11

Index of 1803, 16 theory of, 9, 13 versus secularism, 1 SED. See Socialist Unity Party Sedlnitzki, Bishop of Breslau, 39 self-help, 151–152 semi-education. See Halbbildung Seydel, Karl Theodor, 145 Silesia, 25, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 78, 150 Simon-Ritz, Frank, 9 Singer, Paul, 143, 155, 158, 159, 169 Sintenis, Wilhelm Franz, 35, 37 Smith, Helmut Walser, 173, 212 Social Democracy Kulturkampf, 192 parties ADAV, 143, 158, 160, 161, 162 SDAP, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 171, 196 SPD, 18 USPD, 147, 242, 270 VDAV, 158, 162 religious policies, 158–160 secularism and left deviations, 167 secularism and revisionism, 164–167 secularist milieu of, 18 social hygiene, 238 socialism. See Social Democracy Socialist Laws, 165, 176, 200–206 Socialist Unity Party, 276 Society for the Propagation of Popular Education, 132, 152, 204 Sonderweg debate, 9, 174 Soviet Union. See Russia Spain, 7, 181 Specht, August, 2, 101, 202, 228 Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 155, 195 spiritualism, 87, 259 Stadtbürgertum. See town citizenry Stahlhelm, 272 Stahn, T., 101, 205 Stahr, Adolf, 139 Stark, Rodney, 103 state churches, 189, 270, 272, 276, 277 as confessions, 19–21, 33, 60, 64, 276 relations to the state, 16, 29 Steiner, Rudolf, 258 Stern, Jakob, 171, 241 Stoecker, Adolf, 23, 198–200, 214–215, 272 Stoecker, Helene, 6, 253 Stolzenfels, 51, 54 Strauss, David Friedrich, 104, 191, 241 Struve, Gustav von, 69, 79

303 vegetarianism, 88 summepiscopate, 16, 31 Suttner, Bertha von, 134, 218 Switzerland, 81, 270 temperance, 262 theosophy, 259 Thile, Ludwig Gustav von, 47, 54, 56 Third Republic, French, 7 Thölde, Gustav, 129 Thuringia, 274 Tolerance Edict. See Religious Patent of March 1847 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 13, 245 town citizenry, 107, 115, 116, 130, 135, 150, 260 Tractarianism, 72 Träger, Albert, 265 Treitschke, Heinrich, 47, 51, 211, 216–217 Trier pilgrimage of 1844, 39 Troeltsch, Ernst, 3, 269 Tschirn, Gustav, 63, 243 Tutzauer, Franz, 145 Twesten, Karl, 145 Uhden, Alexander von, 45 Uhlich, Leberecht, 45, 96, 98, 103, 142, 194 antisocialism, 158 leadership of Lichtfreunde, 37, 48, 51 on Jewish congregations, 223 Progressive Party, 102, 171 rationalism, 37, 48, 78 Revolution of 1848, 78 suspension of, 57 workers’ education, 152 Ule, Otto, 89, 194 ultramontanism, 10 unions, Hirsch-Duncker’schen, 151 Unitarianism, 55 United States, 72, 81, 168, 224 Unruh, Hans Viktor von, 145 Urban, Friedrich Ludwig, 77 Vahlteich, Julius, 160–161, 166, 169, 194 Vatican Council, 176, 185, 187 vegetarianism, 88, 262 Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung, 264 Verein zur Pflege des freireligiösen Lebens. See Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life Vienna, 79, 179 Virchow, Rudolf, 68, 115, 123, 124, 145, 149, 184

304 Virchow-Haeckel controversy, 124 Viswanathan, Gauri, 13 Vogt, Carl, 89, 92 Vogtherr, Eugen, 142 Vogtherr, Ewald, 242, 246 Voigt, Karl, 235, 246 völkisch movement, 64, 215, 258, 271, 275 Volkov, Shulamit, 212 Volksverein für das Katholische Deutschland, 15, 18 Volkszeitung, Berliner, 146, 147, 153, 176, 181, 241 Vormärz, 6 Vorwärts, 159 Vossische Zeitung, 72, 146, 147, 180, 186 Wabnitz, Agnes, 6, 159, 203 Waldeck Association, 232, 235, 240 Waldow, 180 Walker, Mack, 112 Weber, Max, 13, 255 Wedell, Wilhelm von, 48 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 10, 173 Weimar Cartel, 263 Weimar Constitution, 66, 270 Weimar Republic, 22, 23, 269 Weiss, Guido, 114, 142, 154, 228 Democratic politics, 148, 153, 154, 156, 169 Free Religious leadership, 114, 142 journalistic activities, 147, 150, 169 Welskopp, Thomas, 18 Weltanschauung. See worldview Welträtsel, 67, 256, 261 Werner, Anton von, 143

Index Wiggers, Moritz, 153 Wilhelm I, 45, 140 assassination attempts of 1878, 201 Wille, Bruno, 158, 254, 258 co-founder of Giordano Bruno League, 258–262 Windthorst, Ludwig, 234 Winkler, Heinrich August, 170 Wislicenus, Adolf Timotheus, 57, 93, 96, 99, 100, 114, 142, 177, 183, 194 Wislicenus, Gustav Adolf, 37 censure in 1845, 48 critique of Christian rationalism, 38 Whether Scripture or Spirit?, 38 Woeniger, Dr., 49 women’s movement, 6, 44, 241, 262 workers’ education, 6, 121, 128, 152, 158 world riddles, 257 worldview. See also monism and anticlericalism, 4, 104 Catholic, 52 criticism of, 14, 233–238, 246, 250 in Weimar Constitution, 66 monistic, 2 politics and, 138 popular science and, 137 Würkert, Ludwig, 94, 95, 101, 160, 171 Zedlitz-Trützschler, Robert von, 243, 254 Zeitgeist, 35, 74 Zepler, Georg, 251 Zimmerwald Movement, 270 Zionism, 3 Zukunft, democratic journal, 154, 157, 163 Zukunft, socialist journal, 166