The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany by Maria D. Mitchell.

• Author: Goldstein, Thomas W.
• Position: Book review

Mitchell, Maria D. The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. xv + 343 pages. Cloth, $85.00.

It is surprising that Christian Democracy, one of the most significant political movements in modern history, has received far less scholarly attention than its socialist, liberal, or Green rivals. This deficit can be seen in studies of German politics after 1945, where the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Federal Republic's most successful party, has only recently found expanded interest among historians. Historian Maria D. Mitchell's well-researched The Origins of Christian Democracy seeks to address this gap. In so doing, Mitchell calls attention to an underappreciated but dramatic development in German history: the creation of the first political party in the land of Luther to overcome the centuries long rift between Catholics and Protestants.

To explore this process, Mitchell painstakingly reconstructs early CDU discourse and networks from an extensive source base, including correspondence, party platforms, speeches, and memoirs. She begins the book with the long-term origins of German Christian Democracy, introducing her central argument: the creation of the CDU was the culmination of the much longer struggle of Germany's Catholic minority to break its "tower" of isolation in a majority Protestant country. Although the Center Party had successfully mobilized the Catholic milieu in the nineteenth century, its more progressive members had become aware by the twentieth century of the limits of appealing solely to a religious minority. Thus in the decades before the Nazi takeover, key Center leaders, especially from the Rhineland, sought alliances with devout Protestants, though reactionary Catholics continually scuttled these efforts.

The Second World War, Mitchell explains, marked a crucial turning point in these ecumenical aspirations. The collaboration of conservative Center politicians with the Nazi regime discredited their claims to postwar leadership, while Catholics who resisted the Nazis, particularly clergy and workers, acquired moral legitimacy in their quest for a broad Christian political movement. Moreover, the demographic upheaval wrought by war destroyed older social patterns and created unprecedented opportunities to bridge the confessional divide in order to rebuild and reorient Germany. Yet, Mitchell reports that broad enthusiasm for an...