Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark Page A

Catholics was a failure. He had hoped that an anti-Catholic crusade would help to create a broad, Protestant liberal-conservative lobby that would help him to pass legislation consolidating the new Empire. But the integrating effect of the campaign was more fleeting and fragile than he had anticipated. Anti-Catholicism could not sustain a durable platform for government action, either in Prussia or in the Empire. There were many facets to this problem. Bismarck himself was less of an extremist than many of those whose passions were aroused by his policy. He was a religious man who sought the guidance of God in his administration of state affairs (and usually, as the left liberal Ludwig Bamberger sardonically noted, found the deity agreeing with him). 28 His religion was – in the Pietist tradition – non-sectarian and ecumenical. He was opposed to the complete separation of church and state sought by the liberals, and he did not believe that religion was a purely private affair. Bismarck did not share the left-liberal hope that religion would ultimately wither away as a social force. He was thus unnerved by the anti-clerical and secularizing energies released by the
Kulturkampf
.
    The anti-Catholic campaign also failed because the confessional divide was cross-cut by the other fault-lines in the Prussian political landscape. As the
Kulturkampf
wore on, the rift between left liberals and right liberals proved in some respects even deeper than that between the liberals and the Catholics. By the mid-1870s, the left liberals had begun to oppose the campaign on the grounds that it infringed fundamental rights. The increasing radicalism of anti-church measures also prompted misgivings in many Protestants on the ‘clerical’ wing of German conservatism. The view gained ground that the real victim of the
Kulturkampf
was not the Catholic church or Catholic politics as such, but religion itself. The most prominent examples of such conservative scruples were Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach and Hans von Kleist, both men formed by the Pietist milieu of old Prussia.
    Even if the support for Bismarck’s policy had been more secure, it is

     
    50. Anti-clerical stereotypes. Cartoon by Ludwig Stutz from the satirical journal
Kladderadatsch,
Berlin, December 1900.

Notes
     
Introduction
     
1. Control Council Law No. 46, 25 February 1947,
Official Gazette of the Control Council for Germany
, No. 14, Berlin, 31 March 1947.
2. Speech to Parliament, 21 September 1943, Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War
, vol. 5,
Closing the Ring
(6 vols., London, 1952), p. 491.
3. Ludwig Dehio,
Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie. Betrachtungen über ein Grundproblem der neueren Staatengeschichte
(Krefeld, 1948), p. 223; id., ‘Der Zusammenhang der preussisch-deutschen Geschichte, 1640–1945’, in Karl Forster (ed.),
Gibt es ein deutsches Geschichtsbild?
(Würzburg, 1961), pp. 65–90, here p. 83. On Dehio and the debate over Prussian-German continuity, see Thomas Beckers,
Abkehr von Preussen. Ludwig Dehio und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945
(Aichach, 2001), esp. pp. 51–9; Stefan Berger,
The Search for Normality. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800
(Providence, RI and Oxford, 1997), pp. 56–71;Jürgen Mirow,
Das alte Preussen im deutschen Geschichtsbild seit der Reichsgründung
(Berlin, 1981), pp. 255–60.
4. On the critical school in general, see Berger,
Search for Normality
, pp. 65–71. On the
German Sonderweg
: Jürgen Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German
Sonderweg
’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, 23(1988), pp. 3–16. For a critical view: David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley,
The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-century Germany
(Oxford, 1984). For a recent discussion of the case for Prussian peculiarity, see Hartwin Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders? Politisches System und Strukturen Preussens als Kern des “deutschen