The Politics Of German Protestantism

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

In The Politics of the Reformation in Germany, Thomas A. Brady, Jr. constructs a new understanding of the Protestant Reformation through the biography of a little-known figure, the urban politician Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) of Strasbourg. At once a man of the late Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Renaissance, Sturm's political career cut through every one of the levels of the complex political life of Germany in this era - the city, the province, the region, the Protestant movement, and the Holy Roman Empire - and examination of it reveals why Protestantism, which began as a radical movement, quickly allied with local and regional government to become a conservative force. Professor Brady places the Reformation in the context of the political pluralism of the late Middle Ages and in so doing provides an interpretation that does not see it as the beginning of Germany's movement towards national statehood. Rather it gives full play to the popular movements, the largest and richest in Europe before the French Revolution, and to local interests and traditions. This perspective also allows for a reassessment of the impact of the Reformation on the political culture and government of the Holy Roman Empire and its potential for altering the future course of German history.

During the forty years of division, the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany were the only organizations to retain strong ties and organizational structures: they embodied continuity in a country marked by discontinuity. As such, the churches were both expected to undergo smooth and rapid institutional consolidation and undertake an active role in the public realm of the new eastern German states in the 1990s. Yet critical voices were heard over the West German system of church-state relations and the public role it confers on religious organizations, and critics often expressed the idea that despite all their difficulties, something precious was lost in the collapse of the German democratic republic. Against this backdrop, the author delineates the conflicting conceptions of the Protestant and Catholic churches' public role and pays special attention to the East German model, or what is generally termed the "positive experiences of the GDR and the Wende."

The German Empire of 1871, although unified politically, remained deeply divided along religious lines. In German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Helmut Walser Smith offers the first social, cultural, and political history of this division. He argues that Protestants and Catholics lived in different worlds, separated by an "invisible boundary" of culture, defined as a community of meaning. As these worlds came into contact, they also came into conflict. Smith explores the local as well as the national dimensions of this conflict, illuminating for the first time the history of the Protestant League as well as the dilemmas involved in Catholic integration into a national culture defined primarily by Protestantism. The author places religious conflict within the wider context of nation-building and nationalism. The ongoing conflict, conditioned by a long history of mutual intolerance, was an integral part of the jagged and complex process by which Germany became a modern, secular, increasingly integrated nation. Consequently, religious conflict also influenced the construction of German national identity and the expression of German nationalism. Smith contends that in this religiously divided society, German nationalism did not simply smooth over tensions between two religious groups, but rather provided them with a new vocabulary for articulating their differences. Nationalism, therefore, served as much to divide as to unite German society. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book discusses the political setting of Protestant theology in the German-language area (including Switzerland), and the efforts made in the period 1890-1933 to develop forms of social thought and action on Christian presuppositions. It discusses the theoretical challenge posed by Max Weber, and the more far-reaching challenges offered by the outbreak of war in 1914 and the political instability of the 1920s. Central to the argument are the efforts of theologians from Stoecker and Harnack to Barth and Tillich to assess Socialism from a Christian point of view, and their difficulties in coming to terms with the daily politics of operative political systems. The book treats the subject from an historian's viewpoint as has not previously been attempted in English or German.

Any student of the political history of medieval and modern Germany will find this book an excellent account of relations between Church and State. It examines the interaction between religion and politics in German history up to 1789.

Challenging accepted notions of Elizabethan foreign policy, Gehring argues that the Queen’s relationship with the Protestant Princes of the Holy Roman Empire was more of a success than has been previously thought. Based on extensive archival research, he contends that the enthusiastic and continual correspondence and diplomatic engagement between Elizabeth and these Protestant allies demonstrate a deeply held sympathy between the English Church and State and those of Germany and Denmark.