Derek K Hastings. European History Quarterly. Volume 38, Issue 1. January 2008.
‘How can the educated and, above all, men be preserved for the living faith? How can one prevent the Church from becoming a Church for women and children only?’ With these words the Catholic historian Philipp Funk identified one of the central challenges facing Catholics in Germany on the eve of the First World War. Funk had begun his career as a journalist in pre-war Munich and, importantly, served for several years as the leading spokesman for the Krausgesellschaft, a Munich-based Catholic cultural association whose stated organizational goals emphasized the ‘deepening of religious life and the fostering of a personal and manly (persönlichen und männlichen) Christianity’. Typical of this emphasis was an unapologetically bombastic manifesto entitled ‘More Manliness!’ (Mehr Männlichkeit!) that appeared in May 1914 in the group’s official organ. Lamenting the alleged preponderance of emotion and sentimentality within the Church and the resultant fact that ‘Catholic religious life is at present completely tailored to womanly souls’, the article issued an appeal for ‘stronger and more manly priests’ and closed with a clarion call to Catholics throughout Germany: ‘Religion belongs in the hands of men, not women and children!’ The Catholic Church in Germany was in deep trouble, the argument ran, and its only salvation lay, in effect, in a massive injection of testosterone. But what was it that moved Funk and his colleagues in the Krausgesellschaft to such hyperbolic language? What larger images and imperatives were driving their religio-cultural activism on the eve of the First World War? And, perhaps more importantly, when referring to the pressing need for more Männlichkeit within German Catholicism, what definitions of masculine identity did these activists envision?
Funk, and the members of the Krausgesellschaft with him, were part of a pre-war cultural and intellectual movement known as Reform Catholicism, whose effective centre of gravity within Germany was Munich. Although the movement was largely limited to university-educated Catholics and therefore remained somewhat marginal (especially in numerical terms) within the universe of Wilhelmine Catholicism more generally, Reform Catholicism has received a substantial amount of attention from theologians and ecclesiastical historians, largely because of its connections both to the controversial phenomenon of theological modernism and, eventually, to the sweeping changes of the Second Vatican Council. Ecclesiastical historians have rightly pointed to the movement’s central theological hallmarks: the emphasis on opening the Catholic Church to advances in modern scholarship and culture; the attempt to reform the public face of the Church to conform more harmoniously with the times and thereby, it was hoped, to ensure the Church’s viability in the face of the dawning twentieth century; and the desire to separate the eternal truths of the Catholic faith from man-made accretions while maintaining loyalty to those perceived timeless truths. The existing theologically-based literature on Reform Catholicism, however, has tended to obscure the fact that the movement was very much a product of its times, connected in important and interesting ways to a broader discourse of cultural crisis in Wilhelmine Germany. This article aims to explore these connections, examining the extent to which Catholic identity came to be implicated in the so-called ‘crisis’ of masculinity of the early twentieth century.
This perceived crisis, which was manifested to varying degrees within bourgeois society in most western countries in the two decades or so preceding the First World War, has been the subject of a rich and varied literature. Crises such as this have been characterized as key historical junctures in which ‘traditional masculine images and values were placed in question and what was considered manly became uncertain and ill-defined’. Underlying both the images and the uncertainty was a broader distress fuelled in large part by late-nineteenth-century modernization processes—most notably rapid industrialization and urbanization—that brought about a blurring of long-unquestioned social and sexual boundaries, including not only class distinctions but also the much-theorized divide between the (feminine) private sphere and the (masculine) public sphere. Beginning in the 1980s, cultural historians placed increased focus on the effects of this unsettling blurring of boundaries. Bram Dijkstra characterized the widespread presence of violently misogynistic images in fin-de-siècle artistic production as the result of pathological anxieties produced by the increased emergence of women in the public sphere. Similarly, Bernd Widdig examined the apprehensive reactions of German male elites to the rise of modern mass society and the apparent ‘crisis’ of upper middle-class masculine identity brought about by the threat of blurring class boundaries. George Mosse, for his part, pointed to the symbiotic relationship between visions of national vitality, normative images of masculine honour and restraint, and the bourgeois need for well-defined social order—a potent symbiosis whose all-important lines of demarcation were endangered not only by the blurring of class distinctions or the direct challenge of deviant sexual practices but, perhaps just as powerfully, by the mere appearance of effeminate or ‘dandified’ men. Indeed, the effacing of social and sexual boundaries was seen as both an acute threat to the internal strength of the German nation and an affront to the entire moral order. Perhaps more importantly, however, the most recent literature has increasingly focused on the dynamism and plurality that, of necessity, exists within and among relationally-constructed gender ideals. The seminal works of R.W. Connell and others have allowed historians to trace the construction of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘alternative’ forms of masculinity, and several important studies on the tensions between multiple competing masculinities have shed important new light on the texture of European culture from the middle ages to the present. As will be seen, much of the fin-de-siècle crisis mentality can thus be characterized as a reflection of the contestation between hegemonic and alternative masculinities.
The literature on European Catholicism in the nineteenth century has, for its part, documented the perceived progression of religious ‘feminization’ from a number of angles, beginning with the relegation of religion to the private sphere of home and family during the Napoleonic era and then tracing the dramatic growth of female religious orders that followed. An impressive array of statistics on the process of secularization has been similarly deployed to demonstrate that the dwindling numbers of European Catholics who continued to go to church, make confession, and receive communion were increasingly female as the nineteenth century progressed. Especially within the context of German Catholicism, this demographic feminization of religious practice was also accompanied by the perception of a distinctly visual feminization of devotional imagery, as evidenced perhaps most clearly in the growth of Marian devotion and other related manifestations of popular piety—ranging from the emotive culture of processions, pilgrimages, and Catholic Volksmissionen to the allegedly over-sensitive cult of the sacred heart of Jesus. Several insightful recent works on confessional animosity in Imperial Germany have begun to note the variety of gender-based images utilized by nationalistic Protestants specifically to stigmatize German Catholic men as somehow less ‘manly’ and, in any case, less authentically German. What have not been sufficiently investigated to this point, however, are the reactions to these images among Catholics themselves. These reactions provide a central point of departure for the present essay.
Specifically, the pages that follow will approach the intersection of these two literatures—religion and gender—by examining the discourse on Männlichkeit that emerged in the Reform Catholic movement in early twentieth-century Germany, especially within the context of an energetic and colourful campaign against the institution of mandatory celibacy within the Catholic priesthood. The article will attempt to demonstrate that Reform Catholic activists, alarmed at the perceived ‘feminization’ of German Catholicism, borrowed heavily from hegemonic (essentially bourgeois-Protestant) definitions of masculinity to combat the perceived dangers posed by an alternative form of masculinity—that of the clerically-defined ultramontane milieu. The primary goals of this endeavour were, on the one hand, to stem the perceived flow of educated men out of the Catholic Church and, on the other, to facilitate the progressive integration of Catholics into the cultural mainstream of German national life. Munich, as the effective centre of the Reform Catholic movement in Germany, played a prominent role in this process. We will begin by examining the ways in which German Catholic men (both clergy and laymen) came to be coded not only as effeminate but also, quite strikingly, as potentially emasculated eunuch figures; the article will then discuss the resonance and appropriation of these images among reformoriented Catholics within the context of the debate over mandatory clerical celibacy. As will be seen, this debate illuminates, among other things, the notable convergence of a radicalized form of Catholic masculinism, made perhaps more extreme through over-compensation, and a nascent form of völkisch-oriented thought in Munich on the eve of the First World War.
Ecclesia Impotens? Hegemonic Masculinity, Ultramontanism, and the Emasculation Motif
In 1902 Thomas Mann published a short story entitled Gladius Dei, which features one of Mann’s more memorable characters, a young and tormented Catholic monk named Hieronymus who, shrouded in a dark cowl, walks ominously and obliviously through the heart of Munich’s bohemian district, Schwabing, on an otherwise resplendent summer afternoon. After stopping to pray for guidance at the nearby Ludwigskirche, he then enters an elegant yet highly commercialized art-reproduction gallery to demand that all morally objectionable material in the shop be destroyed, including especially a reprint of a voluptuous nude Madonna in the display window that has continually captivated crowds of onlookers and which Hieronymus himself has been unable to get out of his mind for days. When the shop owner refuses this demand and instead orders his burly assistant to eject the monk forcibly and in full view of the snickering crowd gathered outside, the story closes with the pathetic crusader rising from the pavement in ‘mad ecstasy’, muttering angrily and dreaming of hellfire, brimstone, and the destruction of the entire city and its vast array of sinful cultural commodities.
While Mann’s narrative can be (and has been) read on a number of levels, it is clearly an attempt, whatever else it may be, to wrestle with the deeply problematic relationship between Catholicism and culture in early twentieth-century Germany, and Munich in particular. What is most significant in the context of the present article, however, is Mann’s use of gendered symbolism. When Hieronymus enters the Ludwigskirche to pray for guidance before embarking on his moral crusade, for instance, he is immediately transported into another dimension, one of dim light, sweet incense, and allegedly ‘feminine’ piety. It is, however, within this strangely feminized atmosphere that Hieronymus rises for the first time to his full masculine carriage: ‘Somehow he seemed to have grown in stature here. He stood erect and motionless, holding his head high … and his eyes were no longer fixed on the ground but gazed boldly straight ahead’. This erect posture, however, disappears dramatically and gives way to a striking flaccidity when Hieronymus leaves the church and approaches the art gallery with the scandalous Madonna in the window, before which he proceeds to shrivel visibly: ‘His brows were no longer raised as before … [but] were lowered and frowning darkly; his cheeks, half hidden by the black hood, seemed more deeply sunken than ever, and his full lips had turned very pale. Slowly his head drooped further and further down, until finally his eyes were staring fixedly upward at the picture from well below it. The nostrils of his great nose were quivering. He remained in this posture for about a quarter of an hour’. Mann goes on to reinforce the imagery of physical impotence in the penultimate scene, in which the burly shop assistant, with his ‘heroic arms’ and ‘vast strength’, humiliates and expels the wilted monk, whose lack of virility is displayed in the words he utters just before being thrown out the door: ‘I am weak. My flesh cannot stand firm (es hält nicht stand) … It cannot avail against force’.
Mann’s portrayal of Hieronymus reveals at least in part the apprehensions over blurred sexual boundaries that characterized contemporary masculine crisis imagery, embodied in this case in a young monk whose virility and potency apparently emerge within the sanctified space of the cathedral but who then shrivels before the image of a voluptuous nude female figure. Importantly, however, Hieronymus also embodies, with an unmistakable tinge of the grotesque, a representative image of the alternative masculinity of the clerically-dominated ultramontane milieu. At the same time, the symbolic richness of Mann’s portrayal of Hieronymus’ enervation was quite nuanced and sophisticated in comparison to the broader tradition of emasculation and castration rhetoric employed by Catholic baiters who, typically as Protestant nationalists and liberals, espoused the central tenets of what emerged as the hegemonic form of bourgeois masculine identity in Imperial Germany. This identity was built in large part upon normative notions of rationality, intellectual independence, and maturity of character (rooted in fundamental ways in the self-perception of the Protestant bourgeoisie), rather than on physical prowess alone. According to Wolfgang Schmale, Karen Hagemann and others, the roots of what became the hegemonic Prusso-Protestant-bourgeois form of masculinity were located firmly in the Enlightenment before becoming increasingly militarized in the course of the early nineteenth-century wars of liberation against Napoleon. Recent studies by Patricia Mazon and others have persuasively demonstrated the continued centrality of this ostensibly hegemonic masculinity, albeit often in highly intellectualized form, to the academic and professional structures of Imperial Germany.
Despite its often abstract nature, there always remained an unmistakable physicality and virulence to this discourse. Confessional animosity in nineteenth century Germany in fact proved sufficiently vehement to be labelled by Olaf Blaschke and others as evidence of a ‘second confessional age’, specifically evoking the catastrophic religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Johann Bluntschli, a leading Protestant-Liberal nationalist of the Kulturkampf era, had stated famously in 1872 that ‘the rule of the priests always brings about the castration of the people’, and that submission to papal authority had historically had an emasculating effect, forcing the ‘peoples of Europe to sacrifice their manhood’. Importantly, however, this type of imagery flourished and intensified specifically within the crisis-laden atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle. As Helmut Walser Smith has shown, the polemical imagery used by Protestant nationalists to stigmatize German Catholics was often formulated most explicitly after the Kulturkampf had begun to de-escalate, becoming increasingly visible specifically during the period in which Catholics were beginning their political integration into the nation and when the differences between the confessions should, at least in principle, have been shrinking. This intensification was in many ways inseparable from the fin-de-siècle masculine ‘crisis’ discourse, as Catholic forms of masculinity (or the ostensible deficiencies thereof) were not only disdained but perceived as a threat to hegemonic masculinity. Kurt Schindowski, one of the national leaders of the anti-Catholic Evangelischer Bund, memorably characterized the Catholic mentality in an 1898 article as ‘servile’ and well-suited only to the ‘womanly peoples’ of southern Europe, failing for this reason to establish its grip on the ‘young, vital, manly tribes’ of the more virile German north. Schindowski further warned that a continuation of the emasculating influence of Catholicism would force Germany to ‘renounce the masculine ideal of independent morality and individual national character’. Additionally, the Protestant-nationalist editor of Munich’s famous satirical weekly Jugend, Georg Hirth, launched a well-publicized attack in 1900 against the disastrous ‘castrating’ impact of political Catholicism, which for Hirth was manifested most painfully in the government’s propensity to bow to pressure from the Center Party. Similarly, the nationalist educator Ludwig Gurlitt stated famously in his influential 1907 book Erziehung zur Mannhaftigkeit:
Where the unmanly (unmännliche) faith in the Catholic Church leads is made clear by the examples of Italy and Spain. Germany has become great not with and through the Roman Church, but in the battle against it … Does the Catholic Church foster manliness (Erzieht die katholische Kirche zur Mannhaftigkeit)? No, that it does not do! The Church destroys manliness, destroys all sense of personal responsibility in that it demands silent obedience to papal authority. The Church demands subjugation. Manliness (das Mannhafte), however, submits to no power with whose demands it does not concur. It needs no guardian, unlike the child who must be told what it can and cannot read.
We see here how aggressive nationalism and threads of masculine crisis imagery are woven rather seamlessly into a discourse of cultural and intellectual emasculation; ‘authentic’ German manliness is to be forged first and foremost in the battle against the Catholic Church and its ‘unmanly’ and anti-intellectual proscriptions. In this view, the sacrifice of intellectual independence required by submission to Church authority was tantamount to the sacrifice of true masculine identity itself, at least in its hegemonic Protestant-bourgeois form, creating an ideational universe within which Catholic men more generally—and not simply eccentric monks like Hieronymus—could be seen as representatives of an inferior, albeit dangerous, alternate form of masculinity.
Interestingly, while the majority of Catholics throughout Germany typically tried to brush this type of imagery aside as a crass form of Catholic-baiting, the unflattering rhetoric of emasculation fell on remarkably receptive ears among Reform Catholics, especially in Munich. As previously noted, although Reform Catholicism remained a somewhat marginal phenomenon within the broader context of the Catholic milieu in Germany, the movement exercised considerable influence in Munich. Among the leading representatives of Reform Catholicism in Munich were Karl Muth and the circle surrounding his journal Hochland, which was by common acclaim the leading Catholic cultural forum in the German-speaking world; the Munich priest Josef Müller, who was responsible for coining the phrase ‘Reform Catholicism’ itself and who edited the Munichbased cultural journal Renaissance; and the aforementioned Krausgesellschaft, whose publicistic organ was Das 20. Jahrhundert (later renamed Das Neue Jahrhundert), edited by Philipp Funk. In addition to the desire to bring German Catholics into the mainstream of modern German cultural and intellectual life, a central unifying element among Reform Catholics—and one that became closely intertwined with the fin-de-siècle masculine crisis mentality—was a deeply critical attitude toward the influence of ultramontanism within German Catholicism.
The ultramontane movement had taken shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as European Catholics looked increasingly to the pope, who resided ultra montes (‘over the mountains’, in Rome), as the guarantor of Church freedom from the intrusion of state bureaucracies into religious affairs. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, ultramontanism had come to be characterized, in the eyes of many, by an increasingly obsessive (some have argued ‘fundamentalist’) devotion to the papacy, which was venerated not only as a defence against state incursions but also as an essentially backward-looking bulwark against the rising evils of the ‘modern’ world, a trajectory embodied perhaps most notably in the pronounced curial anti-intellectualism of the 1864 Syllabus of Errors and the 1871 proclamation of papal infallibility. Importantly, also, historians have established a fairly convincing connection between the aforementioned advance of Catholic ‘feminization’ and those regions where the ultramontane movement was able to gain an early foothold in the nineteenth century. The feminization motif should not, however, be taken too far; masculine-oriented imagery, albeit of a markedly divergent nature, was far from absent within the ultramontane camp, being characterized by a generally unreflective patriarchalism conveyed by an insular (and, it should be noted, celibate) clerical elite often trained outside the vaunted German university system and its emphasis on rational intellectual independence. Olaf Blaschke has characterized the dominance of male clerical elites within the ultramontane milieu, whom he identifies as the ‘managers’ of the milieu, in terms of a literal process of ‘colonization’. Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, for her part, has convincingly sketched out the nature of ultramontane clerical dominance in Freiburg in terms of what she calls an almost pathological ‘deviance’. In any event, in the view of Reform Catholic nationalists in particular, ultramontane masculinity, based as it was on clerical dominance and lay submissiveness, was even more dangerous because of the power it drew from the sentiments of allegedly gullible female parishioners—not only through the confessional but also through the cultivation of emotive piety and embarrassingly kitschy ritual—and thus appeared both as a debilitating ‘feminizing’ influence within German Catholicism and as a central impediment to the further integration of Catholics into the national mainstream. As a result, Reform Catholic nationalists proved eager to adapt and exploit the emasculation motif in their battle against ultramontane-clerical masculinity.
Among the most significant precursors to (and early influences on) the masculinist anti-ultramontane orientation of the Reform Catholic movement had been the nineteenth-century Munich theologian Ignaz von Döllinger. Although he began his career as a champion of ultramontanism, by the 1860s Döllinger had become not only a staunch German nationalist but also one of the harshest critics of the ultramontane movement as it was then developing. Importantly, Döllinger’s works—even his theological works—exhibit a virtual obsession with masculine physicality. One of his most memorable speeches, given in 1863, focused on the allegedly vast superiority of German theology and scholarship, which Döllinger viewed as both virile and progressive, over the allegedly ‘impotent’ conservative theology of his Rome-oriented ultramontane opponents. In it Döllinger constructed a striking, if rather bizarre, equation of German theological rigor and masculine potency:
[Theology must] carry within itself a life-seed (Lebenskeim) that is energetic through and through. It can, however, in the hands of an intellectual vulgarity that passes itself off as conservative theology, shrink and become withered to the point that it shrivels up like an old [man’s] body (zusammenschrumpft wie ein alter Leib) and in its impotence (Impotenz), drained of its life-forces (selbst von den Lebenskräften verlassen), loses the power to beget life and light. Since dogmas, in the form of the Church’s definitions, are themselves only words, however rich and carefully chosen they may be, they continually require spiritual impregnation (geistige Befruchtung) by theology and teaching.
Both the image of authentic (German) theology as a sort of potent spiritual phallus and the analogy between ultramontane conservatism and the physical impotence of a ‘shrivelled’ elderly body were crude and perhaps a bit grotesque (certainly they were perceived that way by Döllinger’s ultramontane opponents at the time); but the emphasis on masculine potency was to be both revived and amplified decades later by Reform Catholic activists.
Building on the ideals of Döllinger, for instance, in 1897 the Reform Catholic theologian Herman Schell not only criticized ultramontane anti-intellectualism as a ‘sacrificium intellectus [that] leads inevitably to intellectual inferiority’, but also trumpeted the emasculation motif by stating that Christ called his followers to be ‘vigorous intellects, not intellectual eunuchs (geistige Eunuchen) who are too inept, inert, and servile to make their intellectual individuality fertile (fruchtbar) in a Christian sense’. Similarly, for Schell’s close friend Karl Muth, the most influential Reform Catholic publicist in Munich, not even the realm of literature was safe from the potentially emasculating effects of prudish ultramontane conservatism. Muth called famously for the ‘rejection of all excessive prudery and pettiness and whatever else hinders the development of a great, free, manly (männlichen) literature that is saturated with the Christian spirit’. Not surprisingly, when Muth and his Hochland-circle launched their well-publicized campaign to reform and nationalize German Catholic literature, one of their stated goals was ‘to unite the manly spirit with childlike faith’. Additionally, according to one of the central leaders of Munich’s Krausgesellschaft, the proponents of ultramontanism were best characterized as ‘wretched castrated souls’ (erbärmliche Kastratenseelen). This same spirit was also unmistakable in the work of the Reform Catholic priest Josef Müller, whose journal Renaissance sported a striking trademark cover illustration—which Müller claimed was taken from ‘ancient Aryan cultic legend’—featuring an almost grotesquely muscular nude male titan bearing a torch with an eternal flame in triumph over the cold enervation of the surrounding darkness.
Overall, in the eyes of Reform Catholic nationalists, the allegedly emasculated nature of ultramontanism endangered not only the necessary integration of Catholics into the German nation but also threatened to make the Catholic Church, as Philipp Funk put it at the outset of this essay, a ‘church for women and children only’. The pressing need, then, was to essentially supplant ultramontane masculinity with the hegemonic (authentically ‘German’) form of masculinity. As shall be seen, this endeavour takes on interesting contours when viewed through the prism of the energetic debate over mandatory clerical celibacy waged in the years leading up to the First World War.
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven? The Debate over Mandatory Clerical Celibacy
In much the same way that the early twenty-first century atmosphere of sexual scandal surrounding the Catholic Church in the United States (and elsewhere) sparked renewed calls for a reform of the institution of mandatory clerical celibacy, an energetic celibacy debate in early twentieth-century Germany was initially fuelled by allegations and intimations of sexual misconduct among the Catholic clergy. In the early summer of 1901 a series of sensationalistic exposés on alleged sexual abuse within the Catholic priesthood appeared in Munich, creating both a local uproar and, happily for the historian, a substantial archival paper trail. Much of the scandalous pamphlet literature that appeared in the course of 1901 and 1902—often with provocative titles like The Immoral Devil in the Monk’s Cowl—focused not only on priestly immorality and misuse of the confessional but also on alleged tragic cases of parish cooks who had been forced to sacrifice their morality and serve as ‘concubines’ to sex-starved ‘celibate’ priests. The author of one pseudo-journalistic pamphlet claimed to have collected documentation on some 68 cases of sexual abuse by priests that had occurred in the year 1900 alone. Another tract from early 1902 claimed to list dozens of cases throughout Europe in which Catholic priests had been either accused or convicted of sexual abuse during the 1890s; significantly, this latter exposé was entitled The Wretchedness of Priestly Celibacy and, as such, drew the clear conclusion that mandatory clerical celibacy was responsible for creating a dangerously twisted and perverse sexual identity among Catholic priests. These conclusions were given added legitimacy by the appearance of a more measured (albeit far from even-handed) historical study of priestly celibacy by the Protestant religious scholar Ferdinand Heigl, which was published in Berlin but distributed widely in Munich by the local branch of the anti-Catholic Evangelischer Bund in 1902. Importantly, it was also within this context that Thomas Mann’s memorable image of Hieronymus appeared.
As it happened, however, the vast majority of allegations of sexual abuse among the Catholic clergy ultimately turned out to be vague and unfounded, or outright fabrications. For example, the aforementioned ‘documentation’ of the 68 alleged cases of priestly abuse from the year 1900 alone was found to be completely false; the pamphlet was confiscated by the Munich police authorities and became part of a legal action against the publisher. Largely as a result of the general weakness of the allegations, the initial furore over sexual scandal within the priesthood seems to have died down fairly quickly, as most scurrilous anticlerical campaigns ultimately do. Importantly, however, rather than dying down as well, the debate over clerical celibacy began to take on a life of its own. In fact, as it turned out, in the years leading up to the First World War the issue of clerical celibacy came to overshadow the initial sex abuse allegations to such a degree that one is forced to look elsewhere for the deeper forces driving the celibacy debate. If the threat of priests as sexual predators was primarily a red herring utilized by Catholic baiters, what was it that caused the issue of clerical celibacy to go on to become such a hot topic in the decade before the First World War? The answer is connected in important ways to the aforementioned ‘crisis’ of masculinity in the early twentieth century and to the resonance it found among Reform Catholic critics of ultramontanism in Munich, many of whom took up the celibacy issue with passionate zeal as part of their campaign against the perceived defects of ultramontane masculinity. What ensued was essentially a battle between, on the one hand, Reform Catholic opponents of mandatory clerical celibacy who were deeply influenced by broader Wilhelmine cultural currents and, on the other, the ultramontane defenders of mandatory celibacy who represented a competing image of masculine identity. The paragraphs that follow will briefly outline three sets of images attached to the issue of clerical celibacy which served to give the debate a potency and persuasive power it would not otherwise have had, and which ultimately illustrate the extent to which radicalized visions of Catholic masculinity and a nascent völkisch orientation were interwoven within the ideational universe of pre-war Munich.
First, and in a most basic sense, mandatory clerical celibacy was portrayed by reform-oriented Catholics as an affront against nature, and particularly against the biological nature of priests as men. In contrast to the ultramontane advocates of clerical celibacy, who portrayed the celibate lifestyle as a badge of honour that demonstrated the manly self-discipline of priests, Josef Müller ridiculed the attempt to turn the priest into a ‘living cadaver’, a deliberately grotesque image fusing the animate nature of the priest’s biological existence and the inanimate inertia of celibate flesh. Müller also argued that biological urges were natural and that it was unwise to force priests to place themselves in opposition to the laws of nature, which were themselves created by God. Similarly, Munich’s Krausgesellschaft consistently framed the debate over clerical celibacy in terms of a ‘battle between nature and unnature’, and argued that, through the imposition of mandatory celibacy, the priest was ‘robbed of a part of himself, almost as if he had agreed not to speak for his entire life’. The blanket equation of sexual activity with something as fundamentally human as speaking gives an indication of the sense of natural self-evidence with which Reform Catholics viewed the apparent justice of their crusade. Furthermore, it was argued, compelling the priest to suppress biological impulses which could otherwise be satisfied in a healthy married relationship forced the priest to have a twisted, confused, and unhealthy attitude toward his own sexual identity. Reform-oriented priests themselves also touched on such sensitive subjects as priestly auto-eroticism and the problem of persistent sexual dreams resulting in nocturnal emissions, which were blamed on the biological ‘unnaturalness’ of mandatory celibacy. One priest in particular complained about the psychological damage done to conscientious priests who were often forced to perform eucharistic mass the morning after nocturnal emissions without the opportunity to confess beforehand. Another lamented the special psychological difficulties posed by the celibate lifestyle to young and virile candidates for the priesthood, described quite memorably as ‘healthy men with energetic drives’ (gesunde Männer mit regem Trieb), as well as to other priestly candidates whose masculine identity remained perpetually in crisis, threatened at least potentially by neurasthenia brought on by masturbation (Onanie). Since mandatory clerical celibacy was nowhere to be found in the New Testament, reformers argued, there was no reason to place such a heavy and unnatural burden on priests, especially given the broader popularity and growing pervasiveness of nature-friendly movements throughout Germany at the time, such as the Jugendbewegung. In fact, this aspect of the campaign against mandatory celibacy should be viewed as a corollary to the broader and welldocumented fear that the artificiality of modernity was sapping the ‘natural’ vigour of Germany’s young men, a trope that was indispensable to representations of the fin-de-siècle crisis mentality.
Connected to this nature-oriented imagery was a second and somewhat darker set of images, which betrayed a rather hyperbolic castration phobia that both built on and went beyond the aforementioned emasculation metaphor. The gospel of Matthew had of course famously framed the celibacy issue in terms of ‘those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’, and reformoriented opponents of mandatory celibacy often portrayed the threat of emasculation quite graphically and sensationalistically, as in the well-publicized case from 1909 of a young German priest who attempted to physically castrate himself in the hopes of thereby controlling his sexual urges. Note the hyperbolic tone and choice of language in the following report: ‘One day, when a friend came to visit [the young priest], he found him slumped in his chair, unconscious and near death, his body mutilated most horribly, robbed of his manhood (seiner Mannheit beraubt). He had attempted violently to remove the occasion to sin, after his prayers for relief [from sexual temptation] went unanswered. He destroyed his body to keep his soul pure’. The account closed by hinting that the unfortunate priest apparently died as a result of the ill advised self-castration attempt. A similarly tragic episode that ended in the suicide of a tormented young priest was also publicized. Leaders of the Krausgesellschaft often made the metaphorical connection between mandatory celibacy and fear of castration explicit, as formulated by Otto Sickenberger, the chairman of the Krausgesellschaft, in what became a rather infamous analogy between surgically castrated Roman choirboys and sexually emasculated priests: ‘For centuries the popes in Rome had the choirboys of the Sistine Chapel physically castrated (körperlich entmannt) to preserve their high singing voices, with which they were to enhance the glory of the mass. Men who, in pursuing this goal, were capable of carrying out such an atrocity (Scheusslichkeit) have naturally also proven capable … of legally castrating tens of thousands of priests (viele Zehntausende von Priestern rechtlich zu entmannen)’. The verb ‘entmannen’ was used here quite tellingly: mandatory clerical celibacy posed a grave danger to the future of the Church precisely because it made the priest literally less of a man, raising the central question of whether celibate priests, who had been effectively ‘castrated’, were capable of the virility needed to lead German Catholic men into the dawning twentieth century.
The third, and perhaps most powerful, set of images surrounding the debate over clerical celibacy consisted in the portrayal of mandatory celibacy in distinctly racial and nationalistic terms, as a dangerous threat not only to the viability of the Catholic Church but to the health of the German Volk. Much has been written about the more general spread of fears concerning racial hygiene and perceived racial-demographic decline in Wilhelmine Germany, which resulted in part from the proliferation of Social Darwinistic ideals around the turn of the twentieth century and which themselves became deeply implicated in the contemporary ‘crisis’ of masculinity. As will be seen, these völkisch phobias and concerns did much to help frame the Reform Catholic portrayal of the issue of clerical celibacy.
First, however, to provide a bit of broader context it should be noted that nationalistic Reform Catholics in Munich often had close ties to other völkisch-oriented elements throughout Germany. Certainly one of the strongest influences on Karl Muth at the time of the founding of Hochland in Munich was the völkisch poet Friedrich Lienhard, who was the one who suggested the name ‘Hochland’ to Muth in the first place. Importantly, Muth used the pages of Hochland to publicize and interpret for his educated Catholic readership the thought of leading racial theorists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Gobineau, the latter of which was praised all the more emphatically because he had been Catholic. Gobineau in particular was lauded in Hochland for the ‘heroism of his view of life’, which was based in part on the conviction that ‘the white race, in comparison to the black and the yellow, is the only race truly equipped with the elevated qualities, with creative power and organizational capabilities … In comparison, the others are dull and wretched. Their ruler is the Aryan family, whose crowning glory are the Germans’. In another gushing tribute to Gobineau, a frequent Hochland contributor proposed Gobineau’s racial thought as an answer to Germany’s current troubled times. In general, the reformoriented circle surrounding Muth was intent on emphasizing Gobineau’s identity as a believing Catholic whose religious identity in no way prevented him from recognizing the absolute centrality of race and racial thought. While typically avoiding what he regarded as unsophisticated forms of Radau-Antisemitismus, Muth was not above publishing staunchly antisemitic articles, such as a vehement diatribe by Hans Rost from 1914 that sweepingly labelled the Jews ‘the ultimate carriers of the symptoms of degeneration of our times’ (Hauptträger der Zerfallssymptome unserer Zeit überhaupt), resonating clearly with broader contemporary crisis themes.
Munich’s Krausgesellschaft was not only eager to publicize the works of völkisch theorists, but also explicitly utilized the issue of race in the campaign against the allegedly pernicious influence of ultramontanism. In a programmatic essay written shortly after the founding of Das 20. Jahrhundert, co-editor Johannes Bumüller voiced clear opposition to the ‘senile Roman identity’ (senilen Romanentum) of ultramontanism while dreaming of the future ‘supremacy of the Germanic race within the Church’ (Herrschaft der germanischen Rasse innerhalb der Kirche). To make the emphasis on race explicit, Bumüller continued:
When we advocate the joining together of the Catholic religion and German culture, we do so in the conviction that the religion of a nation (Volk) or of a race (Rasse) must stand and live in harmony with its culture or be cast off to the side … The Catholic Church must now reckon above all with the principle of race and nationality (Rassen- und Völkerprinzip).
In regard to antisemitism in particular, a programmatic Krausgesellschaft article on Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s construction of ancient Aryan racial identity concluded quite tellingly:
Unique in the whole of Indo-European history, altindisch thought and literature is free from all contact with the semitic spirit, and is therefore pure, undefiled, genuine, distinctive. What is pronounced in these words [of Chamberlain] should not be considered antisemitism. The semitic spirit, however, which is characterized to an exceedingly great extent by the lack of individual creative power, is the enemy of our own existence (der Feind unseres eigenen Daseins).
The Krausgesellschaft also, perhaps not surprisingly, publicized the ideals of the flaming racial antisemite Theodor Fritsch. Josef Müller, for his part, also surrounded himself frequently with fanatical antisemites. The elderly August Rohling, for instance, whose infamous manifesto Der Talmudjude was itself a landmark in the development of German antisemitism during the 1870s, was one of the central early collaborators in Müller’s journal Renaissance. Additionally, Franz Schrönghamer-Heimdal, who as a student was co-founder along with Müller of the Reform Catholic organization Verein Renaissance in Munich in 1904, went on to become one of the most visible Catholic antisemites in and around Munich and a central Catholic-Nazi activist in the aftermath of the First World War. Müller was also influenced by the eccentric racist former monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who has been labelled (in a bit of an overstatement) the ‘man who gave Hitler his ideas’.
As further indication of the extent to which Reform Catholic thought could become intertwined with the fin-de-siècle masculine crisis mentality, it might also be noted that Müller was an unusually devoted admirer of Otto Weininger, trumpeting and praising Weininger’s nervous misogynistic ramblings for their ‘downright stupendous erudition’ (geradezu stupender Gelehrsamkeit).
But perhaps the best way to illustrate the convergence of Reform Catholicism, racial thought, and masculine crisis imagery is to return at this point to the debate over clerical celibacy. Josef Müller consistently criticized mandatory celibacy not only for being unnatural or unnecessary, but especially for inflicting lasting damage on the German race—he famously labelled it ‘a perpetual debasement of the race’ (eine fortwährende Rassenverschlechterung)—because it deprived racially-healthy priests from contributing to the national gene pool at a crucial point in the demographic development of the German Volk. Similarly, citing the Munich racial hygienist Max Gruber as an authority, Müller condemned clerical celibacy as a eugenic nightmare, insisting that ‘the breeding and maintenance of a healthy and noble race is incomparably more important than the passing on of the highest Kulturgüter, which will be nothing more than worthless rubble in the hands of degenerate offspring’. In addition to praising racial theorists more generally, the Krausgesellschaft also attempted to frame the issue of clerical celibacy specifically in antisemitic terms, characterizing the tradition of a celibate priesthood as the unhealthy and unnatural legacy of a repressive and particularly Jewish asceticism. By positioning the celibacy issue within the context of the need not only to redefine Catholic masculinity but also to protect the racial strength of the German Volk in a crucial time of Darwinian struggle, Reform Catholics were able to connect the celibacy debate to the larger ‘crisis’ discourse and thereby gave the issue an urgency and resonance it would not otherwise have had. Their ‘emasculated’ ultramontane opponents were not only wrong, they argued, but dangerous, posing a distinct threat to the Church and its future position within the German nation.
A Völkisch Convergence? Reform Catholicism and Eugenics on the Eve of the First World War
Interestingly, however, the racist-nationalist tinge to the debate over masculinity and clerical celibacy was but one aspect of a broader and more encompassing eugenic vision of the German future. Josef Müller’s comments about the potential racial damage done by mandatory celibacy should be placed in the context of this broader vision. One of several articles published jointly in Müller’s Renaissance and in Theodor Fritsch’s infamous racist journal Hammer, for instance, railed against the current ‘era of pervasive degeneration’ and called upon ‘racially healthy elements, out of which a future powerful generation could build itself anew’ to come together to form a ‘circle of morally and physically healthy people’ who would then constitute a ‘Pflanzstätte of new social and national life’. For Müller and others, this type of eugenic activism remained a pressing priority, offering not only an integrative point of commonality between Protestant and Catholic nationalists but also a preventative measure against impending racial degeneration and a key source of national reinvigoration.
The Krausgesellschaft frequently employed similar eugenic rhetoric. A particularly striking example can be seen in a programmatic article written in early 1914 by August Hallermeyer, a spokesman for the Krausgesellschaft. Echoing Müller’s ideals, Hallermeyer lamented that German racial power (Rassenkraft) was being threatened by a ‘slow but certain degeneration’, a condition that was significantly worsened by depriving the ‘better racial elements’ from contributing to the genetic make-up of the German Volkskörperwhile racially inferior elements were allowed to reproduce at alarming rates. Identifying this trend as ‘racial suicide’ (Rassenselbstmord), Hallermeyer insisted: ‘It is not the indiscriminate propagation of the race, but only the effective cultivation of the better racial elements that can provide the basis for a rational population policy’, and he went on to call for Reform Catholic nationalists to commit themselves to a wideranging and radical eugenic program in the interest of protecting the God-given racial superiority of the German Volk. For Hallermeyer and many of his colleagues in the Krausgesellschaft, maintaining ‘racial fitness’ (Rassentüchtigkeit) was an almost religious duty to which German Catholics were called by God. In pursuit of this objective, Hallermeyer proposed that ‘The next step would be to demand obligatory health certificates at the time of marriage. The foundations would thereby be laid for the mandatory sterilization of racially inferior elements’. And finally, in somewhat eerie anticipation of policies that were to emerge in the not-so-distant future within another of Munich’s offspring, the Nazi movement, Hallermeyer noted that it might take some time for these ideas to find broader acceptance: ‘These policies can only be the beginning of greater and more fundamental reforms, for which the times are not yet ripe. Public opinion must first be transformed in favour of a racially-based ethic before a renewal from the ground up can be conceived’. As it happened, of course, it did take a number of years before a fundamental racial reform of this sort was effected under the Nazis. But the fact that this elaborate eugenic model was laid out among Reform Catholic activists in Munich already in 1914 is significant in itself.
This striking eugenic vision also provides, if nothing else, a more nuanced context within which to place the hyperbolic rhetoric of the Krausgesellschaft that opened this article; it is noteworthy that the group’s energetic appeal for ‘more Männlichkeit’ appeared in the same Reform Catholic journal only weeks after Hallermeyer’s eugenic missive. On the eve of the First World War, reformoriented activists not only portrayed mandatory clerical celibacy as the effective sterilization of the wrong men—stifling the reproductive energies of racially healthy priests, while so-called racial inferiors were allowed to propagate without constraint—but also carefully folded the celibacy debate into the broader campaign against the perceived defects and insufficiencies of ‘emasculated’ ultramontane masculinity. At stake, it seemed, was nothing less than the viability of the Church in the dawning twentieth century, a viability to be fostered in an immediate and local sense by the effective re-masculinization of German Catholicism and its necessary integration into the national mainstream.
For the historian, this pre-war campaign against mandatory clerical celibacy, as well as the broader ideational universe illuminated by the debate, is significant on at least a couple of levels. First, it sheds new light on a colourful and hitherto under-studied aspect of the fin-de-siècle crisis mentality, as well as the contestation between hegemonic and alternative masculinities that underpinned it, by explicitly highlighting the religious dimension. Additionally, the phenomenon of Reform Catholicism, with its embrace of hegemonic masculinity as part of the broader campaign for integration into the national mainstream, should give pause to historians quick to bracket off Protestants and Catholics into tidy camps, or almost airtight ‘milieus’, arrayed against each other as combatants in a so-called ‘second confessional age’. As the campaign against mandatory clerical celibacy illustrates, milieu boundaries were often porous and major divisions within confessional camps were often far from insignificant; in fact, confessional identity could itself be subsumed within the broader imperatives of more encompassing völkisch and eugenic visions of the Germanic future. Finally, in regard to these völkisch visions, if one looks ahead a few years with the focus still on Munich, the outlines of an additional point of significance begin to emerge.
Initially, the nationalistic euphoria and unity of the fateful summer of 1914 seemed to serve as both confirmation and culmination of the broader Reform Catholic project. As both Protestants and Catholics mobilized energetically and in unison in the name of the nation, Reform Catholic organs in Munich—notably Hochland and the Krausgesellschaft’s Neue Jahrhundert—engaged in a veritable orgy of nationalistic fervour, confident not only in the inevitable victory of Germany’s military forces but also in the success of their own integrationist objectives. Ultimately, as we know, this confidence was misplaced; the unity and euphoria of 1914 was to prove anything but enduring.
The First World War and its aftermath ushered in a dramatically altered intellectual and cultural atmosphere, in Munich as elsewhere in Germany. The campaign against mandatory clerical celibacy in particular did not survive the war, at least not with any semblance of the vigour that had characterized the prewar years; its importance was eclipsed, as was so much else, by more fundamental material concerns. Similarly, within the atmosphere of the well-documented crisis of progressivism in postwar Germany more generally, the Reform Catholic movement was also unable to reconstitute itself after the war or regain its pre-war significance. As one insightful observer noted: ‘The postwar period is the darkest chapter in the annals of religious liberalism [in Germany]. This movement, once so powerful, reached its lowest point in this period. Its exit reminds one of the ending of a Shakespearean play in which all the heroes lay slain on the floor’. The secretary of the Krausgesellschaft, Josef Giliard, attempted to revive the organization after the war, but was forced to confide despairingly to a friend in early 1919: ‘I feel so lonely now in the Krausgesellschaft, and if our forces do not gradually pull themselves together again, then Reform Catholicism can soon be put into the books as a movement that died a quiet death’ (dann dürfte der Reformkatholizismus bald als selig entschlafene Bewegung zu buchen sein). While remaining in the Munich municipal registry until 1926, the Krausgesellschaft was in fact dissolved for all intents and purposes in 1920.
But what, if anything, emerged in the vacuum left by the movement’s demise? Did the Reform Catholic battle against ultramontanism and mandatory clerical celibacy produce anything of note, or was there at least a broader echo to the movement’s masculinistic rhetoric and nascent völkisch orientation? In this regard, it may be permissible to close on a somewhat suggestive rather than conclusive note. Historians have typically had some difficulty in explaining the fact that the Nazi movement, which was founded in Munich in 1919, was born and raised in a city whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic. In fact, due to a tendency to project backward onto the early 1920s the undeniable antagonism that existed between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime in power in the 1930s, scholars have typically assumed—when they have considered the problem directly at all—that the early Nazi movement was comprised either of outright opponents of Christianity or that its support was drawn mainly from Munich’s Protestant minority. I have argued elsewhere that Catholics played a larger role in the early Nazi movement in Munich than has previously been noted. I would mention here in closing that, among other things, the völkisch-oriented visions and images formulated among Reform Catholic masculinists in pre-war Munich can be seen as helping provide a sort of vocabulary with which Nazi activists a few years later could appeal to young, disillusioned Catholic men in Munich. The völkisch advocates of a newly radicalized postwar masculine crisis mentality, sketched famously by Klaus Theweleit and others, were speaking a language that was perhaps not entirely new. Pre-war Reform Catholic activists such as Josef Müller and Franz Schrönghamer-Heimdal developed important contacts with early Catholic Nazi leaders like Dietrich Eckart (Schrönghamer, who was especially close to Eckart, joined the party in early 1920, only a few months after Hitler), while reform-oriented Catholic university students in Munich—the young and still-pious Heinrich Himmler is but one example—flocked to the Nazi movement with almost missionary zeal in the early 1920s. Although the campaign against clerical celibacy itself, as part of the broader drive to foster ‘more Männlichkeit’ and to combat the perceived inadequacies of ultramontane masculinity, failed in terms of its immediate stated objectives, the unintended consequences of the broader movement may have turned out to be much more portentous than many of the pre-war activists themselves could have envisioned. To explore these continuities in sufficient depth here would go beyond the scope of this essay, but the increasingly radical visions and ideals constructed in the context of the pre-war campaign against mandatory clerical celibacy—as part of a broader, religious-oriented clash of competing masculinities—suggest that it is perhaps not such a puzzling circumstance that the radical rhetoric of the young Nazi movement found such a receptive response when and where it did.