Confessionalization:  The Ghost of Ritter's Past

Ute Lotz-Heumann and Stefan Ehrenpreis appear to cede all the old
programmatic connotations that "confessionalization" once carried.  They
seem ready to jettison its link to modernization theories.  Yet the
argument for "confessionalization" cedes nothing of the original impetus
that sought to use a sociological treatment of early-modern Europe as a
way of drawing attention away from anything unique about German
political culture.  The more pressing question has to be:  Why focus on
confession as a unit of study at all?  It carries the same definition
problems that bedevil inquiries into class, class-consciousness, and
class formation.  By reifying confession one overlooks the institutions
and the political behavior of the very individuals who were employing
"confession" conveniently to serve their own ends and purposes.
Focusing on a "process" safely leaves aside the sticky question of
agency, and agency in relation to German history is one of the most
important questions to confront, precisely the one not to obfuscate with
impersonal social forces and processes.  Confessionalization's promise
to integrate is precisely what has been wrong with it from its very
conception.  Its power to abstract is what has allowed it to serve its
larger ecumenical program.  Like the focus on class, the focus on
confession gets bogged down in the definition stage, and as a result
reverts back to ideology to find direction.

The more interesting question involving confession is the one that asks
why 16th century writers invoked confession in the first place.  That
requires a form of intellectual history that--unlike the form that
Ritter repudiated in the 1940s and 50s for suggesting that there might
be something about Lutheranism that could account for Hitler's
rise--looks less at published ideas but goes deeper to explores the
situations and circumstances, the political behavior of the people who
sought to make confession a powerful construct in the first place.  The
fact the Melanchthon was given the philosophy curriculum to reform, and
not the theology faculty raises an interesting set of questions about
the University as an institution with its own culture and behaviors.
How about the institutions of the Holy Roman Empire, its courts and
bodies? Did its members employ confession, or were there more pressing
concerns?  The focus on confession as a significant cultural force is a
residue of the Kulturkampf.  Why perpetuate that category, even as it
has been inverted in an attempt to join together the very forces that
tore at each other in the 1800s?

I agree with Geoff Eley that there is an all too pronounced gap that
exists between early-modern and modern historians of Germany.  The
nature of this gap is dispositional, however, and reflects the broader
cultural divergence that emerged from the Kulturkampf and the end of the
Kaiserreich.  It goes back to the apostasy of theologians like Ernst
Troeltsch, who, in the face of the "modern age," put theology aside in
favor of sociology.  At the opposite end of the spectrum were Lutheran
theologians like Karl Höll who inaugurated his "Luther Renaissance" as
an antidote to this same modern age.

In the 1920s and 30s, historians critical of modern society looked
longingly back to an "age of faith" that preceded the modern age and
traced its origins--to find it roots, as it were, and pull it up the
weed that it has become.  Gerhard Ritter, one of the first generation of
historians to participate in Höll's renaissance, did not at first
concentrate solely on early-modern topics; his writing ranged from
Luther to Hitler.  Troeltsch, similarly felt competent to treat modern
and early-modern German history in a piece.

The great divide opened up most dramatically after the Second World War,
most prominently in the 1950s in the wake of the Ritter-Fischer debate.
The staging ground for the rupture, however, began in the 1930s when
Hitler's political triumphs allowed Ritter and other sympathetic
anti-modernists historians to purge the universities of left-leaning
professors, "socialists," and others sympathetic modernists.  The broad
ecumenical anti-modernist political coalition, the CDU/CSU only deepened
the anti-modernists hold on medieval and early-modern history chairs.
Modern history, however, quickly became a concern of the allies and
their process of "denazification".  Indeed Fritz Fischer carried out his
rehabilitation from the ranks of the Nazi party under the close
supervision of the Allied occupying forces.  Fischer followed the
Anglo-American historical concern about Germany's missteps and traced
the problem back to the backward, conservative, militaristic, and
authoritarian culture of the Kaiserreich--a portrait of German history
that understood Bismarck and Hitler as birds of a feather.  Where
Fischer saw continuity, Ritter and his colleagues perceived an
unmistakable caesura with the dissolution of the hierarchical
Kaiserreich in favor of the democratic Weimar Republic.

After the Ritter-Fischer debate Ritter retreated to the relative
obscurity of his newly formulated "early-modern" period.  Forced to
relinquish his account of the Kaiserreich, Ritter, along with his allies
and students took up Brunner's and Conze's newly introduced
"Sozialgeschichte," (previously dubbed "Volksgeschichte") as a way of
drawing attention away from Fischer's pathological diagnosis of German
history.  Social history, the confessional age, confession building
allowed them to formulate their anti-modern critique at a safe
distance.  From the 1930s when Ritter took over the editorship of the
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, institutional control of early-modern
German history has been solidly in the hands of Ritter's students and
allies.  After Ritter relinquished his editor's post, his student, Erich
Hassinger took it up.  Ritter was also an early supporter of Ernst
Walter Zeeden's.  Indeed the main defenders of "confessionalization"
have close ties to Ritter, Fritz Hartung, Otto Brunner, Werner Conze,
Gerhard Oestreich and Ernst Walther Zeeden.  Ritter's open disdain for
modernity and apologetic attitude to German traditional elites and
institutions has been carefully toned down through successive
generations, but his agenda can still be discerned with out too much
digging.  The fact that "confessionalization" has such staunch well
dug-in advocates has meant that it has been able to withstand scrutiny
from with out and has been able to reproduce itself every generation
with yet another round of dissertations.

Insofar as confessionalization was, from its outset, an ideological
construct, one whose very formulation reflects its creator's
anti-modernism and his forced retreat from the stage of modern history,
it should come as no surprise that modern historians find little to gain
by adopting it.  Neither is it surprising to find a dearth of modern
scholars particularly interested in "confession."  Anyone who embraces
or at least accepts the inescapably secular character of modernity will
see little sense in a continued reification of "confession."

Any hope of bridging the divide means discarding the modern/early-modern
terminology in favor of an alternative narrative, one less tinged by
ideology.

John Holloran
Oregon Episcopal School

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