Description
Book SynopsisHistorians have long believed that Catholics were late and ambivalent supporters of the German nation. Rebecca Ayako Bennette's bold new interpretation demonstrates definitively that from the beginning in 1871, when Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser of a unified Germany, Catholics were actively promoting a German national identity for the new Reich.
Trade ReviewBennette has written a lucid, scholarly analysis that furthers past research that has studied Catholics no longer in the ghetto, and who can now be treated as modern historical subjects. -- D. J. Dietrich * Choice *
A first-rate work that significantly revises our understanding of a key issue in modern German history. Bennette shows for the first time that the
Kulturkampf dented German Catholic loyalties to the new nation-state far less seriously than historians have hitherto assumed. Instead, it was precisely during the period of repression that Catholics developed an alternative national culture, one which opposed not the nation-state itself, but Protestant and liberal visions of it. This very fine book is a crucial contribution to the history of German Catholicism before World War I. No other work brings us as deeply into the mindset of German Catholics as they negotiated their way into the culture of German nationalism. -- Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University
Bennette joins a growing number of recent historians who are shedding fresh light on the dynamics of religious conflict under the Kaiserreich.
Fighting for the Soul of Germany guides us reliably and insightfully through Catholic understandings of German nationhood in the era of Bismarck. -- Geoff Eley, University of Michigan
