Report: German Studies Association 2002 Session Nr. 59a, Liberalism,
Bismarck, and Gender

Moderator:  Harry Ritter, Western Washington University

"Kaiserin Friedrich - Deutschlands liberale Alternative zu Otto von
Bismarck? or: The Life of an Uncommon Woman in Imperial Germany"
Michael Epkenhans, Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung

"German Liberals, the Well-Ordered Public, and the Patriarchal Nation,
1860-1920"
Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

"Kulturkampf und Geschlechterkampf: Liberalism, Anti-Catholicism and
Misogyny in the nineteenth Century"
Michael Gross, East Carolina University

Commentator:  Harry Ritter, Western Washington University


The session was well-attended despite being moved at the last minute
from Saturday morning to Friday afternoon.  Dr. Epkenhans's paper was a
review of current research on the relationship between the Kaiserin
Friedrich and Bismarck, situated in a summary of German liberalism's
shortcomings in the 1870s and 1880s.  The Kaiserin wanted an
English-style parliamentary monarchy in Germany, but she had no real
power or popularity, and had much less influence over her husband than
used to be thought.  Her husband wanted constitutional monarchy but no
more than that, and the Kaiserin exaggerated the nature of his
liberalism after he died.  Few liberals of the Kulturkampf generation
really wanted the English-style government of parties that the Kaiserin
imagined.  Like Friedrich III, many were satisfied, at least for the
time being, with a regime that upheld the rule of law and defended the
constitution as a binding agreement between the king and the people.
Going further, to a government of prime ministers, parties, and
parliamentary majorities, would risk loss of control.  Unable to out-fox
Bismarck, Kulturkampf-generation liberal leaders imagined the White
Revolutionary as an instrument of historical reason to build the
power-state they would some day inherit to fine-tune their utopia of
social order, fiscal responsibility, and passive and active
citizenship.  Overall, Epkenhans seemed to agree with Karina Urbach's
characterization of Lord Odo Russell's view:  "a transfer of political
values [from England to Germany] was not possible.  He learnt to accept
that a German Liberal had after all few things in common with a British
one, and that not even Crown Prince Friedrich would be capable of
changing the tide and liberalizing Germany because of the fear of
enemies--whether real or imagined."

Michael Gross's paper analyzed one aspect of this real or imagined
anxiety:  misogyny.  Gross argued that the Kulturkampf's emotional
intensity can be largely explained by the liberal imagination's
conflation of hostility to women and anti-Catholicism.  Both Catholicism
and women's emergence in the public sphere seemed to threaten
liberalism, at the precise moment of its imagined triumph in the early
1870s.  Gross suggested that mistrust of women was even more fundamental
to liberals' sense of threatened achievement than religion, arguing that
the "chest-thumping" language of liberal spokesmen provides plenty of
evidence.  Appeals to "manliness" were ubiquitous in liberal discourse,
but the opposite side of such rhetoric was an idiom of a feminized
Catholicism.  The language of Johann Bluntschli--pitting the
emotionalism of women and Romanism against virile reason--was an
exaggerated but not unrepresentative case.  Liberalism for Bluntschli
was "a young man, who...steps forward into life fully aware of his
strength and self-confidence." In contrast, the Catholic Church used
"her feminine wiles to exploit man to her advantage."  "At the center of
liberal anti-Catholicism," Gross claimed, "was not religion but
biology."  "...from the perspective of the gendered discourse of
Catholicism and liberalism," he asserted, the conflict between liberals
and the Catholic Church takes on the dimensions of a more fundamental
contest between men and women for access to the public."  Catholicism
had become a venue for women's special emergence outside the home in the
mid-19th-century, with the growth of new female religious congregations,
the emergence of women as teachers, nurses, welfare workers and so on,
so the connection was not hard to make. "At the level of social-sexual
ideology," Gross argued, "the incessant invocation of masculinity in the
face of Catholicism served to define the public space as exclusively
male."  Seen from this angle, he concluded, "the Kulturkampf was a
complex attempt during a period of dramatic pressures for change to
preserve the distinction between gender specific public and private
spaces.  Exploring the Kulturkampf as a contest between men and women
for access to the public allows for a different evaluation of the
origins and meaning of liberal anti-Catholicism."

There was considerable overlap between the Gross and Eley papers. Both
saw the Kulturkampf as a defining moment in the history of liberal
behavior, even though it eventually failed.  Like Gross, Geoff Eley
wanted to understand the "triumph and tribulations of an extremely
self-confident and ambitious liberalism," particularly the "gendered
dimensions of German liberalism."  His paper brought wide reading in the
literature of German women's history to bear on liberal state-building.
In this context, the Kulturkampf was part of a broader "drive for
cultural uniformity" undertaken between roughly 1861 and 1879, when
liberals were able to shape legality according to a patriarchal
sensibility born in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries.  The
language of politics and identity were strongly gendered in Germany from
the Napoleonic Wars onward, when public languages were "hard-wired"
around a binary "axis of manliness and domesticity."  Following the
arguments of Karen Hagemann, Eley thought the "martial determinants of
the nationalist founding moment [i.e., the wars of anti-French
liberation] preempted more generous and optimistic justifications drawn
from either the Enlightenment, the ideals of civil society, [or] the
welfarist governmentality of the later eighteenth century...."  But he
nonetheless believed that as late as the 1860s, amidst debates over what
specific sort of legal framework the liberal Rechtsstaat should be, the
nature of citizenship--including citizenship for women--was still "up
for grabs."  Women participated in the public sphere in notable ways,
such as patriotic auxiliary work in the 1866 and 1870 wars and the
founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein in 1865.  But "just
as liberal connections to organized labor became severed...via
deliberate and disdainful exclusion" at this point, so in the early
1870s did "anything resembling acceptance of women's political rights."
Like Gross, Eley believed that "the Kulturkampf played a vital part in
managing and shaping that process of exclusion."  The anti-Catholic
crusade was part of a "broader offensive to shape the public values of
the new state according to a vision of a "well-ordered public and
patriarchal nation."  Protestant and liberal women were allotted a niche
role in this vision as "the bearers of a rational and progressive
domesticity."  They were to be "the supporting players for the
patriarchal citizenry of the new liberalizing state."  Thus "the
potential claims of German women to even a modified form of civic
recognition became contained."  Since there was so little liberal
advocacy for women's rights in a public as opposed to private sense, it
is not surprising that German feminists directed their efforts toward
the social sphere rather than toward efforts to win voting and other
civil rights.  According to Eley, this supports Ann Taylor Allen's
"progressivist reading of maternalist feminism in the specifically
German context of the later nineteenth century."

The commentator thanked the panelists for their stimulating papers. At
the same time, he noted that the presenters all tended to follow the
traditional path of viewing the German liberal glass as more half-empty
than half-full.  In contrast, he noted that a number of studies from the
1980s and 1990s--sometimes revolving around such ideas as  political
culture and civil society rather than liberalism per se--have
contributed to a more differentiated and in some cases even sympathetic
sense of Central European liberalism's past predicaments and
achievements.  Still, there is plenty of reason to bewail the blinkered
vision of Kulturkampf generation liberals, and the three papers all
enriched our understanding of why.  Since the Kulturkampf was centered
in Prussia, however, he wondered if it would be prudent to explore other
German regions and states for possible differences and
similarities--especially when it is a question of conflating misogyny
and anti-Catholicism.  Gross's analysis of the masculinity trope made an
especially valuable contribution to knowledge of the way leading liberal
minds worked in the 1870s.  Still, had the case had been made that
misogyny was even more fundamental than religion in the Kulturkampf?
Was it not one ingredient among many?  Moreover, by leaving unmentioned
the genuinely progressivist heritage of the manly trope (i.e., as
Enlightenment code language that pitted self-reliant autonomy against
supine deference to princely patriarchy), Gross left a partial picture
of that tradition of usage.  Moreover, why single out the liberals for
distrust of women?  Wasn't it normal among men (and many women) across
ideological, religious, and national boundaries in the 19th century?
This question was reiterated in various forms in the vigorous general
discussion that ensued, continuing until to end of the session's
allotted time.  Gross's strong version of the case for the connection
between misogyny and anti-Catholicism was a point of special interest.
What about Catholic misogyny?  Was it qualitatively different from
Protestant misogyny?  Gross acknowledged that misogyny was widespread
across sectarian lines, but stressed that what interested him was the
specific political and social uses that liberal Protestants put it to in
Prussia.  When the session broke up at 4:30 p. m., the moderator could
remember few other GSA panels with such a lively and useful interchange
of ideas.

Harry Ritter
Western Washington University


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2002 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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