Reguliertes Abenteuer: Missionarinnen in Südafrika nach 1945 by Martina Gugglberger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reguliertes Abenteuer: Missionarinnen in Südafrika nach 1945 by Martina Gugglberger Martina Cucchiara Martina Gugglberger, Reguliertes Abenteuer: Missionarinnen in Südafrika nach 1945. L’Homme Schriften. Reihe zur Feministischen Geschichtswissenschaft 22. Vienna: Böhlau, 2014. 276 pp. In this noteworthy monograph, Martina Gugglberger seeks to illuminate the personal histories and experiences of European women religious missionaries after 1945. The author based her work on interviews with twenty-three Austrian and German Catholic sisters from the congregation of the Schwestern vom Kostbaren Blut, who have lived and worked as missionaries in South Africa for decades. These mostly elderly sisters represent the last generation of European women who joined new Catholic religious congregations dedicated to charitable works in large numbers during the monastic spring in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In this buoyant age of monastic revival, the abbot Franz Pfanner (1825–1905) founded the order of the Missions-schwestern vom Kostbaren Blut in 1885, and hundreds of German and Austrian women subsequently joined the congregation through the 1960s, when the prevalence of religious vocations declined sharply. By the 1970s, few women were entering religious life, and it was only then that scholars in the emerging fields of women and gender studies hesitantly began to turn their attention to the complex roles of women in organized religion. Since then, historians have struggled with the question of why so many women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries joined the patriarchal Catholic (and Protestant) churches that seemed to oppress rather than liberate [End Page 159] them. Offering satisfactory answers has proven quite difficult, and despite a growing body of research on the topic, in many ways the scholarship on women religious has not moved far beyond the somewhat laconic assertion Martha Vicinus made thirty years ago that “religion opened and closed doors for single women.” Martina Gugglberger, too, focuses on the question of why the women she interviewed took the veil. She writes early on that “Kern der Untersuchung war es, Bilder und Vorstellungen zu eruieren, die die Motivationen für ein Leben als Missionsschwester zeithistorisch begreifbar machen” (16). Although the author’s conclusions are familiar in that the stories of the women missionaries take on the gestalt “eines ‘regulierten Abenteuers’, im Spannungsfeld zwischen individuellen and gesellschaftlichen Begrenzungen und Ausbrüchen,” her substantial chapter on the missionaries’ early lives, their “Herkunftsraum,” is nonetheless a highlight of the monograph (16). Gugglberger’s skillful and sensitive presentation of her interviewees’ early life stories that ended in the cloister addresses a significant gap in the scholarship on religious women, that is, the woeful lack of autobiographical sources on individual sisters. Readers will no doubt study with great interest her detailed descriptions of the women’s rural upbringing that was commonly shaped by “hard work and deep religious attitudes” and the deleterious impact of World War II on already limited educational and professional opportunities and marriage prospects (97). In this often bleak postwar era, many adolescent girls found refuge first in vibrant Catholic youth groups in their villages and then within the “stützende Gemeinschaft von jungen Frauen” in the cloister (175). For women who felt drawn to religious life, the Missionsschwestern vom Kostbaren Blut’s missionary school in Neuenbeken near Paderborn was an accredited Oxford Centre that offered attractive educational opportunities to its candidates for sisterhood. But Martina Gugglberger found that not all missionaries were created equal; unlike the mostly German graduates of Neuenbeken, who usually entered the teaching profession and were well prepared for further university studies abroad, young Austrian women who entered the congregation’s cloister Wernberg in Austria did not achieve the same level of education and usually found themselves employed in lower positions within the congregation in (housekeeping, clerical tasks, farming, and other manual labor). The uneven education the sisters received in Europe perhaps accounts for why quite a few of the sisters the author interviewed were ill prepared for [End Page 160] missionary work. Severe language barriers, feelings of incompetence, overwork, and disappointment about their work assignments caused some to suffer severe breakdowns and psychological crises. This is an important insight that speaks to the potential of oral histories to introduce intriguing nuances to a...