Kulturkampf: The Relationship of Church and State and the Failure of German Political Reform

Abstract

Following on the heels of the wars of unification, the decade of the 1870s proved to be a critical era in the history of the modern German state. The peculiar character of the German political sys tem, which was established in that first decade of the new Empire, must be seen as one of the contributing factors to the troubled history of Germany in the twentieth century. This peculiarity came from a political development in Germany which was curiously out of step both with the process of economic modernization that was going on within Germany and with the course of political develop ment in neighboring countries. Germany's failure to develop pro gressive political institutions is remarkable in that there were defi nite currents at work in the 1870s which seemed to augur well for their establishment. The process of unification had brought to the forefront of German political life liberal sentiment which favored the establishment of responsible, parliamentary government. At the same time, there arose an opportunity to disentangle the institutions of church and state and move toward a secularized political order. The three elements of modern political development (national unification, parliamentary government, and secularization) were brought together in the 1870s by a phenomenon known as the Kulturkampf or battle for civilization. The purpose of this essay is to examine the roles of the factions which were engaged in the struggle and to explore the reasons how and why the causes of political liberalism and secularization came to be at cross-purposes with one another and, in the end, why neither was able to effect a genuine reform of the traditional political system. The kulturkampf is difficult to define because it involved many