Zeitgeschichte in Lebensbildern. Aus dem deutschen Katholizismus des 19. und 20, Jahrhunderts ed. by Jürgen Aretz, Rudolf Morsey, and Anton Rauscher

Abstract

Zeitgeschichte in Lebenshildern. Aus dem deutschen Katbolitzismus des 13. und 20, Jabrbunderts, Band 7. Edited by Jurgen Aretz, Rudolf Morsey, and Anton Rauscher. (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald Verlag. 1994. Pp. 314. DM 48,-.) This is the seventh volume of a continuing series of biographical articles on prominent German Catholics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coverage is broad, sometimes providing detailed accounts of the careers and works of leaders and other dignitaries in the political and ecclesiastical spheres, social theorists and activists, scholars, writers, and other German Catholics of some repute. The series has undoubted value for experts in the field of German Catholic studies, though some articles will disappoint them. The publisher and the editors have been eager to make the series attractive to two quite different groups, specialists and members of the German Catholic community who a interested in the history of their church, its various institutions and its most distinguished members. The authors are undoubtedly, as the publisher tells us, scholars or other writers of name recognition, but their articles a not foot-noted. Nor are they on occasion as analytical and critical as the trained scholar might expect. In the past century or so Germany has undergone profound changes and dislocations in the course of which Catholic leaders had to make decisions which were painful to them and their co-religionists. In this series the editors and some of the authors have apparently decided that the amount of discomfort that they should impose on their German Catholic readers should be kept at a modest level. This is evident in the articles on Ludwig Kaas, the leader of the German Center Party from 1928 to 1933, in the first volume and on Ernst Lieber, who had led that party from 1893 to 1902, in the fourth volume of the series. The reader is not adequately informed on the reasons why Kaas persuaded his Reichstag colleagues to approve Hitler's enabling act in March, 1933, which made it possible for the Nazi leader later to dismantle the parliamentary system of why Lieber had pressured his Reichstag associates to bring about the passage of the naval bills of 1898 and 1900 which would ruin Germany's relations with Great Britain. In fairness to Ernst Lieber, however, it should be said that the Imperial Government had not informed him that the building of a big German navy could be a risky venture. Lieber saw the whole naval issue in a purely budgetary context. Still, it should be said that the first two volumes of the series of which Rudolf Morsey was the sole editor contain several substantial articles on prominent Catholics who were controversial in their own time or at a later point, some of them by Morsey himself. They include sketches of Cardinal Georg Kopp (d. 1914), the leader of the Prussian episcopal conference for matly years who had feuded with the German Center Party and sometimes with his own colleagues, and Cardinal Adolf Betram (d. 1945), the chairman of the national bishops' group in the Nazi years, who convinced his episcopal associates that they should not difficulty attack the Hitler regime for its violations of the Concordat of 1933 and human rights. …