Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Since the Kulturkampf in the 1870s, the Zentrum party had served as the primary political vehicle for German Catholics interests. Although the Zentrum had long gathered German Catholics of various classes and ideological dispositions under its confessional-political umbrella, the party’s decision to ally with the Church-hostile Social Democrats in the first coalition after the November Revolution and to support the revolution’s offspring, the Weimar Republic, caused consternation among its right wing. Believing that the party could no longer justifiably claim to represent German Catholicism, some conservative Catholics defected from the Zentrum and found a political home in the Reich Catholic Committee (RKA) of the recently established, majority-Protestant Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP). Under fire from their fellow Catholics in the Zentrum, the RKA had to persuade their brothers and sisters in faith that the Zentrum could no longer justifiably claim the title of the sole political representative of German Catholicism and that the DNVP’s program more closely adhered to Catholic political and social theory. To have any hope of drawing Catholics away from the Zentrum and into the arms of the DNVP, the RKA needed to associate German Catholic identity with conservative politics. Their efforts led to the development of a conservative Catholic political theory that affirmed monarchical rule, critiqued modern economic ideologies like socialism and capitalism, idealized the German nation, and challenged the secularization of public life. Following the committee from its inception in October 1920 to its first dissolution in the Summer of 1929, this dissertation analyzes the worldview and rhetoric of the RKA to illustrate that the conflict between the Zentrum and the RKA over who truly represented German Catholic identity in the Weimar Republic was more than a party-political dispute, but another front in the decades-long battle within Catholicism over the relationship between the Catholic faith and modernity itself.
Date
2-28-2025
Recommended Citation
Wisniewski, Andrea, ""Catholics in Name Only"?: Weimar Catholic Identity and the Thought of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee" (2025). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 6683.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/6683
Committee Chair
Suzanne Marchand
Included in
European History Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Political History Commons, Political Theory Commons
