Tag Archives: Michael von Faulhaber

Reviews on the History of German Catholic Women

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Jörg Seiler, ed. Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen, Vol. 1. Forschungsperspektiven. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2018, pp. 216.

Antonia Leugers, Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen .Vol. 2. Analysen und Ergebnisse. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2020, pp. 288.

Dominik Schindler, “Michael von Faulhaber und die katholische Frauenbewegung (1903-1917). Zeitgemäße Seelsorge eines modernen Bischofs.” In Katharina Krips, Stephan Mokry, Klaus Unterburger, eds. Aufbruch in der Zeit: Kirchenreform und europäischer Katholizismus. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2020, pp. 207-220.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In the ever-widening definition of church history, the role of women of faith remains an open field. The three contributions under review here demonstrate not only the extent of research that remains to be done but also the significant contribution that Christian women’s history makes to a greater understanding of Christian life in general, especially in the twentieth century. The first two volumes under consideration are the result of a multi-year grant-funded study on Catholic women authors from 1900 to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), while the single chapter throws new light on the support of Michael von Faulhaber, before his appointment as archbishop of Munich, for Catholic women’s groups as well as his views of the woman’s role in church and society.

The study on Catholic women authors was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the University of Erfurt. Antonia Leugers, Jörg Seiler, and Lucia Scherzberg, well-known historians of German Catholicism, as well as other church historians and several literature scholars and experts in database-supported research, collaborated on this study. Establishing a database of 160 Catholic women authors, as many as the grant permitted, the participants welcome future scholars to append additional writers, especially from earlier and later periods, to the historical record.

Based on theoretical concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic power” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, the researchers inquired how these women fared as women authors and whether the authors met contemporary ideals concerning Catholic women. Did they dedicate their careers to upholding these ideals? Did identifiable subgroups exist? Which works caused scandal, which were forbidden, either by the Reichsschrifttumskammer or the Allied powers? Which authors went into exile? How did that experience change their views? While the volumes answer these questions, they lack effective summaries that conclude “indicators of processes by which these authors emancipated themselves from church norms by analyzing their fictitious characters” (vol. II, Leugers, p. 10) The authors of this volume analyze the degree to which Catholic women authors, in their personal lives and their fiction, adhere to the Catholic image of womanhood promoted by both the church and secular society, especially by the National Socialist regime. Many authors in their lives and their works differ from both Church and social expectations in matters of marriage, chastity, parenthood, and gender.

Instead, the volumes offer a wealth of case studies. Some of the authors, such as Gertrud von le Fort and Hedwig Dransfeld, were well-known, while others published only a few works. Each of the authors has their history. The Leugers volume includes a primarily quantitative summary of the women’s experiences, how many got divorced, converted to Catholicism, left the church, lived in same-sex relationships, had children out of wedlock, attempted suicide, chose cremation, were childless, etc. Leugers admits, however, that such personal information is sometimes difficult to obtain and that, given the limited sample, the data are more “symptomatic” than representative. This detailed qualitative analysis, however, lacks explanatory power. The more important questions raised in the project remain unanswered. The authors offer no conclusions about Catholic women’s emancipation, their understanding of gender, chastity, and parenthood. While some suggest disapproval of modernity, most suggest ways of accommodating it while maintaining a life of faith. In all cases, Catholic faith triumphs. Beyond this, however, this rich body of evidence cries for additional meaningful analysis. One wonders if these volumes report results from which results can be drawn.

Determining a work’s effect, i.e., its reception history, remains difficult. The project includes contemporary critiques of the authors’ works, mostly by Catholic publications. Many of the works were considered trivial. Those authors who adhered most closely to Catholic moral standards tended to fare well in the reviews. Those who problematized Catholic teaching or offered differentiated explanations of human behavior were often condemned by church authorities and Catholic publications. For the period 1933-1945, the detailed records of the Reichsschriftumskammer, which evaluated the publications for ideological conformity or at least compatibility, offer insights into the works. One of the regime’s objections was the Catholic praise for virginity and chastity. The regime denigrated women who chose not to bear children. A final measure of a work’s popularity was the number of volumes printed. In some cases, new editions were published well after the war, while other works sold only a few hundred copies.

While the research summary volume by Leugers, the second in the trilogy, focuses on the various types of Catholic women authors, the contributors to the Seiler volume, the first in the series (these two volumes are reviewed here; the third volume, also edited by Seiler, discusses the literary conflict between Carl Muth and more conservative, orthodox groups), offer insights useful for future scholars. Lucia Scherzberg, for example, analyzes the gendering of God throughout history and how Protestantism is often defined as male, while Catholicism is usually described as female. She asks how the authors constructed gender and what role religious affiliation plays in constructing gender. In general, she inquires about the role that gender plays in the thinking and works of these authors. Scherzberg provides no answers and poses these questions to future scholars.

In an apparent rebuke to Leugers, Scherzberg also questions “whether or not social scientific theory can capture the contingency of historical processes.” Social scientific theories often cannot provide micro-historical explanations.

Günter Häntzschel discusses Catholic lyric poetry. Interesting is his summary of the conflict between Carl Muth, who founded Hochland, the premier intellectual Catholic journal of the period before World War II, and who sought to establish Catholic literature independent of Catholic teaching, and Richard Gralik, who founded the Gral as a conservative Catholic magazine. Muth became the driving force behind an independent non-ecclesiastical Catholic intellectual life in Germany. Maria Cristina Giacomin addresses Muth’s concern about inferior Catholic literature more directly. Muth feared that Catholic literature, directed primarily at women and older girls, had been feminized. The first novel by a woman that Muth published in Hochland was a complex account of an anti-Catholic man and the Catholic woman who denounces him as a Lutheran for blasphemous desecration, but also reconciles him with the Catholic faith. Gendered religious identities, erotic undertones, and the protagonist’s refusal to bear children yielded much criticism. Giacomin argues that Catholic readers at the time were accustomed to clearly didactic novels in which the Catholic moral lesson was presented unambiguously.

Regina Heyder explains that while Catholics considered women’s chastity and virginity laudable before 1945, in the post-war era, chastity was considered a burdensome outcome of fate. Several authors explain that Catholic women authors described convent schools as places of repression and punishment, but also, more importantly, as places dominated by obscurantism and “void of intellectual and artistic nourishment” (Seiler, 166).

Martin Papenbrock analyzes book covers from the Beaux-Arts style to post-war modernity. While offering little commentary on the works’ Catholicism, he notes that publishers often commission book covers that do not accurately reflect the nuanced discussions provided in the text. They reflect more the times in which the book was published than its contents.

While both volumes lack an analytical, summative conclusion, they complicate scholars’ understanding of twentieth-century Catholicism. Women who read and could afford books, or who sought out lending libraries, were offered a differentiated and challenging image of Catholic womanhood, one that demands further analysis and explanation. These works paint a more complicated picture of Catholic womanhood, as the views of womanhood discussed in these volumes were ascribed to Catholic men of their subjects’ time, and ecclesiastical concerns about “modern” Catholic women. Most importantly, the volumes offer evidence of the significance to Catholic social, moral and cultural history of women’s agency.

Another instance in which women’s agency proved important can be found in Dominik Schindler’s discussion of the relationship between the Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund and Michael von Faulhaber, a theology professor at Strasbourg and bishop of Speyer. In a nuanced brief essay, Schindler argues that Faulhaber actively supported the formation of the Frauenbund and the Hildburgisbund, an organization supporting female university students. According to Schindler, Faulhaber largely adhered to traditional values, but insisted that Catholic values reflect the equal role many Catholic women played in securing the family’s income. He also argued publicly that Catholic theology proved no obstacle to women’s suffrage. While men remained heads of household, this did not consign women to second-class status. Faulhaber’s view of the family remained conservative. Still, he acknowledged that in an industrial society, a man’s wages might not suffice to meet the family’s expenses, and thus a woman might be forced to work. Faulhaber argued that women from the upper classes should be encouraged to participate in social and cultural life. In contrast, women in the lower classes deserved much support to earn an honorable living. He believed that women’s work was necessary to meet the needs of their children. Schindler argues that, even if Faulhaber’s views seem backward today, at the time, they were quite progressive.

The three works in question raise more questions than they answer, but there is justification for such works. While Laura Fetheringill Zwicker, Martina Cucchiara, and others, including the scholarship reviewed here, have made inroads into German Catholic women’s history, much work remains to be done, work that will enrich the record and challenge scholars to be sensitive to greater differentiation.

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2017), XII + 817 Pp., ISBN: 9783402132289.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

This hefty tome, running past eight hundred pages, is a valuable contribution to the fields of German history, church history, and theological studies. Its inception was a conference held at the Catholic Academy Stapelfeld, in Cloppenburg in November 2016. Considering its subject – individual biographies of the Catholic bishops of Germany between 1933 and 1945 – its length is perhaps not surprising, though its editors caution us against treating it as exhaustive or comprehensive. For this reason, the reader may notice some sizeable gaps or curious omissions: Lorenz Jaeger, archbishop of Paderborn from 1941 into the postwar period, is not included (though his predecessor, Caspar Klein, is), nor are the bishops of Speyer, Aachen, Limburg, and Augsburg. Some chapters seem relatively cursory or incomplete: the chapter on Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber by Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising and an expert on this subject, runs a scant twelve pages, only six of which deal specifically with the Third Reich; similarly, the chapter on Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, focuses mostly on his pre-1939 biography.

The editors, Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, discuss significant forthcoming works on both von Faulhaber and Jaeger to account partly for the brevity of the studies here (13). And while there is a detailed chapter by Raphael Hülsbömer on Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli – later Pope Pius XII – and his relations with the German bishops, there is no attempt to integrate the episcopate into Vatican politics or consider the complicated, at times strained relationship between the wartime pope and the bishops as a collective. The editors justify this in part by referencing the closed archives covering the wartime pontificate of Pius XII; they could not have known that the year following this volume’s publication, the Vatican would finally announce the much-anticipated opening of these “secret archives” in 2020.[1]

Taken together, though, these gaps fail to significantly undermine what the volume brings to existing scholarship. Twenty-six German scholars, the majority with doctorates in history or theology (or both), several of whom direct diocesan archives or affiliated institutes, have produced twenty-one biographical chapters on twenty-three bishops.[2] Conscious that historical literature over the past seven decades has focused consistently on the political behaviour of the bishops, sometimes individually but more often as a group, and particularly on what the bishops failed or neglected to do – namely, explicitly condemn the Nazi regime’s human rights abuses and especially its persecution of the Jews – the contributors to this volume concentrate instead on studying the central purpose of the bishops: the exercise of their priestly, magisterial, and pastoral offices, which encompassed their zeal to preserve the teachings of the church and its values from distortion, and to immunize Germany’s Catholics against the Nazi world view.

In this, the contributors build on Antonia Leugers’ seminal 1996 study, which pointed to the bishops’ remarkably homogeneous backgrounds as a partial explanation for their lack of collective resistance to the regime’s policies during the war.[3] This volume goes further and acknowledges the distinctions not just between the bishops but also between their dioceses, exploring such diverse factors as age, health, the size of non-Catholic or non-German populations, the varied impact of industrialization and secularization, even the regional nature of German Catholicism, contrasting north versus south and centre versus periphery.

Despite these strong differences, the editors emphasize that the bishops remained united in thinking that the real lapse (Sündenfall) of Nazism was not its turn away from democracy, but its rejection of God and complete disregard for his commandments (11). They were not ignorant of the broader arena in which the Church was under attack by those intent on exterminating religion: events in Russia, Spain, and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s urged the bishops to prepare for an existential battle within Germany up to the outbreak of war, a point made by Joachim Kuropka (to whom the volume is dedicated) in his introductory chapter.

This underscored the bishops’ commitment, at once individual and collective, to maintaining their office as pastoral care providers, even at the expense of becoming political actors. As pastors, they consistently identified their primary goal as confronting and limiting the insidious impact of Nazi ideology on German Catholics. They recognized Nazism, with its absolute political rule and its feverish attempts to claim universal jurisdiction over the construction of all worldly meaning, as a grave threat to the autonomy of the Church in Germany. They wielded an array of methods, from sermons to pastoral letters to a rigorous defense of the independence of Catholic youth organizations, to try to keep their flocks immunized against Nazism (die Immunisiering gegen die NS-Ideologie, 7). In this they were successful: there was no steep drop in the number of Germans identifying as Catholic throughout this period, to which the useful diocesan statistics in the appendix testify. Kuropka references Gestapo reports that describe a spiritual battle between the regime and German Catholics, which, he insists, the former lost (27).

Despite this uniform commitment to pastoral work, the bishops were not a uniform group, as their biographies emphasize. In his study of the two bishops of Fulda (Joseph Damian Schmitt and Johannes Baptist Dietz), Stefan Gerber argues that the most prominent members of the episcopate – Clemens von Galen, Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Freising, Konrad von Preysing in Berlin, Joannes Baptista Sproll in Rottenburg – were in many ways exceptions and therefore are not helpful in reconstructing the self-perceptions, motives, expectations, and frictions of the “so-called second row” bishops (347). Indeed, von Galen, bishop of Münster, spoke publicly and forcefully against the regime’s euthanasia program in the summer of 1941 (Kuropka, the chapter’s author, gives this incident short shrift, more interested in other aspects of von Galen’s personality; he does not stress that von Galen spoke on his own, and not as a representative of the bishops), but he was the only Catholic bishop to do so. Other bishops designated assistants to spearhead efforts to help the victims of Nazism, particularly Catholics who had converted from Judaism and who were thus Catholic in the eyes of the Church, but Jewish in the eyes of the regime: Conrad Gröber in Freiburg, Cardinal Adolf Bertram in Breslau, and von Preysing in Berlin all took this route.

Other authors wrestle with source-based or historiographical problems. Thomas Flammer’s study of Joseph Godehard Machens, in the diaspora diocese of Hildesheim (its population in 1933 was less than 10% Catholic; the only diocese smaller than this, according to 1933 numbers, was Berlin) points to contradictory descriptions of the bishop’s personality: scholars have called him warmonger and Nazi and, according to his employees, he was both vain and humble, egotistical and shy, and “trusted very few people and counted even fewer among his friends.” (381) But upon his death in 1956, the Bundestag held a moment of silence, calling him a warrior against Nazism, and the Jewish community of Lower Saxony spoke of him as a friend and a great Catholic bishop.

Christoph Schmider wrestles with the legacy of Conrad Gröber, archbishop of Freiburg, which swings between the poles of “brown Conrad” (for his early openness to working with Hitler’s regime) and of “warrior of the resistance” (411). Schmider concedes ultimately that such a personality abjures a simple black-and-white characterization but instead requires “numerous gray tones so that, depending on the view of the observer, sometimes the gloomy and sometimes the brighter nuances prevail” (433).

Ulrich Helbach writes about how Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne who died during a bomb attack in 1941, has been consistently overshadowed in scholarship by his successor, Josef Frings, and his detailed analysis of Schulte centers on his personality, the challenges of leading one of Germany’s larger dioceses, and the impact of a serious heart attack (at the relatively young age of fifty-six, in 1927, six years into his tenure as archbishop) on his vocation and his reactions to Nazism. His observation about Schulte’s tendency towards compromise and conflict reduction (161), strengths which served him well in the 1920s, were a completely different matter under Nazism, and one that might be applied to other bishops as well.

All contributors treat diocese and region as integral to understanding the personality and behaviour of the bishop in question, and do not shy away from posing difficult historical and theological questions. In one of the longest chapters, Bernhard Schneider situates Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser’s particular difficulties partly in the task of shepherding the peripheral diocese of Trier. So, on the one hand, Bornewasser was deeply involved in formulating a church-based approach to the pro-German campaign of the 1935 Saar plebiscite, a task for which his ardent love for the Fatherland (which he distinguished from “unchristian nationalism”) prepared him well and which seemingly put him in step with the regime (260). On the other hand, in September 1941 he preached about the prohibition against killing, referring to the T4 program and referencing other episcopal writings (including von Galen’s, indirectly), apparently willing to risk the wrath of the regime in doing so.

Andreas Hölscher writes of Jacobus von Hauck as decisive in shaping the archdiocese of Bamberg for the twentieth century; in 1933, when he was seventy-one, he was the second-oldest and second-longest serving of all the German bishops, having been archbishop since 1912. Since the 1990s his reputation has been shaped by accusations of accommodation with Nazism and a failure to speak out on behalf of human rights. But as Hölscher argues, these questions can, and should, be asked of all the bishops, and of the Church as a whole: what was, and is, the Church’s mission in connection to the defense of human rights? Does the Church have a clearly defined mission beyond the recognized and accepted ecclesiastical milieu (kirchliches Umfeld, 615)? Hölscher and other contributors address these issues, but mostly by way of concluding remarks, and do not attempt to wrestle with them at length. It should be noted that these questions have risen largely in hindsight, after 1945, and that it is far from clear that any of the German bishops at the time entertained them, either in the safety and security of their own minds or, with less security, in conversation with each other.

While the volume fails to tackle these questions directly, its contributors and editors might claim, with justification, that they lie beyond the scope of their objective, which is to consider each bishop in the context of his diocese. They have eschewed overly moral or hagiographic narratives in favour of critical historical analyses of how each bishop approached his office as pastor, and how this shaped his interactions to the Nazi regime, from accommodation to opposition. In some cases, this spectrum is apparent even within an individual case (the best example is Gröber). This is the real strength of the book as a whole: each chapter demonstrates the significance of background (birthplace, education, family history, friendships) and location in helping to determine the course of action a bishop took. Ultimately the image of the episcopate as a group that emerges is not simply one of collective silence in the face of murder and atrocity, as previous histories stress, but also of collective concern for the preservation of the Church in Germany, a concern that co-existed, sometimes with considerable tension, alongside individual hopes and fears, private dissent and frustrations, and physical and emotional limitations. United they may have been in presenting a unified front to Hitler, but behind this façade these men were individual humans, with myriad strengths and weaknesses.

The tendency throughout the volume is to rely on archival material, though the contributors and editors have also relayed relevant historiographical information, detailing shifting interpretations of episcopal actions and reactions across several decades. Michael Hirschfeld’s introductory essay is particularly illuminating in this regard, tracing the post-1945 history of the bishops under Nazism through three distinct phases that affected the broader narrative of the history of the Catholic Church under Nazism between the end of the war and twenty-first century. In this he echoes, though with far less detail, some of Mark Ruff’s findings in his recent book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980, which appeared in print a year before this volume. Hirschfeld does not cite Ruff (likely the book was not available in time), and the secondary literature included in the bibliographies is entirely in German. This reflects the state of the field, in which – predictably – German scholars have undertaken the great bulk of writing the history of their Church leaders.

This book is currently the most up-to-date collection of biographical chapters on the German Catholic bishops during the Third Reich. Its dedication to highlighting revelatory contextual information by plumbing their personal backgrounds and integrating them more fully into their diocesan environments is invaluable, and is rendered explicitly, as Hirschfeld tells us, to reflect a growing trend: the rejection of the easy, unambiguous understandings of historical figures that our contemporary information society peddles in order to “embrace the grey tones that make possible a nuanced image of the respective personalities of the bishops” (49-50). Many contributors acknowledge this trend as well, and reference research projects of various sizes that are underway, for example of Jaeger and Faulhaber, as already mentioned, but also of Machens and Sproll. Thus the volume will hardly be the final word on many of the individual histories. So too we must anticipate that the opening of Pope Pius XII’s “secret archives” next year will generate a new wave of questions and challenges about the Catholic Church’s leaders in Germany and their relationship with the Vatican during the war. Until then, Hirschfeld and Zumholz and their host of contributors have given those of us interested in the Catholic bishops and their historical legacy much to consider.

[1] “Pius XII: Vatican to Open Secret Holocaust-Era Archives,” BBC World News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47444293, last accessed 30 May 2019.

[2] Hirschfeld and Zumholz define the German episcopate from 1933 to 1945 as consisting of 9 archbishops and 25 bishops, using the Altreich (1937) borders of Germany (pg. 2). The study therefore excludes the Austrian bishops and dioceses integrated into Germany following the 1938 Anschluss.

[3] Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens : Der Ausschuß für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945 (J. Knecht Verlag, 1996).

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 603 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525-55040-3.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

In his work, Priests in Times of Upheaval: Identity and Culture of Catholic Parish Clergy in Upper Bavaria 1918 to 1945, Thomas Forstner, a freelance historian in Berlin, offers an in-depth examination of the world of parish clergy in Germany during the Weimar Republic and later under National Socialism. Originally produced as a 2011 dissertation at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the direction of Dr. Walter Ziegler, professor emeritus for Bavarian regional history, this edition, according to Forstner, has been slightly revised and slightly shortened. Still, the present work inherently reveals its dissertation origins with extensive, but certainly informative citations, which, at times, act as parallel narratives to the text itself. The sources constituting these citations are also equally impressive. Quite significant among the sources are twenty interviews Forstner conducted with priests who had first-hand experience of the priestly world so-well documented in this work. Forstner incorporates selections from these interviews convincingly throughout his work. While all of the above points are naturally of great interest to the historical specialist and perhaps to modern-day clergy, the study’s thoroughgoing nature will more than likely make it daunting for most readers.

forstner-priester From the outset, Forstner makes it clear that his book will depart from the following works: Thomas Breuer’s Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstreit zwischen nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt im Erzbistum Bamberg (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992); Thomas Fandel’s Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: Evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930-1939 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997); and Tobias Haaf’s Von volksverhetzenden Pfaffen und falschen Propheten: Klerus und Kirchenvolk im Bistum Würzburg in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). All of these works, he argues, centered primarily on questions relating to resistance and politics without significant consideration of priestly culture and everyday life. Forstner places my own 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press) in the same category, though he does acknowledge that my work included “some” discussion of priestly culture. By contrast to these studies, Forstner seeks to understand specifically the all-too often hermetic world of Munich’s clergy, especially their pastoral training, outlook, and practices, quite closely akin to Monika Nickel’s Habilitation, Die Passauer theologisch-praktische Monatsschrift: Ein Standesorgan des Bayerischen Klerus an der Wende vom 19. Zum 20. Jahrhundert (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 2004), a study upon which Forstner lavishes great praise. Nickel’s work examined pastoral practice addressed in the Passau Monthly of Practical Theology.

In his introduction, Forstner spells out the three aims of his work: (1) to describe the formation of the Upper Bavarian clergy in the period between the two world wars; (2) to build upon the research of the late Erwin Gatz among others by further examining the cultural, social and attitudinal history of German Catholic clergy; and (3) to detail the ways in which clergy did and did not overcome the challenges of the tumultuous time in which they lived, especially taking into account the strategies they employed to negotiate the difficulties they faced. In my opinion, Forstner convincingly accomplishes his first two goals, though falls a bit short of his third ambition.

In his efforts to address the aims of his work, Forstner regularly employs the term Lebenswelt, though he purposely avoids the term “milieu” when discussing the nature of Munich Catholicism. According to him, a unique single Catholic milieu did not exist in the archdiocese, even though 89% of its population professed Roman Catholicism. Despite the lack of uniformity, Forstner finds the Catholic clergy of Munich and Freising quite unified in their world view. According to him, the Catholic clergy’s ideals revolved around the understanding of Habitus clericalis – the imposed norms for priestly conduct in private and public life. These priestly ideals embodied the practices of self-sanctification and self-denial. The challenges of the modern world interfered significantly as the clergy strove to live ascetically pure lives. This was especially true as the society, in which they lived, especially following the First World War, became more tumultuous. Increasingly, Catholic clergymen found they often lacked the training and abilities to deal with the harsh realities of modern-day German society. The archbishop and his clerical staff were of little assistance in addressing this situation.

Forstner begins his work by offering an overview of the archdiocese from 1918 to 1945. Throughout this period, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, imposing archbishop of Munich and Freising (1917-1952), set the tone for the archdiocese. Yet, at the same time, his clergy found him distant and aloof. As one priest frankly commented, “Following my priestly ordination, I never saw Faulhaber in my life again, never again. We had no access; he was a feudal Lord in his palace. Any baroness had access to Herr Cardinal, but curates not…. I only remember Faulhaber from his majestic behavior, as if he was a noble’s son, even though he was, I believe, a master baker’s son” (p. 51). Still, Cardinal Faulhaber was an entity from whom many of Munich’s 1.47 million Catholics (in 1933) took heed. Such regard among Catholics did not translate into weekly Mass attendance. In fact, the Munich archdiocese had one of the lowest records for Mass attendance in Germany. Similarly, Munich Catholics offered less support for political Catholicism than Catholics in other regions of Germany. In the 1924 state elections, for example, three out of four Catholics did not cast a vote for a Catholic party. As the rector of the Freising seminary lamented, “The men of our age no longer enjoy the protection and advantage of an ideologically closed culture and a uniform milieu” (pp. 43-44). Yet, within such a diverse culture, Forstner stresses that the clergy maintained their united anti-modern conservative outlook. Only a few priests, minor figures, Forstner argues, embraced a reform anti-Ultramontane strain of Catholicism present in Munich and its environs.

In the following chapter, Forstner examines the recruitment and training of Munich priests. Interestingly, he reports that more than half the priests of the Munich archdiocese came from the countryside, though he finds that this trend began to change after the First World War, especially since German society experienced an upheaval in general. The majority of the priestly candidates began their studies as young teenagers (ages 11-15), attending one of the minor seminaries in Freising, Scheyern, or Traunstein. The seminarians continued their studies at either the Freising Major Seminary or at the more liberally structured Georgianum in Munich – the latter included seminarians from other dioceses who attended classes at the University of Munich, taught by members of its Faculty of Theology. Forstner offers pages upon pages of detail as he richly documents seemingly every aspect of vocation recruitment and seminary life. The directors and rectors of the seminaries made every attempt to ensure that the young men entrusted to their care were kept as far from possible from outside worldly influences. Still, the realities of the times did creep into seminary life. For example, Nazi enthusiast, Father Albert Hartl, a prefect at the Freising Minor Seminary, had his students read and discuss the contents of the Völkischer Beobachter during morning study period. By late 1933, Hartl had further awakened everyone at the minor seminary to the realities of living under National Socialism when he denounced seminary director, Father Josef Roßberger, for speaking against the government. Actually, Forstner reveals that seminary life was never as insular as one might believe. In 1929, for example, 43 seminarians at the Freising Major Seminary supported the NSDAP candidates in local district elections, despite the rector’s assurances to his superiors that no seminarian was a member of the NSDAP.

It became impossible for seminarians to escape the grasp of National Socialism. In June 1935, the German government instituted a law that made six months of labor service (Reichsarbeitsdient) compulsory for all young men ages 16 to 25. According to Forstner, the seminarians, who were used to being away from family and friends for long periods of time, actually fared better than the majority of their peers. Anti-Church propaganda also had a reverse effect, by primarily strengthening the resolve of most of them. In 1939, the German government added another impediment to seminary training by making membership in the Jungvolk (ages 10 to 14) and the ordinary Hitlerjugend (ages 14-18) compulsory. By this time, however, priestly formation was already under significant stress in Upper Bavaria as the government requisitioned seminary buildings for military use, disbanded theological faculties, and altered or ended seminary programs of study.

In chapters three and four, Forstner centers upon parish ministry and the ideals of priesthood within active ministry. He offers an extensive portrayal of parish life, including a detailed examination of pastor-vicar work relationships, priestly social life, and remuneration. In particular, he illustrates how parish life revolved around the pastor who served not only as a pastoral care provider who dispensed the sacraments but also as an individual from whom everyone in a particular area sought advice. The latter role underwent a gradual but significant change as mayors more and more assumed this role. After 1933, this was even more the case when the National Socialist government removed priests from most honorary local positions.

In chapter five, Forstner discusses a topic rarely addressed in the existing literature on the German Catholic Church in this period: clerical deviancy and punishment. After explaining the various penalties that Church hierarchy had at its disposal to deal with recalcitrant priests, Forstner examines specific problems that befell individual priests and offers brief individual case studies. These issues included breaking celibacy, partaking in financial irregularities, and suffering severe psychological illness. In the latter discussion, the case of Father Richard H. stands out. Soon after his ordination, Father Richard manifested schizophrenic symptoms so his superiors placed him in Schönbrunn asylum, a Catholic sanitarium run by Franciscan sisters. His condition worsened and the asylum’s director, Monsignor Josef Steininger, approved his transfer to Eglfing-Haar, a state asylum in which the decentralized euthanasia program was still taking place – a fact of which Steininger was well aware. Soon after his transfer, the 35 year old Father Richard was reported as having died “officially” of fever and pneumonia, but, quite possibly, Forstner argues, a victim of the euthanasia program. Forstner speculates about Steininger’s choices and role in Father Richard’s death.

The sixth chapter deals with complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. Here Forstner examines brown priests, clergymen who openly supported National Socialism. Forstner acknowledges my book, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008) and various articles on this subject, but believes that I did not differentiate sufficiently enough the varying degrees of “brownness” among such priests. Instead he turns to four categories of complicity suggested by University of Heidelberg historian Olaf Blaschke: “(1) Selective Contentedness, (2) Cooperation and Conformity, (3) Loyalty to Consent, and (4) Active Collaboration” (p. 425). Forstner argues that scholars should only label priests “brown” if their behavioral pattern falls within the third or fourth categories of complicity. Such priests consented to the core aims of National Socialism and, in turn, cooperated with National Socialism against the beliefs and practices of their own religious tradition. From this group, he singles out seventeen Munich archdiocesan priests, of which eleven were members of the NSDAP. Forstner offers compelling informative overviews of the careers of almost all these brown priests and concludes that these clergymen can primarily be placed in one of two groupings to explain their reasons for siding with National Socialism: extreme nationalism and opportunism. Forstner also argues that most of these individuals belonged to the generation that Detlev Peukert called the “Superfluous Generation” and Michael Wildt termed the “Uncompromising Generation” – those born between 1900 and 1910, too late to prove themselves during the First World War. While such characterization may help to explain the motivations for some brown priests, it does not cover the overwhelming majority of them. Still, Forstner does build upon and add to the existing literature as he discusses these problematic priests, even if his conclusions are not entirely new.

In chapter seven, Forstner offers a comparative examination of the role of priests in both world wars. In World War I, 6.5% (90 priests) of the diocesan clergy and almost all seminarians served in the military. Of the 301 seminarians who carried arms, 95 perished, a third of these falling in direct combat. Like most Germans, the priests of Munich shared in the nationalism and monarchism that so filled the air in 1914. Michael von Faulhaber, then serving as Deputy Field Provost (Stellvertretender Feldpropst) of the Bavarian army, was no different. His sermons used terms such as “soldiers of Christ” and described the war as “sacred” and “just.” By contrast, Forstner argues that Faulhaber’s public rhetoric during the Second World War was much more reserved. He does acknowledge though that any positive statements about the war, even if in support of the soldiers or seminarians in military service, still served indirectly to support the war effort and Hitler’s criminal regime. Munich’s clergy and seminarians showed much less enthusiasm for this war than the previous one. The church-state conflict clearly had affected diocesan seminary life by then. Despite exhibiting a zealous enthusiasm for the war, theologians were still drafted due to a secret provision in the 1933 Reich-Vatican Concordat. Before the war was over, 230 Munich priests, 270 seminarians and 182 pre-theology students from the minor seminary took part in military service. 10% of the priests and 30% of the seminarians fell in military service, the majority on the eastern front.

In his final chapter, Forstner focuses on the question of resistance among Munich’s clergy under National Socialism. While making great effort to differentiate his argument from other historians, his conclusions are not novel. Few priests, Forstner concludes, participated in open resistance against the National Socialist regime. Most considerations were subordinated and guided by the necessity to administer the sacraments and maintain pastoral care. He arrives at such conclusions without significant archival evidence. Rather, he relies primarily on his analysis of the materials collected by Ulrich von Hehl and his collaborators, published in the third edition of Priester unter Hitlers Terror (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996). Overall, this chapter seems wanting, especially when compared to the depth of study and analysis presented in the other chapters of this work.

According to the portrait Forstner offers, Cardinal Faulhaber did not inspire resistance among his clergy. In a 1940 pastoral conference, Faulhaber told his priests: “Guarding the tongue in the pulpit is the strictest Canon of the time” (p. 532). Evidently, from the number of priests who came into conflict with the state primarily over issues relating to pastoral care, such words of advice were not easily followed. Other priests found Faulhaber of little assistance in their daily negotiation with the state. One clergyman commented: “The man [Faulhaber] left us completely alone as chaplains in the difficult conflict over the schools and in our preaching. We never received any help in the time of the Nazis, never! … The bishops were not for us.” Another priest added: “There was no help to be expected from the Church” (p. 538).

Overall, Forstner has produced a magisterial study on the culture of priesthood in Munich and Freising during some of its most trying times in the twentieth century. Certainly, it will become a standard work on this subject. Despite this important contribution and the information that it contains, the work does little to address the larger questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church with National Socialism and less to engage existing literature in these areas. In all of its 552 pages of text and footnotes, Forstner devotes but five pages (pp. 510-514) to a discussion of relations between clergy and Jews. Neither is any general picture offered on this topic. Those seeking to gain a broader portrait of the Catholic Church in such troubled times will have to look elsewhere. By contrast, those who wish to know specifically about clergy, seminary training, and parish life will find a rich resource in Forstner’s work.

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

By Hubert Wolf, University of Münster [1]

Ever since 2012, a corpus of sources has become accessible in the Archdiocesan Archive of Munich and Freising, which historians have long awaited: the diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952), which were predominantly written in a shorthand called “Gabelsberger.” Johannes Waxenberger (1915-2010), the last secretary of the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had taken the diaries – against the archbishop”s testamentary will – and kept them in a cardboard box under his bed for decades. That the cardinal had kept a diary was known to researchers. Waxenberger, however, refused to release the records and only transcribed singular pages of the diaries for the purpose of a few academic studies. It was only in 1999 that he concluded an agreement with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich until 2008, according to which the diaries were to be restored to the Archiepiscopal See of Munich after his death, which occurred on June 25, 2010.

This longtime-hidden treasure will now be edited by researchers and made accessible online for anyone to view. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a long-term project for a duration of twelve years, for which the historian Prof Dr. Andreas Wirsching, head of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), and I are responsible. Concise but elaborate annotations will furnish information on the individuals and the most important issues recorded in the diaries. The edition is not only intended for use by historians and theologians, but also by scholars from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Sources edited online are also suitable for the use in university teaching, which the “Critical Online Edition of the Nuncial Reports of Eugenio Pacelli (1917-1929)” in Münster has already proven. The new project will profit from this in many ways. The first texts that Faulhaber wrote during the eventful period from 1917 to 1919, which are of utmost importance for his biography, will be available online by late 2014 at www.faulhaber-edition.de.

A close look behind the scenes of official correspondences

Michael Faulhaber was bishop of Speyer from 1911 to 1917 and archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1917 until his death in 1952. He was of humble birth, being the son of a baker and farmer from the Lower Franconian village of Heidenfeld near Schweinfurt. In 1913, however, he was ennobled and created a cardinal in 1921. Faulhaber was an excellent theologian, an articulate pioneer of political Catholicism, and a champion of Catholic interests. His influence reached far beyond Germany”s borders and those of the Catholic Church. Faulhaber had marvelous connections with the Bavarian people and with the elites of Church, politics, nobility and the media at home and abroad. He was a close friend of Pope Pius XII, but also negotiated with Adolf Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer. The numerous interlocutors that Faulhaber received day by day came from all social classes. It is especially through his published sermons that he reached a mass audience. Already in his lifetime, church members admired him, but he remained highly controversial, especially due to his stance during the period of National Socialism.

The fact that a representative of the Church wrote down his experiences and thoughts in a detailed diary for over four decades is a stroke of luck for historians. Since the Catholic Church is a “global player” and Faulhaber had excellent foreign contacts, there are various possibilities to approach the issues mentioned in the diaries on an internationally comparative level.

The diaries represent a corpus of sources that is unique in terms of quality and quantity. They have been fully preserved for the period from 1911 to 1952. The diaries consist of 32 volumes in notebook format comprising more than 4,000 pages that primarily contain succinct entries on the individuals Faulhaber met as well as brief summaries of their conversations. In total, Faulhaber recorded about 52,000 visits. These diaries are often referred to as a “visitors’ diary,” in order to distinguish them from other, less comprehensive diaries that Faulhaber kept. He, however, used it also to record information he considered important with regard to his views on key political, social or religious events. Whenever he considered such issues to a greater depth or had particularly important conversations, he added ample supplementary sheets, of which approximately 1,000 have been recorded so far. The average length of a supplementary sheet ranges from one to four pages in octavo. The edition will thus offer a detailed view of approximately 15,000 days of Faulhaber”s life.

According to what is known about him so far, Faulhaber was a great and reliable observer, who mostly wrote soberly, but sometimes used very frank words to phrase his opinions. His records were not only influenced by his own observations and experiences, but also by messages received orally and by letter and by reports from newspapers and radio transmissions. He then enhanced such communication with his own interpretations. The entries are usually brief, being written down shortly after the depicted event had taken place. The notes apparently served him as a sort of reminder, not being intended for publication, which is why Faulhaber had the possibility to write down confidential and maybe even incriminating contents of his conversations.

The source is therefore to be considered a highly authentic relic that was transmitted unintentionally. The private records allow for an exciting view of a church dignitary”s emotional world and behind the scenes of official correspondences and official statements. They complement the corpora of sources already accessible, so that new perspectives and motives for his actions may be discovered, which could so far scarcely be delineated. The diaries represent a key to open up his comprehensive papers and to analyze them from particular perspectives. Ahead of schedule, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter made the larger part of Faulhaber”s papers in the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising available to research in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is easily accessible, but has only been analyzed rudimentarily. There is no comparable corpus for other important German church representatives.

The supplementary sheets are scattered among Faulhaber’s papers, but many of them emerged recently in the records turned over by Waxenberger. So far, only a few supplementary sheets have been edited by Ludwig Volk (Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917-1945, 2 vol., Mainz 1975/1978). These documents are frequently quoted by researchers and give proof of this source’s potential for historical research. Ludwig Volk saw only a brief selection of the many items Waxenberger withheld from Faulhaber’s papers. It may thus be assumed that those supplementary sheets that are politically charged are only casino online now soon to be made accessible to researchers and the general public.

Gabelsberger Centre of Excellence is to make accessible further archival holdings

The historical analysis of the diaries and supplementary sheets is complicated by the fact that it was only the dates and names of his interlocutors that he wrote down in longhand, as well as geographical, political and ecclesiastical or religious terms, though often in abbreviated form. For the rest he used Gabelsberger, which was the most widespread short hand in Germany before the introduction of the German Unified Shorthand (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) in 1924. Today, only few experts know how to decipher Gabelsberger. The long-term project therefore also comprises stenographic training, which pursues the aim of establishing a centre of excellence for shorthand in Munich. This training was financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which in general sponsored the preliminary work of the long-term project. With the help of those newly trained experts on the cultural technique of reading Gabelsberger further comprehensive archival holdings will be made accessible to researchers. A survey has revealed that German archives hold ample collections of the nineteenth and twentieth century written in Gabelsberger.

Online edition offers numerous advantages

The online edition aspires to offer a flexible, multidimensional technique of editing, which permits the contemporary display of two textual versions of each diary entry in arbitrary combination: first, the scanned facsimile; second, the precise transcription; and third, an extensive reading version that contains references to supplementary sheets, spelled-out abbreviations, other possible readings and indications of the respective stages. Annotations will appear as pop-ups. The database-based online edition offers numerous advantages compared to a printed volume:

(1) Accessibility: the project supports the principle of Open Access. The diaries and the supplementary sheets will be accessible all over the world, for free and comparably fast and easy.

(2) Efficiency: an online edition is considerably more low-priced and resource-efficient, especially given the amplitude of sources.

(3) Flexibility and velocity: the texts and the pertaining annotations are to be uploaded in sections – and thereby accessible more quickly. Moreover, particularly interesting parts of various years can be transcribed and made accessible online together with the respective supplementary sheets, even before the other documents of that particular year are transcribed and all supplementary sheets have been retrieved. Belated additions and modifications are not a problem, for instance in case further relevant documents are found among Faulhaber”s comprehensive papers.

(4) Transparency and meticulousness: an online edition offers the opportunity to mark cases of doubt as well as various readings more thoroughly than a traditional print edition. This is a huge advantage considering the complexity of the material”s content and the difficulties that are to be expected when deciphering Gabelsberger. The multidimensional technique of editing allows for excellent attention to detail as well as for legibility.

(5) Linking possibilities: the documents in the database can be linked with each other, but also with external corpora of sources, such as image or audio files.

(6) User-friendliness: among the most important advantages of the online edition are the comprehensive search options, the possibility to copy the texts easily and the multi-linking with the entries in the biographical as well as in the keyword databases. Moreover, online editions are comparably easy to analyze from a statistic point of view, which may raise new questions, e.g. as far as writing processes and the development of terminologies are concerned.

(7) Interactivity: online editions make it easier for users to forward advice and recommendations to the project team. There is going to be a contact form on the website of the Faulhaber-edition.

The online edition is based on software called “DENQ” (Digital edition of contemporary sources), which was developed by Dr. Jörg Hörnschemeyer from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome in cooperation with the DHI London. The IFZ assumes the hosting of the database and of the website as well as of the project”s internal server platform, which contains a protected area. Long-term storage is secured within the frame of the Institute”s close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library.

State of research and possible questions

The biographical literature on Faulhaber”s fellow bishops is not very broad yet. Nonetheless, it offers a basis to compare what is representative and what is specific of Faulhaber”s biography. Neither a biography based on source material nor partial biographies of Munich”s spiritual leader have been published so far. A history of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the first half of the twentieth century is missing as well.

What is more, the edition is going to be illuminating on many fundamental questions of Germany’s and Europe’s history. In his notes, Faulhaber reported on the German Empire, the First World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation period as well as on the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. This period saw several surges of secularization and re-confessionalization as well as fundamental theological developments. Many questions that Faulhaber was confronted with are still current today, and essential for the self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

Faulhaber”s diaries and the pertaining supplementary sheets are of particular interest as far as several fundamental issues are concerned, which are in various ways interlinked: the relationship of religion and politics, especially that of the Catholic Church and the “Third Reich,” the relationships with other religions and confessions, and the Church”s structures and networks. Moreover, it is concerned with questions of cultural, religious, and theological history and deals with issues such as emotions and piety.

The interdisciplinary team of the long-term project began its work on October 31, 2013 and cooperates closely with Dr Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising. Members are Dr. Erich Ruff, an expert on Gabelsberger, Dr. Philipp Gahn, a Catholic theologian, Dr. Peer Oliver Volkmann, a historian, Matthias Bornschlegel, a computer scientist, and Carina Knorz and Franziska Nicolay, graduate students, who will critically examine the diaries in their dissertations.

Links related to the project:

Hubert Wolf: http://www.uni-muenster.de/FB2/personen/mnkg/seminar/wolf.html

Andreas Wirsching: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/andreas-wirsching/

Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis: http://www.pacelli-edition.de/

Jörg Hörnschemeyer: http://dhi-roma.it/team.html

Peter Pfister: http://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/Page005788.aspx

Erich Ruff: http://www.erichruff.gmxhome.de/

Philipp Gahn: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/philipp-gahn/

Peer Oliver Volkmann: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/peer-oliver-volkmann/

Matthias Bornschlegel: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/matthias-bornschlegel/

Carina Knorz: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/carina-knorz/

Franziska Nicolay: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/franziska-nicolay/

[1] I would like to thank Elisabeth-Marie Richter for translating the present article and Holger Arning for his contributions to the concept of the text.