Abstract
Reviewed by: Thomas Brodie, University of Birmingham, UK
Over the past twenty years, Mark Ruff has emerged as one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of religion, and specifically, Catholicism, in post-war West Germany. His many publications have variously explored the social histories of religious belief and practice in the early Federal Republic and the roles played by Catholic conservatives in its political culture, and have grappled with the utility of secularization as a paradigm for comprehending religious developments since 1945 across the North Atlantic world. His recently published work, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany 1945–1980, distils this accumulated expertise to provide a masterful account of the fiercely contested memory wars which repeatedly engulfed the West German Catholic Church over this period, specifically concerning its conduct during the preceding years of Nazi dictatorship between 1933 and 1945. Ruff organizes his work chronologically, with each chapter examining a particular moment within the period’s memory wars, such as the impact of Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play, The Deputy, which attacked Pope Pius XII’s response to the Holocaust. It is a ground-breaking study which reveals much about the far-reaching entanglements between the media, politics, religion and academic scholarship in the Bonn Republic.
One conspicuous strength of Ruff’s work is its formidable empirical foundation. Study of his bibliography reveals consultation of over 70 archives located not only in Germany, but also Austria, Canada, France and the United States. Ruff’s painstaking research ensures that his portraits of the key dramatis personae are rich and detailed, and he skilfully locates them within their respective social and intellectual contexts. It moreover permits The Battle for the Catholic Past to offer compelling analysis of the contemporary reception of individual scholarly works and public controversies, and their position within the evolving public sphere not only of West Germany, but also internationally, in the United States and other Western democracies.
Ruff’s compelling analysis highlights how, as early as the 1950s, the Catholic Church’s recent history during the Nazi period became the terrain upon which many crucial political battles of the Adenauer era were fought. He eloquently outlines, for example, how arguments in the 1950s concerning the place of confessional schools within the Federal Republic’s education system, waged between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on the one hand and its social democratic and liberal opponents on the other, centred on the contested legitimacy of the Reichskonkordat of July 1933, concluded between the Vatican and Hitler’s new government. Catholic Christian Democrats keen to protect confessional schooling argued that the Concordat remained valid in the Federal Republic; their liberal and socialist opponents opposed this view, claiming the treaty had played a role in the Centre Party’s vote for the infamous enabling act of March 1933, and thus helped establish the Nazi dictatorship (48–85). Archival and other documentary evidence concerning the political manoeuvrings of 1933 thus became crucial weapons in the political struggles of the mid-1950s. Ruff also convincingly demonstrates that many of the historical and literary works penned during the postwar decades, critical of the Catholic Church’s role during the Nazi era, extensively reflected unease concerning the ecclesia’s contemporary political influence in the Federal Republic, secured via its close relationship with the CDU. The ‘nonconformist’ or ‘left’ Catholic, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, penned a seminal essay in 1957, entitled ‘The Ethos of Modern Democracy and the Church’, which powerfully expressed these concerns (103). Ruff convincingly outlines how this mounting criticism of the Church’s record during the Nazi era serves as evidence of the increasing liberalization and democratization of West Germany’s public sphere from the late 1950s onwards.
Above all, Ruff’s study contributes tremendously to its field by historicizing the often moralizing debates and controversies which serve as its core subject matter. He provides an extremely detailed account of how archival documentation rapidly became politicized over the decades following the Third Reich’s destruction, with the West German episcopate seeking to curate its chosen narrative of Catholic martyrdom at Nazi hands with document collections for the years 1933–1945, and outsiders, such as the American sociologist Gordon Zahn, striving to gain access to church archives in the Federal Republic, often in the face of clerical suspicion and opposition. Ruff engagingly outlines how a scholarly arms race developed over the course of the 1950s and 60s, with defenders of the Church, in particular, developing a network of scholars, institutions and document collections with which to counter critical histories. In thus reconstructing the peculiar historical circumstances in which this historiographical field emerged over the post-war decades, Ruff has moreover rendered an invaluable service to future historians exploring its terrain. Much of the subsequent research into the histories of Catholicism in Nazi Germany has followed the debates examined in Ruff’s book, and been shaped by the moral and political commitments he lucidly deconstructs. Future historians beginning work on this subject would do well to consult The Battle for the Catholic Past as both an indispensable guide to the field’s historiographical genealogy, and simultaneously an aid for discerning those topics and methodologies neglected by the post-war period’s culture wars, and thus required to break new intellectual ground.