Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles in West Germany, 1920–1960

Home , Anton Storch, Georg Schreiber, Heinrich Brauns, Johann Plenge, Karl Thieme, Maria Laach Abbey

New German Critique

James Chappel

And so, with Leo’s Encyclical pointing the way and furnishing the light, a true Catholic social science has arisen, which is daily fostered and enriched by the tireless efforts of those chosen men whom We have termed auxiliaries of the Church. —Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931)

In 1952 a German Catholic sociologist told his audience about a recent trip to a coal mine outside Cologne. He was awestruck by the large, artificial val- ley, in which he could see one or two workers directing a vast assemblage of machinery. “How,” he wondered, “would such a mine have looked in Roman times?” Doubtless, he reasoned, it would have been staffed by slaves. In the current world of technology, however, workers have received their proper dignity. Their labor “is more like the reign of a sovereign than the yoke of a slave.” These mighty sovereigns, the coal miners, were only following the divine injunction to enjoy “dominion over the earth.” While some atavistic Christian writers had extolled the old peasant economy, the sociologist continued, a close linkage can be found between modern economics and the Christian faith. Modern labor might seem dehumanizing, but its monotony is in fact reminiscent of Benedictine monks, who deliberately chose repetitive tasks as a spiritual exercise. Factory labor, it turns out, is conducive to singing and to the

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contemplation of God. We should not bemoan our new economy, he declared, but celebrate the profound “harmony between technics and faith.”1 The speech, in both its institutional location and its ideology, helps us see how capitalist, growth-oriented economic reconstruction could be squared with the dominance of Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, in both the popular and the political culture of West Germany in the decade after World War II. The speaker was Joseph Höffner, founder of the Münster-based Insti- tute for Catholic Social Science and soon to become archbishop of Cologne. He was a friend to Konrad Adenauer and adviser to his government, particularly in policies toward workers and families; Adenauer, of course, was the leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the party that dominated West Ger- many between the end of the war and the 1960s. While Höffner had the ear of Adenauer, he also spoke to Catholic industry and church leaders across the continent. His audience for this speech was the annual study session of the Union Internationale des Associations Patronales Catholiques, an international association of Catholic employers’ federations (Höffner represented the Bund der katholische Unternehmer, the premier of its sort in Germany). Höffner did not provide a mere aureole for a fundamentally secular reimagining of the economy. He is a deeply representative figure, in that the tradition of Catholic social science he epitomized was central to Christian Democratic governance. How did Catholics come to embrace the “economy,” to the extent that Oswald von Nell-Breuning, one of the world’s leading Catholic economists, could claim by 1949 that “an action, which strives for economic success through following the laws of economy . . . is . . . not merely economically sound, but also, for this very reason, ethically sound”?2 As with socialism, national peculiarities abounded, so the present article focuses on “Catholicism in one country”: West Germany.3 Here Catholic politics and Catholic social science achieved unparalleled significance, especially at the heart of the dominant Christian Democratic Union. This was not just any economy: it was a Wirtschaftswunder, a miracle economy. And, like all other miracles, it was bound up with the sacred. Catholicism in these decades functioned as a political economy and a social science. This is not the way we are accustomed to thinking about religion, particularly in Germany, where Carl Schmitt’s notion of “political theol-

1. Joseph Höffner, “Progrès téchnique et progrès humain,” in Progrès économique et progrès social (Paris: Études, 1952), 76–77, 81, 75. 2. Quoted in Hans Tietmeyer, “Kirche und Wirtschaft,” in Kirche—Staat—Wirtschaft auf dem Weg ins 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Karl Gabriel (London: Lit, 2002), 21. 3. This story, mutatis mutandis, held true across much of Western and Central Europe. For an extended version of this argument, see my forthcoming monograph.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 11 ogy,” alongside the overweening interest in the relationship between Catholi- cism and Nazism, has dominated the debate. The influence of religion cannot be reduced to politics, however. Religion greatly influenced “society” and its governing sciences, too. This approach has been neglected for some time, but it seemed natural to a long tradition of scholarship linking Karl Marx, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, R. H. Tawney, and E. P. Thompson. Yet the exploding interest in religion in recent decades has coincided with an emphasis on culture and nation, and a corollary disinterest in political economy. This is true especially in Germany, where the study of religion has been dominated by the questions that animate German historiography more generally: the questions of democracy, anti-Semitism, and the nation. Posed by German history as a field, these questions found answers in the Catholic tradition. Kevin Spicer and John Connelly, for instance, have analyzed Catholic anti-Semitism, while Margaret Anderson, Noel Cary, and Karl-Egon Lönne, following the lead of Ronald Ross and Rudolf Morsey, have thought about the Center Party and Catholicism’s relationship to democratic politics more broadly. Rebecca Ayako Bennette, David Blackbourn, and Helmut Walser Smith have written about Catholic formulations of German national belonging.4 This avalanche of scholarship has put the question of religion back on the table, and rightly so. Yet, as a growing body of scholarship reminds us, the positioning of Catholicism on the axes of “nation” and “democracy” dis- tracts us from another facet of religion in postwar West Germany, and perhaps in modern societies more generally. Political form and national identity are not the only ways to think about modern power, as a constellation of theorists from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to Timothy Mitchell and Mark Bevir contends. This was especially true in the immediate postwar decades. The era’s characteristic “political” thinkers—Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oake- shott, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Raymond Aron, Robert Dahl—are more properly antipolitical thinkers, committed as they were to forms of pluralism that would deprive the field of the political of as much autonomy as possible. In practice, too, this was an era dominated more by interest group politics and neocorporatist bargaining than by parliaments. Philip Nord refers to the

4. Some recent works have bucked this trend yet still take quite different approaches from the one I take here. See, e.g., Christian Kuchler, Kirche und Kino: Katholische Filmarbeit in Bayern, 1945– 1965 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); Mark Milosch, Modernizing Bavaria: The Politics of Franz Josef Strauss and the CSU, 1949–1969 (New York: Berghahn, 2006); and Petra van der Osten, Jugend- und Gefährdetenfürsorge im Sozialstaat: Auf dem Weg zum Sozialdienst katholischer Frauen, 1945–1968 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002). 5. See, for one example of many, Jörg Althammer, “Soziale Marktwirtschaft und katholische Soziallehre,” in Tradition und Erneuerung der christlichen Sozialethik in Zeiten der Modernisier- ung, ed. André Habisch, Hanns Jürgen Küsters, and Rudolf Uertz (Freiburg: Herder, 2012), 270–87.

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12 James Chappel post-1945 states as “technocorporatist” and describes the French Fourth Republic in terms that evoke Mitchell’s portrayal of Egypt at the same time: these modernizing states of the 1940s through the 1960s were governed by a conjunction of interest group politics, bureaucracies, and social sciences.6 The slippery concept of democracy, in other words, is not an especially helpful rubric if we want to understand how European states rebuilt themselves after 1945. This insight allows us to reformulate the standard research question. How, previous historians have wondered, did Catholics become acclimated to democracy? This approach follows an unspoken but pervasive notion of Euro- pean history as a medieval morality play, in which the character called “Democracy” fends off a number of contenders before emerging victorious because of its inherent virtues. In this Pilgrim’s Progress version of history, Catholicism is understood as an entity that either supports democracy or opposes it. This is not, though, how Catholicism functioned: as Leo XIII had already made clear in the 1890s, Catholics were doctrinally obligated to remain indifferent to political form. For the most part, Catholics followed his command, and there was very little Catholic political theory in the century after Leo XIII, in the sense of Catholics arguing, qua Catholicism, in support of a particular political form, be it democracy or monarchy (of course, there were Catholic democrats and Catholic monarchists, but close studies of their writings show that they were careful to toe the papal line by disavowing a strict linkage between their faith and their politics). Instead of political theo- rizing, Catholics in the twentieth century followed Leo’s other command: to go forth and study the social, as he announced in Rerum Novarum (1891). “Catholicism is powerful because it is, above all, a sociology,” declared Ferdi- nand Brunetière, editor of the Revue des deux mondes, in 1905.7 Ernst Karl

6. For theory, see Mark Bevir, Democratic Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 2002); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). For this specific historical context, see, among others, Ira Katznel- son, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Prob- lem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973); and Barry Eichengreen, European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 7. Quoted in Albéric Belliot, Manuel de sociologie catholique: Histoire, théorie, pratique (Paris: Lethielleux, 1911), 590.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 13

Winter, an Austrian sociologist, argued similarly. “To solve the problem of sovereignty in a Catholic sense,” he writes, “the theme must be understood as sociological, and not legal.”8 Their fundamentally “social” imaginary prepared Catholics particularly well to govern postwar European democracies, which simultaneously abjured political theologies and elected Catholics to power in record numbers, under the guise of Christian Democracy. When a Catholic sociologist declared that “the social sciences must take on for themselves the meaning of the old humanities,” he fit squarely into a long diachronic Catholic tradition and a broad synchronic tradition of European governance.9 To see how, this article investigates the Catholicism of the Rhineland between 1920 and 1960, show- ing how the Catholic social thinking nourished in Weimar Germany affected the governance of the Christian Democratic Union. The mere fact of social Catholic influence on Christian Democracy is not surprising—what is surprising, instead, is the basic continuity of social Catholic thinking across this period and the fact that it destabilized Weimar while buttressing Bonn. This happened not so much because Catholics learned from their mistakes as because Bonn was a very different kind of state. While I pay little attention to the 1933–45 period here, these years were hardly irrelevant to Chris- tian Democracy or German Catholicism. On the contrary, those were the years in which Catholics across Europe abandoned confessional politics and embraced the new language of antitotalitarianism and human rights that would prove crucial to Christian Democracy.10 The argument here is not, however, about Catholic discourse or political strategy, but about Catholic political economy—the general Catholic approach to social and economic problems. And in this realm, at least, there was striking continuity between Weimar and the Cold War.

Catholicism and Sociology in the Weimar Rhineland In the early decades of the twentieth century, the language of the “social” began to supplant other, more dynastic discourses of political legitimation. Unemployment was invented and measured, poverty was mapped and treated, housing and health entered political parlance. Many historians have traced the rise of the social, and of sociology, lavishing attention on the socialists, new

8. E. K. Winter, “Souveränität,” in Die österreichische Aktion, ed. A. M. Knoll et al. (Vienna: Im Selbstverlag der Verfasser, 1927), 156. 9. Adolf Geck, Erkenntnis und Heilung des Soziallebens: “Zum Aufbau der Sozialwissen- schaft,” Soziale Welt 1, no. 1 (1949–50): 12. 10. This is one of the central arguments of my forthcoming monograph.

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14 James Chappel

Liberals, and liberal Protestants who were creating the early welfare states.11 Dan Rodgers, for instance, demonstrates that the Kathedersozialisten, notably Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller, played a major role in turning experts and policy makers across the Atlantic world toward the insights of the new social sciences. Catholics took the turn to the social as enthusiastically as their competitors and were involved in the same circles. Amid the American pro- gressives and European socialists filling Wagner’s lecture halls, a Rhenish Jesuit could be found. This was Heinrich Pesch, who emerged to become the most influential Catholic sociologist in Wilhelmine Germany.12 Likewise, at the feet of Johann Plenge, a sociologist, we find both Kurt Schumacher (later head of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands [Social Democratic Party of Germany], or SPD) and Heinrich Weber, who held Germany’s sole chair in Christian social thought throughout the interwar period. Goetz Briefs, one of the century’s premier Catholic sociologists, studied in Frankfurt with the Weberean economist Karl Diehl. The Rhineland was the epicenter of this flowering of social Catholi- cism.13 Rhenish Catholics had little sympathy for the reactionary impulses of other European Catholics. In Central Europe, many Catholics, following Karl von Vogelsang, sought to overthrow the new Austrian or German republics in favor of more pious and authoritarian forms of governance; in France, kindred theorists around the Action Française sought something similar. It was common wisdom among European Catholics that something different was going on in the Rhineland: Rhenish journalists like Waldemar Gurian poured scorn

11. Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in Eng- land, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (London: Penguin, 1993); James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Pro- gressivism and Social Democracy in Anglo-American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 12. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 90–111. 13. I cannot hope to provide more than an overview of the voluminous literature on Rhenish Catholicism, which has ballooned to such proportions that at least three major attempts to survey it have been undertaken in recent years. In general, I would merely point out that, following in the footsteps of Ronald Ross (Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979]), many of these accounts have focused on Catholicism as a narrowly party-political phenomenon and are thus hard-pressed to understand the religion’s social and intellectual transformations. See Margaret Anderson, “Piety and Poli- tics: Recent Work on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History 63, no. 4 (1991): 681–716; Karl-Egon Lönne, “Katholizismus-Forschung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6, no. 1 (2000): 128–70; and Oded Heilbronner, “From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 2 (2000): 453–95.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 15 on the Action Française while also engaging in public disputes with reactionary Catholics in Bavaria and Austria.14 Rhenish Catholicism’s relative open- ness to Protestantism and to parliamentarism was preconditioned by its unique political position, which made it one of Europe’s few violators of the ancient principle of the Peace of Augsburg, cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion). Prussia, which administratively contained the Rhineland, was only about 30 percent Catholic, while the Rhineland itself (not including the Saar) was almost 70 percent Catholic.15 Perhaps because they were forced to live in a non-Catholic environment, Rhenish Catholics organized themselves to the hilt. The clearest expression of this was the Zentrum, or Center Party, which had been founded to fight for Catholic interests in Bismarck’s new Reich. Although national in scope, the party was founded in the Rhineland. Most of its voters and leaders came from there, as did its leading newspaper (the Kölnische Volkszeitung). The Rhineland was also the home of the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland (National Union for Catholic Germany), Catholic Germany’s most prominent civil society organization. It was founded and based just outside Cologne, and Rhenish Catholics were about six times more likely to join than their Bavarian counterparts.16 Catholic labor unions, too, were more successful in the Rhineland than elsewhere, if only because the region was far more industrially developed than Bavaria. For instance, Walter Dirks, one of the Catholic Rhineland’s premier intellectuals, enjoyed an upbringing surrounded by workers and labor activism, which would have been most unlikely for a Bavarian Catholic.17

14. Bavarian and Austrian Catholics had more in common with one another than with Rhenish Catholics, an understanding fashioned most prominently at the Salzburg Festival: see Michael Stein- berg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), esp. 70–72. 15. Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken, 1918–1945 (Munich: Schöningh, 1992), 559–60. 16. Thomas Matthias Bredohl, “Parishioners, Priests, and Politicians: The Centre Party in the Rhineland, 1890–1914” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1995); Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken, 119– 43; Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 110, for the statistics on Volksverein membership by Land; Raymond Chien Sun, Before the Enemy Is within Our Walls: Catholic Work- ers in Cologne, 1885–1912 (Boston: Humanities, 1999). For an insightful account of workers’ culture in the Rhineland, emphasizing its modernization and dynamism, see Lynn Abrams, Workers’ Cul- ture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (New York: Routledge, 1992). 17. Walter Dirks and Walter Fabian, Parallelen des Engagements: Sechzig Jahre in Politik und Gewerkschaft (Cologne: Bund, 1984), 13. On the unions, see William Patch, Christian Trade Unions in the Weimar Republic: The Failure of Corporate Pluralism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

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The Rhineland was a center of Catholic intellectual life, as well. The aforementioned chair in Catholic Social Thought (first held by Franz Hitze, a Catholic scholar and Center Party politician, and eventually held by Höff- ner) was located at the University of Münster. The region afforded many opportunities, perhaps unique in Catholic Europe, for collaboration with non- Catholics. Adenauer, as mayor of Cologne, oversaw the refoundation of that city’s storied university in 1919. And while the university certainly nourished Catholic talent, its establishment had been supported by the SPD as well, and it featured such non-Catholic luminaries as Paul Honigsheim (indeed, Paul Nolte has judged that 1920s Cologne was “the center of the institutional consolidation of sociology as a discipline in Germany”).18 Adenauer himself oversaw the Municipal Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, on which Catholics, socialists, and Protestants worked side by side. The University of Frankfurt provided similar opportunities: Catholics like Ernst Michel and Josef Wittig collaborated with its interconfessional Akademie der Arbeit. The relatively progressive character of Rhenish Catholicism did not make it into a bastion of the Weimar Republic, however. The Center Party played a distinguished, and controversial, role in the ill-starred, vertiginous 1920s. It was a mainstay of the Weimar coalition: five of Weimar Germany’s twelve chancellors came from the party, and the party’s willingness to join other defenders of the constitution ensured that it was, despite only polling about 15 percent of the electorate, one of the period’s dominant parties. Cath- olics heavily influenced Weimar’s social and political legislation, while at the municipal level, Catholic mayors pursued the same improvement schemes as their socialist and liberal colleagues.19 Yet the Center Party became one of the gravediggers of the Republic. While it is true that Catholic voters proved more resistant than others to the swelling tides of support for Adolf Hitler after the onset of the Depression, it is equally true that Catholics, both inside and outside the Center Party, played a destabilizing role in the latter years of the Weimar Republic. Following a bitter 1928 election for party leadership, the conservative Ludwig Kaas became the first priest to head the party, and

18. Paul Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft: Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2000), 135. 19. Pius XI pointed this out in paragraph 22 of Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931, w2.vatican.va/ content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html. For a more scholarly account, see Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919– 1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). For the municipal story, see Ben Lieberman, From Recovery to Catastrophe: Municipal Stabilization and Political Crisis in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn, 1998).

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 17 he made clear that he was interested more in lauding Benito Mussolini and spending time in Rome than in shoring up the republic. This was followed by the controversial rise of Heinrich Brüning, who, whatever his intentions may have been, began the tradition of rule by emergency decree that would have such devastating consequences for German democracy. Lastly, the Center Party abandoned Weimar at its moment of greatest need, and the party’s support ensured the passage of the “Enabling Act” in 1933—thus allowing Hitler to come to power. The Catholic milieu was of course divided during these years—some Catholic notables, like Franz von Papen and Martin Spahn, worked directly with Hitler, while others, including in the church hierarchy, stoutly criticized him. Nonetheless, it is beyond debate that Germany’s Cath- olic community, even in the Rhineland, did not wholeheartedly dedicate itself to Weimar.20 Why were German Catholics, even in the Rhineland, so ambivalent about Weimar? The question is not how or when Catholics came to accept “democracy,” as Catholics had participated happily in German parliamentary life since the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848. In addition, Catholic intellectuals and politicians were uninterested in the question of political form. Consider Peter Tischleder, a scholastic theologian and jurist. As Gurian wrote to a friend, Tischleder’s works “are extraordinarily representative of the Zentrum’s political philosophy.”21 His basic project, as outlined in several works in the 1920s, was to defend the Weimar Republic’s legitimacy in scholastic terms. Catholics, Tischleder argued, are perfectly free to support any state form that they please, and the notion that God enjoins a particular political form is both antiquated and false: Tischleder’s, in other words, was a negative defense of democracy.22 Karl Neundörfer, a Catholic jurist and leader of the Caritas movement, was squarely in the mainstream when he emphasized that the church could not tie itself to any political form at all.23 “Men can choose any political form that

20. On this period, and the Center Party’s still-controversial role in it, see above all William Patch, Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Karsten Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar: Das Zentrum als regierende Partei in der Weimarer Demokratie, 1923–1930 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1992); and Larry Eugene Jones, “Franz von Papen, Catholic Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1933–1934,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (2011): 272–318. 21. Waldemar Gurian to Jacques Maritain, September 24, 1927, Maritain Archives, Archives of the Centre d’Études Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, Kolbsheim, France. 22. For Tischleder’s philosophy, see, e.g., Peter Tischleder, Der Staat (Mönchengladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1926). 23. Karl Neundörfer, “Politische Form und religiöser Glaube: Eine Bücherbesprechung,” Die Schildgenossen 5, no. 4 (1925): 323–31. See also Josef Mausbach, Christliche Staatsordnung und

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they wish,” Oswald von Nell-Breuning pointed out a few years later, “even the democratic one.”24 So to understand Catholic ambivalence toward Weimar, we cannot ask why Catholics were opposed to “democracy” as such, let alone “modernity,” but instead why many of them soured on democracy as practiced in 1920s Ger- many. The simplest response is that Catholics had been, since Bishop von Ketteler and the origins of Catholic social thinking in the nineteenth century, committed to a social pluralism over the logic of political or economic monopoly. After all, the mighty nation-state, in Germany at least, had been an inveter- ate opponent of the church’s influence since its origins. In the Weimar era, socialists and nationalists alike were committed to a logic of political monopoly and centralization. It is no coincidence that Weber’s famous definition of the state as wielder of a “monopoly on violence” was coined in 1919. He was refer- ring more to an aspiration than to a reality: in Weber’s own Germany, para- military groups and French occupiers regularly threatened that monopoly, while most of the world remained in some form of quasi-state, imperial hold- ing, or League of Nations mandate. Early twentieth-century Germans, however, did pursue Weber’s ideal type. “We live,” declared Lujo Brentano as early as 1904, “in an age of increasingly expanding monopoly.”25 It is symptomatic that Weber had recourse to an economic concept (monopoly) to distinguish the very essence of the political: in Weimar Germany, land of massive cartels and an ambitious social state, political and economic centralization went hand in hand. The 1920s were the great age of state-driven modernization. Vladimir Lenin, after all, learned as much from German wartime planners like Walter Rathenau as from Marx. While Schmoller and Wagner had already overseen a theoretical turn toward statist forms of economic modernization in the Wil- helmine period, it was not until the interwar years that the state apparatus followed their advice in a recognizably modern way.26 German economic

Staatsgesinnung (Mönchengladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1922); Josef Joos, Die politische Ideen- welt des Zentrums (Karlsruhe: Braun, 1928). This is covered best in Karsten Ruppert, “Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei in der Mitverantwortung für die Weimarer Republik: Selbstverständnis und politische Leitideen einer konfessionellen Mittelpartei,” in Die Minderheit als Mitte: Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei in der Innenpolitik des Reiches, 1871–1933, ed. Winfried Becker (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1986), 71–88. 24. Quoted in Franz Josef Stegmann, Geschichte der sozialen Ideen im deutschen Katholizismus, in Geschichte der sozialen Ideen in Deutschland: Sozialismus—katholische Soziallehre—protes- tantische Sozialethik, ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Olzog, 1969), 446. 25. Quoted in A. J. Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Ger- many, 1919–1963 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 21. 26. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, chap. 3.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 19 theorists allied with the Historical School saw Germany’s highly organized, cartel-based capitalism as a logical development. The anticartel law of 1923 was, in the end, toothless, as enormous cartels under Stinnes, Thyssen, and other titans dominated the economic landscape. The state, meanwhile, exer- cised increasingly close control over its citizens. Thanks to the 1922 Youth Welfare Law, the 1924 National Welfare Decree, and a raft of initiatives on the municipal level, the state found itself more involved in welfare—especially children’s welfare—than ever before. The socialists welcomed this phenomenon, looking forward to a state that could wrest control from property owners. Rudolf Hilferding, one of the SPD’s leading theorists, was convinced that the economy’s progressive abandonment of free competition in favor of scientific planning and cartel organization was in fact a step toward socialism, which would finish the job. “We are witnessing,” declared another German socialist, “the gradual coming into being of the welfare state, of the ‘social state.’”27 States were interested not only in the new space called the “economy” but also in reformulating culture and consciousness in a new and distinctly modern key. Again, the Bolshevik case here only amplifies what was going on elsewhere in Europe. The Austro-Marxists, for instance, were engaged in a famous and dramatic attempt to recast hearts and minds just outside Ger- many.28 In the Rhineland, the Social Democrats wanted to thrust religion into the private sphere, just like their Austrian counterparts (the SPD party program, at least until 1925, contained the same clause about religion as a “private phenomenon” that could be found in the manifestos of Austrian and French socialists). In Frankfurt, for instance, the Social Democrat municipality brought in Ernst May to apply the principles of the new Atlantic progressiv- ism; like city planners in Austria, May attempted to transform Frankfurt into a bastion of Neue Sachlichkeit and a modern, socialist culture. On the level of the Land, the new minister of culture in Prussia, an Independent Socialist named Adolf Hoffmann, embarked on an anticlerical campaign. He sought to end state subsidies to churches, abolish prayer in schools, and even ban

27. Rudolf Hilferding, “The Organized Economy,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 68–72; the second quotation from David F. Crew, “A Social Republic? Social Democrats, Commu- nists, and the Weimar Welfare State, 1919 to 1933,” in Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, ed. David Barclay and Eric Weitz (New York: Berghahn, 1998), 224. 28. Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), chaps. 2–3; Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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Christmas celebrations: in short, he sought to create by fiat a socialist Kultur in a religious Land. Even though his more cautious successor reversed his policies, Hoffmann created a firestorm of controversy and left Catholics wary of socialists, and of the Republic.29 In response to the statism of the SPD, Catholics drew on the long heritage of social Catholic thinking, which since Ketteler had been convinced that natural communities, like the family or the profession, would be the agents of social improvement—not the bloodless artifices of the state or, even worse, the working class. In Adenauer’s characteristic 1929 address to a Catholic women’s movement, he complained not about “democracy” or “modernity” but about the Prussian state’s monopolistic usurpation of authority away from municipalities and families.30 And while Catholics may have questioned the legitimacy of the Weimar order, they did so in the name of a different, equally modern, order, governed by sociology and not theology. “I think and speak,” declared one Catholic sociologist in 1923, “in the language of this century.”31 This was a church, as Benjamin Ziemann shows, that was beginning to har- ness the power of statistics at the same time as the German state itself (via the Cologne Central Office for Ecclesiastical Statistics).32 The centerpiece of this response was the vaunted Königswinterer Kreis, probably the most important constellation of Catholic social theorists in the twentieth century. Its major figures were Gustav Gundlach and Nell-Breuning, both Jesuits and both involved with the drafting of Quadragesimo Anno (1931), a sweeping social encyclical that proudly pursued “a true Catholic social science” (the circle was very much a creature of the Rhineland and its Catholic social-scientific heritage, formally associating itself with the Volksverein in 1932).33 Catholic political economy was also filtered through the constellation of movements that Rhenish Catholics inhabited: the Center Party and its

29. Frank Gordon, “Protestantism and Socialism in the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 11, no. 3 (1988): 423–46. 30. Konrad Adenauer, Reden, 1917–1967: Eine Auswahl, ed. Hans-Peter Schwarz (Stuttgart: Deutsche-Verlag, 1975), 60. 31. Ernst Michel, “Erneuern wirst du das Antlitz der Erde,” in Kirche und Wirklichkeit: Ein katholisches Zeitbuch, ed. Ernst Michel (Jena: Diederichs, 1923), 267. 32. Benjamin Ziemann, Katholische Kirche und Sozialwissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2007), chap. 1. For the German state’s simultaneous, if halting, adoption of statistical methods, see Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 33. Quadragesimo Anno, par. 20. The Kreis was refounded as the Institut für Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsordnung an der Zentralstelle des Volksvereins; on this, see Stegmann, Geschichte der sozialen Ideen im deutschen Katholizismus, 465.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 21 news papers, the labor unions, women’s movements, youth movements, federalist organizations, and, above all, the Volksverein itself. In Die heilige Feuer, a major voice of the Catholic youth movement, a member of the Königswin- terer Kreis declared that Catholicism had moved beyond mere “moral-theological critiques toward a concrete sociological questioning.”34 This particularly meant a turn on the monopoly form. Tischleder, for instance, decried the “political monopoly on issues of marriage and education” in a pamphlet put out by the Volksverein. “States do not have a monopoly on authority,” con- curred another Rhenish Catholic sociologist at a Volksverein conference.35 The general secretary of the Center Party’s commercial and industrial advisory board declared that a major service of his party had been the “complete extirpation” of “the postwar phantom of socialization.”36 In a regional newspaper Ernst Michel, a Catholic sociologist, wrote a series of articles about the takeover of “society” by the “state,” complaining that in the heretical world of modern nationalism, “the state monopolizes all political powers.”37 A 1928 Catholic labor union conference raised the issue of cartels, criticizing them for price-fixing and urging the Weimar regime to police them more thor- oughly. The congress explicitly rejected Hilferding and the other labor-union cartel cheerleaders. “I believe,” one speaker concluded, “that some socialists’ opinion that cartels are a new step toward a socialist economic form . . . is mistaken.”38 Catholic economic thinkers in the Rhineland forged a uniquely Catholic approach to political economy, attempting to imagine an economic order that would be modern while avoiding the monopolizing, anticlerical impetus of liberal and socialist modernity. Its stable electorate and position as a centrist powerbroker ensured healthy ministerial representation, most notably in the key post of Ministry of Labor, held for most of the 1920s by a priest named

34. Franz Müller, “Zur Problematik des kapitalistischen Wirtschaftssystems,” Die Heilige Feuer 14, no. 8 (1927): 311. 35. Tischleder, Der Staat, 10; Wilhelm Schwer, “Die berufsständische Ordnung als natürliches Verhältnis von Gesellschaft und Staat,” in Die berufsständische Ordnung: Idee und praktische Möglichkeiten, ed. Josef van der Velden (Cologne: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1932), 76. 36. Quoted in Eberhard Pies, “Sozialpolitik und Zentrum, 1924–1928: Zu den Bedingungen sozi- alpolitischer Theorie und Praxis der Deutschen Zentrumspartei in der Weimarer Republik,” in Indus- trielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Hans Mommsen, Dietmar Petzina, and Bernd Weisbrod (Düsseldorf: Athanaeum, 1974), 263. 37. Ernst Michel, “Der Staat über der Gesellschaft,” Rhein-Mainische Volkszeitung, April 30, 1926. 38. Konzentration, Rationalisierung und Sozialpolitik: Berichte und Entschliessung des vierten Kongresses des Internationalen Bundes der Christlichen Gewerkschaften (Munich: Selbstverlag, 1928), 16, 19–20.

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Heinrich Brauns, nourished in Rhenish social Catholicism through his work at the Volksverein.39 The Center Party’s approach to governance, and its effectiveness, is apparent in the two most important welfare laws of the 1920s. The SPD hoped that the 1924 National Welfare Decree would create a state monopoly on welfare delivery, wresting power away from religious organizations, but the Center Party, allied with Catholic and Protestant charitable organizations, steered the system toward a more subsidiary, and less state- centric, system.40 The 1927 Unemployment Insurance Act was shepherded through the Reichstag by Brauns, who reassured his Catholic supporters that increasing state power “does not belong to the epitome of democracy.” Against socialist pressure, he ensured that the fund would involve the state as little as possible: “insurance,” instead of state “relief,” would be paid by workers themselves and administered by local boards staffed by workers, employers, and public officials.41 Heinrich Pesch, whom we met at the feet of the Kathedersozialisten, looms large over any discussion of Catholic social thought and governance in the 1920s. His five-volume Textbook of National Economy (1905–23) was the tradition’s premier achievement, and more than any other social theorist he exemplifies the Catholic, and Center Party, approach to political economy. He was interested not in rejecting the modern economy or state but in steering a path between laissez-faire individualism and statist monopoly. Like Nell- Breuning and other Rhenish Catholic economists, he fully inhabited the new discipline of Nationalökonomie, which he defined as “the economic life of a nation that is politically unified as a state.” He defended the acceptability of interest-bearing financial instruments, which was no more taken for granted by Catholics at the time than was the nation-state as a viable political-economic unit. He even admitted that the state should be heavily involved in issues like transportation and public health, yet he was careful to emphasize the principle of “subsidiarity,” according to which economic tasks should be handled by the smallest unit possible. Perhaps the most important aspect of Pesch’s legacy, however, was that he believed that this economic and political decentering would create a hypermodern national project, and not a reactionary one: what

39. Hubert Mockenhaupt, Weg und Wirken des geistlichen Sozialpolitikers Heinrich Brauns (Munich: Schöningh, 1977), 175–77. 40. Hong, Welfare, chap. 2. 41. Heinrich Brauns, “Die Sozialpolitik vor und nach dem Kriege,” in Politisches Jahrbuch 1925, ed. Georg Schreiber (Mönchengladbach, 1926), 285; Brauns, Zentrumsarbeit am Wiederaufbau Deutschlands (Osnabrück: Fromm, 1924), 18; Mockenhaupt, Weg und Wirken, 205–7.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 23 he called “the restructuring of the ‘modern’ state into a more modern state with greater decentralization.”42 Pesch, however, was in the twilight of his career, and under Weimar he passed the torch to a new generation. He had many followers, but perhaps the most interesting and influential were Weimar’s two occupants of the chair of sociology at the University of Cologne, a central site in Catholic intellectual culture: Max Scheler and Theodor Brauer. “The inspired and inspiring Max Scheler,” as Pesch called him, was Germany’s most famous Catholic intellectual.43 He had risen to prominence with his patriotic work during the war, which sold in immense numbers and made him a household name, even among Protestants. Writing at the peak of his influence and in Catholic Germany’s premier journal, Scheler called on German Catholics to stop cowering behind confessional bunkers.44 Scheler did not desire a return to atavistic, Catholic authoritarianism: he was quite clear that, like Adam from his garden, Ger- many had been expelled from the lovely Christian past and could not clamber back inside.45 Likewise, he characteristically assumed that democracy was a fait accompli and did not dwell on its faults and alternatives. The major task of Catholics, he instructed, was the infusing of economy and society with a properly Catholic spirit. The choice we face “is not the choice between a so-called free competitive economy and a State economy . . . —not any choice of right system.” Instead, we are confronted with “a totally different kind of choice”: that between the “spirit” of solidarity and that of atomizing competition. The state should indeed be involved in the economy, so long as traditional respect for private property is upheld. At the same time, however, “all cultural and religious matters (language, schooling, manners and customs, forms of worship, art, research, etc.), must be removed from the State . . . so that the economically mighty State will not be tempted to overstep the regular bounds of its new jurisdiction.”46 As usual, vague paeans to the spirit hide a quite concrete set of policy recommendations. This becomes clear once we turn to the name that Scheler

42. Heinrich Pesch, Teaching Guide to Economics, trans. Rupert J. Ederer, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Lewison, ME: Mellen, 2003), 254, 262. 43. Ibid., 130. 44. Max Scheler, “Soziologische Neuorientierung und die Aufgabe der deutschen Katholiken nach dem Kriege” (1915), repr. in Politisch-pädogogische Schriften (Munich: Francken, 1982), 373–470. This originally appeared in Hochland. 45. Ibid., 322. 46. Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, CT: Shoe String, 1972), 444.

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gave to the denizen of this spiritual economy: the “human person.” Like Mar- tin Heidegger, Scheler sought desperately to rid German philosophy of arid neo-Kantianism, replacing Hermann Cohen’s knowing individual with a human person who loves, worships, and works, always in a community. “Every religious act,” he wrote, “is simultaneously an individual and a social act.”47 Scheler’s idea of personhood was, like Heidegger’s, inherently political. Spe- cifically, Scheler turned his ire on socialism, which wrongly interpreted the individual as a fundamentally economic creature, while only the church understood that the individual is properly a member of multiple communities: “family, homeland, Volk, state, nation.” We are not primarily “citizens,” as the nationalists believed, or “workers,” as the Marxists believed, but “persons” who play many roles: an individual could be a teacher, husband, father, Ger- man citizen, and more, while each role carried with it its own authority, rules, and responsibilities. This notion of the “human person” was omnipresent in Catholic Ger- many. To take one example, Romano Guardini, an influential priest and youth movement leader, promoted it in a 1926 lecture to the Social Scientific Insti- tute at Heidelberg University.48 But what, precisely, did it entail? Guardini argued that, for a person to reach “its highest completion,” there must be a strong and objective “concept of order.”49 Scheler is slightly more specific when he calls for “definite, well-ordered relationships of authority and service between the historically constructed corporations.”50 This notion of the “corporation” or “estate” (Stand) was key to Catholic social science: it was, of course, central to socialist and liberal economics as well, but Catholic notions of personhood ensured that their version would be more federalist, and less étatiste, than their competitors.51 For more insight into what this meant, particularly in the popular notion of the Berufsstand, or professional corporation, we can turn to Theodor Brauer. Born in 1880 in Cleve, near the Dutch border, Brauer found his way into social Catholicism from within the town’s grain industry. He quickly moved up the ranks, becoming assistant director of the Volksverein in 1907 and editor

47. Ibid., 266. 48. Romano Guardini, “Über Sozialwissenschaft und Ordnung unter Personen,” Die Schild- genossen 6, no. 2 (1926): 125–50. 49. Ibid., 146. 50. Scheler, Politisch-pädogogische Schriften, 456. He reiterated similar beliefs in On the Eter- nal in Man (1921), his last major work before breaking with the church. Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 368. 51. Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft, 159–83.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 25 of Deutsche Arbeit, a trade unionist journal, from 1912. By this point he was already a leader in Catholic economics: when Martin Spahn, a leading Catho- lic politician, planned a never-completed volume on German Catholics and the Fatherland during the war, he wanted Brauer to write the section on the economy. 52 Brauer later served as Adam Stegerwald’s private secretary during his tenure as minister of public welfare in Prussia before becoming a professor of economics in Karlsruhe in 1923 (he was in fact the first Catholic worker to earn a doctorate in economics).53 Five years later he accepted Scheler’s old chair at the University of Cologne, becoming codirector of the Municipal Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, a position for which he was specifically courted by Adenauer.54 He was a leading member of the Königswin- terer Kreis and one of the premier theorists of the Catholic labor unions in Weimar Germany.55 Brauer, like Scheler and Pesch, was more interested in economics than politics. “The economy,” he declared in a breathtakingly modern formulation in 1933, “is the foundation of individual and collective existence.”56 He held that a reformed industrial capitalism, cleansed of the language of class consciousness, could secure economic justice. Indeed, what is most striking in Brauer’s work is how close he sounds to hegemonic traditions of Volkswirt schaft, debating figures like Werner Sombart and the Kathedersozialisten on their own turf. In his major work from 1912, The Unions and Political Econ- omy (new edition 1922), he attempted to theorize a space for unions using the new language of political economy and national efficiency. The unions, Brauer held, had a natural and important part to play in the national economy and

52. Martin Spahn to Karl Muth, August 2, 1915, Nachlaß Muth, Ana390II.A, Bayerische Staats- bibliothek München. 53. William Patch, “Fascism, Catholic Corporatism, and the Christian Trade Unions of Germany, Austria, and France,” in Between Cross and Class: Comparative Histories of Christian Labour in Europe, 1840–2000, ed. Lex Heermaa van Voss, Patrick Pasture, and Jan De Maeyer (Bern: Lang, 2005), 182. 54. For Adenauer’s personal involvement, see Johannes Nattermann to Adenauer, February 28, 1928, Zug 54/3, and “Protokoll der Direktorkonferenz des Forschungsinstituts für Sozialwissen- schaften am Mittwoch, den 23. Mai 1928,” Zug 9, 322, both in Forschungs-Institut für Sozialwissen- schaft, UniArchiv Köln. 55. For this judgment, see Noel D. Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 74; Patch, Christian Trade Unions in the Weimar Republic, 57; Stegmann, Geschichte der sozialen Ideen im deutschen Katholizismus, 446. For the biographical information, see Franz Müller, “Theodor Brauer,” in Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930–1952, ed. Mat- thew Hoehn (Newark, NJ: St. Mary’s Abbey, 1952), 43–45. 56. This comes from his untitled contribution to Die Essener Richtlinien der christlich-nation- alen Gewerkschaften (Berlin: Wilmersdorf, 1933), 38.

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were essential to the pursuit of economic growth and efficiency: economic growth, Brauer intoned in a modern key, was the quickest way to ensure the well-being of the workers. “We do not want to be proletarians!” he declared at a 1933 union rally. We reject “the socialist formula of the transfer of private property to the community. . . . We want the Persönlichkeit!”57 Like Scheler, Brauer believed that class-based organizations were bound to fail, based as they are on a heretical notion of the social order. For the socialists, humanity is organized into classes; for the Catholic, humanity is organized into a constellation of legitimate communities. The family is one natural order, the state is another, and in the realm of the economy we find not antagonistic classes but solidaristic professional corporations (Berufsstände). “The core of Berufsgedankens,” Brauer writes, “is the belief that man per- forms a function in the service of a community, however constituted.”58 Work- ers should organize, alongside employers, in their own profession, ensuring that they could receive a voice in wage negotiations without impinging on national efficiency or nature. In a 1924 volume on the crisis of the unions, he claimed that the unions had “been pushed away from their organic development” and in a socialist, “anti-ständisch” direction. The labor movement, Brauer proclaimed, is “no movement of class struggle.” Marxist socialism attempts to “denude the worker of his fundamental unity, which is destined to every man, as Persönlichkeit, from his profession.”59 The Beruf, in Brauer’s expansive vision, was to be charged with providing health care and other services that many expected from the state: they would do so, he reasoned, more efficiently and without the galloping deficits of the Weimar state. In an image drawn straight from Dr. Mabuse, Brauer hoped that this would “repel the hyp- notic stares that today’s men cast on the state.”60 Brauer’s rhetoric became increasingly hysterical as the 1920s wore on: as the leading Catholic expert on German socialism, he was fully convinced that the socialists meant to destroy the church and the divine economy it revealed. By 1930 he gave up hope that the Republic, as currently constituted, could possibly shore up a properly subsidiary economy, stuck as it was between a grasping state apparatus and immeasurably powerful cartels. He fell into a deep depression around this time, but the rise of Hitler gave him something to

57. Ibid., 41, 50. 58. Theodor Brauer, Gewerkschaft und Volkswirtschaft (Jena: Fischer, 1922), 27. 59. Theodor Brauer, Krisis der Gewerkschaften (Jena: Fischer, 1924), 8, 16, 18, 19. 60. Theodor Brauer, “Die katholische Auffassung der Sozialpolitik im Zeitalter des deutschen Industrialismus,” in van der Velden, Die berufsständische Ordnung, 55.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 27 hope for. Like many other Catholics, including social Catholic intellectuals, he welcomed the National Socialist revolution of 1933. His pamphlet Catholics in the New Reich (1933) is one of the clearest expressions of the Catholic-Nazi rapprochement, and it is plain that Brauer was acting, he believed, in the name of his social Catholic principles. “I imagined,” he wrote to a friend, “that the economic-social ideas that had come to victory were in essence the same as those I had supported for decades.”61 Brauer, that is, was perfectly willing to abandon democracy in the name of Catholic political economy. This does not prove that Catholic political economy was inexorably antagonistic to Weimar, of course: most members of the Königswinterer Kreis, including Nell-Breun- ing, wanted nothing to do with Nazism.62 Yet Brauer was not alone. Many of the Rhineland’s other leading Catholic intellectuals—men like Karl Eschweiler, Carl Schmitt, Ildefons Herwegen, Robert Grosche, and Albert Mirgeler—welcomed the National Socialist revolution, too. Brauer met with many of them for a notorious July 1933 conference, “The Idea and Construction of the Reich,” hosted at the Maria Laach Abbey just outside Cologne. It was not yet clear that Hitler would soon turn on the church, and indeed Franz von Papen, one attendee, had just returned from Rome with the glad tidings that a concordat had been signed between Hitler and Pope Pius XI. Amid general enthusiasm for this development, Catholics at the conference, and elsewhere in Germany, welcomed Hitler as a modernizing force that would root out socialist influence while protecting families and corporations (as Brauer well knew, some of Hitler’s economic advisers were convinced corporat- ists, well disposed to the Catholic tradition).63 Catholic political economy spoke with many voices in the Weimar Republic—and some of the loudest ones insisted that the republic was incompatible with Catholic teachings.

61. For his depression around 1930, and his recovery through association with the Right, see Ludwig Heyde, “Theodor Brauer, Leben und Wierken eines christlichen Sozialreformers,” in The- odor Brauer: Ein sozialer Kämpfer, ed. Bernhard Ridder and Ludwig Geck (Cologne: Kolping, 1952), 11; for Brauer’s negative judgment of the Center Party, see Brauer, “The Present Condition of the Centrum,” World, no. 152 (1928): 309–14. For his relations to Nazism, see Brauer, Der Katholik im neuen Reich: Seine Aufgaben und sein Anteil (Munich: Kösel, 1933); and Brauer to Pius Fink, September 21, 1933, Nachlaß Brauer, Zug 54, 5. 62. The general question of whether German Catholics welcomed Hitler or not is, thankfully, beyond the scope of this article. No short answer is possible, as Catholics, like other groups of Ger- mans, were divided by class, gender, and region on this question. For a recent intervention from this perspective, see Grenzen des katholischen Milieus: Stabilität und Gefährdung katholischer Milieus in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik und der NS-Zeit, ed. Joachim Kuropka (Münster: Aschen- dorff, 2013). 63. Max Frauendorfer, Der ständische Gedanke im Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Eher, 1932), see esp. 6, 28–29.

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Bonn and the Social Market Economy After World War II those voices were silenced, and no respectable Catholic political or intellectual leaders opposed the Federal Republic. The most obvious reason is that Catholics, Brauer included, had years before soured on the Nazi regime, as Hitler regularly violated the concordat and became increasingly anticlerical as the 1930s wore on. The political expression of the long- gestating anti-Nazi consensus among German Catholics was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a Catholic-dominated party with unparalleled influence in the new West Germany (which was, after all, far more Catholic, percentage-wise, than the unified Reich had been). The party, which became the most successful in modern Germany, was rooted squarely in the Rhineland (competitors were founded in East Germany, which fell prey to Germany’s division, and in Bavaria, which became the Christian Social Union [CSU]).64 Yet, while the CDU was a new political formation, it was rooted squarely in Germany’s Catholic past, specifically the tradition of Catholic political economy nourished during the Weimar era. Many accounts of the CDU focus on either its interconfessionalism or its commitment to democracy. The former issue is crucial, but the latter is something of a red herring. Catholics had been happy parliamentarians for decades, and Christian Democrats, their name notwithstanding, almost never understood or legitimated the new order terms of “democracy.” Adenauer’s postwar speeches were not about democracy, as befitting the leader of a nation whose people were, polling indicated, still somewhat skeptical of liberal democracy.65 Instead, the CDU, drawing on the Rhenish heritage of its founders and electoral base, championed a specific social form organized around private property, the family, and the workplace. West Germany was particularly attuned to sociology, as the master concepts of Gesellschaft and Wirtschaft replaced the discredited notions of Gemeinschaft, Volk, Rasse, and Staat.66 This was a new kind of politics, and a new kind of economy, marked above all by the rejection of political and economic monopoly. Goetz Briefs, a Rhenish Catholic sociologist from the Königswinterer Kreis, voiced the new common sense when he

64. For the full story, see, above all, Maria Mitchell, The Origins of Christian Democracy: Poli- tics and Confession in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); and Frank Bösch, Die Adenauer-CDU: Gründung, Aufstieg und Krise einer Erfolgspartei, 1945–1969 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001). 65. For an analysis of the German approach to “democracy” in the postwar years, see Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 5. 66. Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft, chap. 4.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 29 declared that Catholics could accept the new order now that “liberalism and capitalism have experienced their great transmutation.”67 As Briefs knew, Catholics in West Germany were largely responsible for this new reality. Religion was an inescapable presence across noncommunist Europe in the two decades after the war. Christian Democrats, relying on religious rhetoric and mobilization, were the unchallenged political victors of the postwar moment, winning electoral victories in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Aus- tria, and Italy. In West Germany, they ruled unchallenged between 1949 and 1966. These parties, primarily led and supported by Catholics, proved surprisingly dynamic during these years. A number of historians, following the lead of Wilhelm Damberg’s pioneering work on Münster, have begun to show how Catholic institutions modernized in a world of cinemas and blue jeans.68 Politically, the church’s new power was obvious: buoyed by support from the American occupying forces and a slate of tendentious works on the church qua resistance organization (most famously Johannes Neuhäusler’s Kreuz und Hakenkreuz [1946]), the church enjoyed tremendous prestige. The CDU embraced its Christian identity: Adenauer declared in one speech that Germany would be rebuilt according to “Christian principles of economic, social and political life” (note the order!).69 The Catholic clergy, as Maria Mitchell shows, came out in droves in support of the CDU, and even the more conservative CSU in Bavaria, under the idiosyncratic leadership of Franz Josef Strauß, embraced the new republic and its modernizing economic policies.70 A new universe of Catholic print culture appeared, throwing its support behind the CDU: foremost was Rheinischer Merkur, a Catholic daily and unofficial mouthpiece of the party (with a circulation of around three hundred thousand).71 The tradition of Catholic political economy enjoyed a renaissance after the war, too, as old figures like Nell-Breuning joined new luminaries like Wer- ner Schöllgen as vanguard moral theorists in a highly moralizing era. At the

67. Goetz Briefs, “Liberalismus und katholische Soziallehre,” Die politische Meinung, no. 52 (1960): 32–41. For the new role of the economy in German self-perception, see Mark E. Spicka, Sell- ing the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957 (New York: Berghahn, 2007). 68. Wilhelm Damberg, Abschied vom Milieu? Katholizismus im Bistum Münster und in den Niederlanden, 1945–1980 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997). 69. Konrad Adenauer, World Indivisible (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), 13. In the same speech (pp. 35–37) he gives significantly more attention to economic freedom than to “democracy.” 70. Mitchell, Origins of Christian Democracy, 44–46; Milosch, Modernizing Bavaria. 71. Waldemar Gurian, “Re-educating Germany,” Commonweal, August 27, 1948, 468. There were periodicals attacking Bonn from the left, but these either were shut down by the occupying authorities (Ende und Anfang) or soon came into line (Frankfurter Hefte).

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heart of the CDU, Catholic social teaching was pursued most forcefully by the “Social Committees,” led by Catholic workers (who lacked a union of their own). Outside the party, the sizable Catholic workers’ clubs were matched by the influential Federation of Catholic Employers (BKU). The founding chair- man was the manager of a synthetic fiber factory in Cologne (Franz Greiss). Its director (Wilfrid Schreiber) and spiritual adviser (Joseph Höffner) were Cath- olic political economists. Höffner, whom we have already met regaling an international congress with tales of his sojourn to the mines, spent the interwar years studying Catholic social thought in Rome and Freiburg, significantly writing a dissertation on the ethics of monopoly. After the war he assumed the chair of Christian social thought at the University of Münster. He was closely involved with both the BKU and the Institute of Catholic Social Sciences (col- loquially known as the Höffner Institute), founded at the University of Münster in 1951 and partly funded by the BKU, which he chaired for years before becoming Archbishop of Cologne.72 Its journal, which featured Theodor Blank (CDU labor minister, 1957–65), was a premier site for Catholic political economy, operating at the intersection of the university, the church hierarchy, and the BKU. Catholic political economy flourished far more comfortably after 1945 than during the Weimar era, as its anticommunism and commitment to private property were the common coin of public reason. While we remember most the radical sociology of the Frankfurt School, the late 1940s were a period of conservative restoration, and its social sciences followed suit. As Charles Maier, Philip Nord, Susan Pedersen, Richard Vinen, and others show, the post- 1945 welfare state was primarily a creation of bourgeois conservatism and traditional elites. Especially on the Continent, its roots lie in anti-Bolshevism and the technocratic circles of the 1930s, not in the fiery rhetoric of the trade unions or the Resistance. As Maier in particular argues, there was a fundamental similarity between the economic stabilizations of the post–World War I and post–World War II periods: both times, socialist demands were defused through a neocorporatist gambit of collective bargaining and interest-group politics, mediated by the state.73 In the post-1945 period, especially, the new American factor ensured that those nations in its orbit did not waver too far

72. For details about its founding and funding, see Manfred Hermans, “Berufung Joseph Höff- ners und Gründung des Instituts für Christliche Sozialwissenschaften,” in Gabriel, Kirche—Staat— Wirtschaft auf dem Weg ins 21. Jahrhundert, 49–84. 73. For a summation, see Charles S. Maier, “The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stabil- ity in Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (1981): 327–52.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 31 from the new capitalist consensus.74 At the same time, communist parties cra- tered in influence and socialist ones crept away from orthodox Marxism. This was especially true in West Germany, where the Communist Party was out- lawed and the SPD became a center-left, mass party, abjuring the language of revolution and class struggle—a process capped off by the epochal Godesberg Program of 1959. This was an antitotalitarian moment, as socialists and liberals joined Catholics in their traditional suspicion of the state (Catholics quite naturally spoke the lingua franca of antitotalitarianism, which they had pioneered in the early 1930s).75 Nation-state sovereignty was widely seen, even by Marxists like Franz Neumann, as the precondition for Hitler’s crimes, and a number of limits were placed on Germany’s sovereignty from above. Most obviously, West Ger- many was not granted full sovereignty until 1955. Even then, the state was enmeshed in a set of international institutions that usurped authority from the Machtstaat. Germany was a member of NATO, and later the United Nations, and could rearm only with the consent and control of the international community. While Hitler surreptitiously rearmed, Adenauer declared in speech after speech that he wanted to rearm only in the context of a European Defense Community—abrogating the most fundamental prerogative of sovereignty. From within, the authority of the Reichstag was limited by the Constitutional Court, empowered to defend against violations of the Basic Law (this sort of constitutional, apolitical jurisprudence is familiar to us in America, but had been foreign to the German experience).76 Likewise, the Reichstag was limited by a deep federalism in Germany itself: the Länder were granted authority over education, cultural affairs, radio, television, law enforcement, environment, and more. Many “public” functions were in fact carried out by joint public-private, or “parapublic,” institutions. The churches were among the best examples of these, as they were granted enormous control over the delivery of social welfare; they were joined by a dense network of other institutions that made up what the political scientist Peter Katzenstein calls the “semisovereign state.”77 Despite these homologies, and despite the continent-wide power of Christian Democratic parties explicitly referencing Catholic social thought in

74. Mary Nolan, “Gender and Utopian Visions in a Post-utopian Era: Americanism, Human Rights, Market Fundamentalism,” Central European History 44, no. 1 (2011): 13–36. 75. James Chappel, “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe,” Mod- ern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2011): 261–90. 76. Müller, Contesting Democracy, chap. 4. 77. Peter J. Katzenstein, Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

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their platforms, few historians have connected the economic reconstruction of noncommunist Europe in light of the Catholic revival, which is normally interpreted as a cultural affair, or as the “brief Indian summer” of the church (as Tony Judt phrases it).78 Of course, Catholic political economy did not reign unchallenged anywhere, least of all in the CDU. Adenauer’s big tent, coalition party had to appease all segments of the divided Catholic milieu, as well as Protestants (his Protestant economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, wanted little to do with Catholic social thought). Nonetheless, it was an important voice, as Adenauer knew himself. When he decided that his party needed a well-developed ideological program to combat the SPD, he wrote to Höffner, who was a tutor to Adenauer’s son and a member of an advisory committee to his Minis- try of Labor, and asked if he would take part in a committee, along with three other social scientists, to draft a “formulation of a general picture” of the CDU worldview.79 Höffner worked on this so-called Four Professor Committee alongside two Protestants and Ludwig Neundörfer, who was integrally tied to the Weimar currents sketched above: he was the brother of Karl, the Caritas leader and legal theorist, and had served as editor of Die Schildgenossen, Guardini’s youth movement journal. This pamphlet was soon published with the rousing title Reform of Social Services (1955). There is much in the volume that revives older traditions of Catholic political economy: while it is impossible to tell who authored what, the text has far more in common with the Catholic tradition than the Protestant one, just as the CDU itself, much to the consternation of Protestant politicians and church leaders, was dominated by Catholics in the early years. The pamphlet, for instance, cites Gustav Gundlach’s work as a principal inspiration. Man, the authors proclaim, “cannot develop into a Persönlichkeit with his own power.” A number of institutions, from the family to the Vereine to the state, must help him. This is all according to the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “small life-circles” are “entitled to their own rights and tasks.” “Wherever the powers of the individual or the smaller communities suffice,” the authors write, “the larger social frameworks, above all the state, must neither abolish nor constrain them.” “Christian-Western thought,” unlike the “secularized Messianism” of Bolshevism, does not sacrifice human “dignity” to society.

78. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005), 227. 79. Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, “Joseph Höffner als Sozialpolitiker,” in Joseph Höffner (1906– 1987): Soziallehre und Sozialpolitik, ed. Karl Gabriel and Hermann-Josef Große Kracht (Munich: Schöningh, 2006), 37–50; Hans Günter Hockerts, Sozialpolitische Entscheidungen im Nachkriegs- deutschland: Alliierte und deutsche Sozialversicherungspolitik, 1945 bis 1957 (Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1980), 279–80.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 33

The authors agreed with Brauer’s notion that the state had hypnotized the masses, suggesting that the experience of two wars, inflation, and unwise policies had led many to expect a provider state (Versorgungsstaat, or what we might now call a “nanny-state”).80 Catholic political economy heavily impacted the CDU’s approach in a number of policy arenas.81 Two of the most well-known examples are family policy and European federalism. Germany’s first family minister, Franz-Josef Würmeling, was a flamboyantly Catholic politician with family roots in the Center Party, and his policies were clearly rooted in Catholic approaches to family ethics. Likewise, the founding fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community—Alcide De Gasperi, Robert Schuman, and Konrad Adenauer—were convinced Catholics who naturally sought venues of authority outside and above the nation-state. Adenauer’s background as a Rhenish Catholic, which predisposed him to thinking beyond the nation-state in the 1920s, was clearly relevant to his pro-European stance during his long tenure as chancellor.83 Catholic political economy was relevant in other, less recognized, areas, too. Old-age pensions provide perhaps the most interesting case study, as the grand 1957 pension reform was one of the signature achievements of West Germany’s welfare apparatus. In 1957 both the family minister and the labor minister were convinced Catholics, so it is not surprising that Catholic political economy left its fingerprints on the pension reform. The main figure, however, was a Catholic economist named Wilfrid Schreiber. Trained at the University of Cologne in the 1920s, Schreiber joined the Nazi Party in 1933, spending the next decade in radio broadcasting. After the war he studied economics at the University of Bonn under Erwin von Beckerath and then rose to prominence as a professor of social politics at the University of Cologne and founding secretary of the BKU. He published numerous works about security and the life course, and he was most famous for his “dynamic

80. Hans Achinger et al., Neuordnung der sozialen Leistungen: Denkschrift auf Anregung des Bundeskanzlers (Cologne: Greven, 1955), 21, 22, 29. 81. I am far from the first to recognize this. See, e.g., Gøsta Esping-Andersen,The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Kees van Kersbergen, Social Capitalism: A Study of Christian Democracy and the Welfare State (London: Routledge, 1995). 82. On the family, see Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Lukas Rölli- Alkemper, Familie im Wiederaufbau: Katholizismus und bürgerliches Familienideal in der Bundes- republik Deutschland, 1945–1965 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000). On Catholicism and federalism, see, above all, Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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34 James Chappel

pension” scheme. Adenauer, captivated by Schreiber’s work, invited him to a meeting of the social cabinet, praising his plan and eventually shepherding a version of it into law.83 Like Brauer and Brauns before him, Schreiber thought in terms of Cath- olic political economy—indeed, it was Adenauer’s son, a Catholic priest, who first alerted his father to Schreiber’s work. Previous social insurance schemes, Schreiber argued, had been based on individual, compulsory savings: workers made contracts, essentially, with their aged selves, placing a portion of their income in an interest-bearing account that they could access at retirement and that would be supplemented by direct state funds. Schreiber sought, instead, what he called a “solidarity contract between two generations” or what we now call a “pay as you go” system of pensions. The current generation of workers paid into a “pension fund of the German people,” which would be paid out in full to the current generation of retirees. Moreover, and somewhat controversially, the “dynamic” pensions would be indexed annually to wage and price levels, ensuring that pensions advanced along with the rest of the economy (Erhard was furious, wrongly seeing in it a spur to inflation). Sch- reiber sought a “radical rejection of ‘state benefits’” in the name of “social insurance” (Sozialversicherung). The new system required nothing from the state but the guaranteeing of contracts and “organizational services.”84 What, though, is specifically Catholic about this plan? Schreiber, for his part, claimed that his plan “does not call on specifically Christian values,” as “economic reasoning was entirely sufficient.”85 This rupture between economics and religion is unsustainable, however, and Schreiber’s own work is evidence of that. First, at the extratextual level, one could simply look to Sch- reiber’s other works, in which he called for a “new industrial age in the spirit of Christianity.” 86 Schreiber’s plan appeared in a pamphlet put out by the Fed-

83. Hockerts, Sozialpolitische Entscheidungen im Nachkriegsdeutschland, 309–17. In his more recent work Hockerts speculates that Schreiber’s völkisch commitments might be related to his newly discovered and considerable collaborations with the Nazis. See Hans Günter Hockerts, Der deutsche Sozialstaat: Entfaltung und Gefährdung seit 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011), 11–12. For a slightly revisionist account, see Alfred C. Mierzejewski, “Social Security Reform the German Way: The West German Pension Reform of 1957,” Journal of the Historical Society 6, no. 3 (2006): 407–42. 84. Wilfrid Schreiber, Existenzsicherheit in der industriellen Gesellschaft (Cologne: Bachem, 1955), 13, 14. 85. Ibid., 31. This was a common refrain: Adolph Geck, a sociologist employed by the church, claimed that there was no more a Catholic sociology than there was a Catholic physics. Geck, “Erkenntnis und Heilung des Soziallebens,” 9. 86. Wilfrid Schreiber, Sozialpolitik in einer freien Welt (Osnabrück: Fromm, 1961), 75.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 35 eration of Catholic Employers, and published by J. P. Bachem, a traditionally Catholic publisher: its back page featured an advertisement for a new book on social Catholicism. It was praised as “Biblical-Christian” in Rheinischer Merkur by Nell-Breuning, the most orthodox of Catholic social theorists, while as a professor Schreiber advised a laudatory thesis on the work of The- odor Brauer.87 At the level of the text, too, Schreiber’s work is shot through with Catho- lic themes. The language of “solidarity” that structured Schreiber’s thinking to its core came directly from Catholic social thought: even if he did not occa- sionally quote scripture, which he did, his presumption that social welfare was, first, a requirement for a moral society and, second, should abjure state involvement wherever possible marked him as a Catholic thinker. The problem with socialism, he argued, is that it assumes that capital “must be the decisive factor of social life.” Capital, however, affects the workers only between the ages of twenty and sixty-five, so an overemphasis on capital precludes a full understanding of human life. Instead, “the vital problem of industrialism” is caring for life in its three phases of childhood, adulthood, and old age. The argument recapitulates Brauer: people are defined not by their role as members of the working class but by their positioning in a web of legitimate authorities and obligations. Schreiber does not argue primarily in the language of equality or efficiency but of dignity: previous pensioners received their benefits “like alms from the hand of the state.” “It is obviously senseless,” Schreiber wrote, “to take a portion of the citizenry’s income and then give it back with the grand gesture of the benefactor. Enough of this juggling game, which only abets the false appearance of the omnipotent state.” His critique of the state is not “economic” in a narrow sense but moral. While Schreiber, then, claimed to rigorously separate religion and economics, he failed to do so. Indeed, near the end of his pamphlet, he slipped and stated that his goals were “defined not only by the clear teachings of our church but also by our own well-understood interests.”88 The influence of figures like Schreiber, Würmeling, and the Catholic ministers of labor (Anton Storch and Theodor Blank) ensured that Catholic political economy enjoyed influence in certain circumscribed areas. But what of the more general economic strategy of the CDU, widely associated with the

87. Oswald von Nell-Breuning, Zeitfragen, 1955–1959, vol. 3 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft heute (Freiburg: Herder, 1960), 346; the thesis, by Evamarie Arnzt, is available in Nachlaß Brauer, UniArchiv Köln. 88. Schreiber, Existenzsicherheit in der industriellen Gesellschaft, 38, 22, 12, 13, 45.

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36 James Chappel

Protestant, neoliberal minister of economics, Erhard? There are two ways to approach this problem. First, Erhard’s free market tendencies were always held in check by other elements in the CDU: the economics ministry may have been powerful, but the CDU was a large and complex party, and his version of neoliberalism often lost out to more traditionally social Catholic approaches, as it did in the case of pensions. Another sterling example is the controversy over codetermination (Mitbestimmung), which Adenauer and his Catholic labor ministers passed, with SPD support and against Erhard’s advice, in 1951–52. Social Catholics, organized in the Social Committees and the Catholic workers’ clubs, were enthusiastic about codetermination, which gave workers circumscribed control over their workplaces, thereby increasing their “dignity” without violating the property rights of employers through nationalization. At the 1949 Catholic Congress, or Katholikentag, the assem- bled delegates passed a resolution declaring that codetermination was a natural right on par with the right to property, an epochal and controversial declaration (and one, incidentally, that greatly annoyed Schreiber, Höffner, and the BKU). The story of codetermination is a complex one, involving foreign affairs as much as economic theory, and there is no space to analyze it in full: suffice it to say that Adenauer’s own social Catholic inclinations, combined with the Bochum Declaration and the agitation of his Catholic base, were at least partly responsible for codetermination as it was finally implemented in 1951 and 1952.89 Second, and just as important, neoliberalism as it existed in the late 1940s and 1950s was surprisingly harmonious with Catholic political economy, as thinkers on both sides of the confessional divide happily noted. The new synthesis was being prepared in the 1930s, along with neoliberalism itself. Walter Eucken, perhaps the progenitor of German neoliberalism, had already declared in 1932 that modern life could “only be given a comprehensive meaning again by religion, by the belief in God,” and he counted at least one priest—Höffner—among his doctoral students. Wilhelm Röpke, a Swiss Prot- estant neoliberal, was probably the other most important German-language neoliberal, and he sought ties to Catholics, too. In his 1944 magnum opus

89. For this judgment of Adenauer, see Andre Markovits, The Politics of the West German Trade Unions: Strategies of Class and Interest Representation in Growth and Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 79. For more on these debates from a Catholic perspective, see, above all, Goetz Briefs, ed., Mitbestimmung? Beiträge zur Problematik der paritätischen Mitbestimmung in der Wirtschaft (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1967); and, for a secondary source, William Patch, “The Legend of Compulsory Unification: The Catholic Clergy and the Revival of Trade Unionism in West Germany after the Second World War,” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 4 (2007): 848–80.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 37

Civitas Humana, he declared that Quadragesimo Anno was “clearly and completely” aligned with his own neoliberal project. “A good Christian,” he decided, “is, unbeknownst to himself, a liberal.” Social Catholics returned the praise. “Yesterday, Christian conservatism struggled, above all, against liberalism and individualism,” wrote one editor of Christian Corporate State, explaining his newfound appreciation for liberalism. “Today collectivism, in either its brown or red shade, has become the primary concern.” Many liberal ideals, he concluded, “are truly a Christian inheritance.”90 Catholics and neoliberals agreed that the “monopolistic,” cartel-centered logic of the Weimar period should give way to a more pluralistic, multipolar system. “Our greatest goal,” declared one Austrian Catholic sociologist in 1952, “is the destruction of all monopolies. We are decidedly in favor of the decentralization of both political and economic power.”91 The leading neoliberal thinkers, forged as they were in the monopolistic 1920s, were convinced that the monopoly form was at the heart of economic and political disaster. Before neoliberalism even existed, Goetz Briefs was collaborating with Ludwig von Mises in a set of studies on the problem of cartels, while he also edited a collec- tion in 1932 that brought together Röpke and Brauer.92 In his major statement of the 1940s, too, Röpke wrote at great length about the problem that “is more important and obvious than all the others: the problem of monopolies.”93 Catholic politicians and theorists were generally enthused by neoliberalism in its midcentury guise: it seemed like a form of liberalism that had abandoned the putatively anticlerical crusades of its forebears. One site for this rapprochement was Rheinischer Merkur, perhaps the most significant of the CDU’s mass-circulation daily newspapers. In the paper’s very first article, which appeared in March 1946, its Catholic editor specifically drew on Röpke to claim that “alongside the Christian-humanist social criticism a liberal- humanist one has arisen, which has much in common with it.”94 “Liberalism,”

90. Walter Eucken, quoted in Samuel Gregg, Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2010). Walter Eucken’s father, incidentally, was Rudolf Eucken, a mentor of Max Scheler’s. Wilhelm Röpke, Civitas Humana: Grundfragen der Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsreform (Erlen- bach-Zürich: Rentsch, 1944), 96, 18; and Klaus Dohrn, review of Totaler Staat—Totaler Mensch, by R. N. Coudenhove Kalergi, Christliche Ständestaat 4, no. 5 (1937): 1221. 91. Quoted in Nikolaus Hovorka, “Die Überwindung der marxistischen Illusion,” in Nicht Konzentration, sondern Streuung des Eigentums (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1956), 22. 92. Emil Lederer, ed., with Goetz Briefs et al., Das Kartellproblem (Leipzig: Duncker und Hum- blot, 1930). 93. Wilhelm Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 228. 94. Anonymous [presumably F. A. Kramer], “Christlicher Humanismus,” Rheinischer Merkur, March 15, 1946.

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he announced the following year, “has not completely collapsed into the face- less rationalism of formal-democratic thought.”95 He referred specifically to “the powerful Renaissance of this school” in the work of Röpke and his colleagues. The paper’s contributors consistently lauded “liberal principles” while “naturally reject[ing] ‘liberalism’ as a ‘worldview’ [Weltanschauung].” Röpke himself published his most important interventions in support of Erhard’s policies in the Merkur, while an article appeared in 1947 about the impossibility of Catholic socialism, celebrating “the unliberal liberalism” of the neoliberals and the CDU. The author, Albert Lotz, not only was himself a veteran of the Weimar years but could draw on Karl Thieme, another leading light of Rhen- ish Catholicism. Thieme had written in Frankfurter Hefte: “Each spiritually mature Catholic Christian can say in good faith: ‘I am anxious to realize liberal fundamentals in the construction of the state, even if I naturally reject ‘liberalism’ as ‘worldview.’”96 Schreiber and Höffner joined the chorus in support of the social market economy. “The maintenance of market competition,” Schreiber declared, “is a requirement not only of rationality but also of morality.”97 At a conference called “The Christian and the Social Market Economy,” organized by an American economist, Schreiber announced his belief that the new economy recognized the “human person” and that industrial growth fulfilled God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. The conference itself was emblematic, featur- ing a slate of Catholics praising the social market economy. To take one further example: Berthold Kunze, a disciple of Höffner and purveyor of the Catholic- neoliberal synthesis, cited Scheler himself on the need for a suitably religious economic order, and the papal encyclicals as antimonopolistic documents.98 Höffner, another speaker at the conference, was probably the leading light of the Catholic-neoliberal synthesis. His dissertation, “Economic Ethics and Monopoly in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” was designed to prove that neoliberal economic ethics are deeply rooted in Catholicism. “The Scholastics rightly rejected private monopoly,” Höffner claimed, “in the interest of the free market.”99 In 1949 he popularized this work in a Merkur essay

95. F. A. Kramer, “Gegenwart oder Vergangenheit?,” Rheinischer Merkur, April 12, 1947. 96. Albert Lotz, “Liberalismus und Liberalität,” Rheinischer Merkur, September 6, 1947 (this article quotes Thieme in Frankfurter Hefte). 97. Schreiber, Sozialpolitik in einer freien Welt, 84. 98. Wilfrid Schreiber, “Kernfragen der Marktwirtschaft,” in Der Christ und der soziale Markt wirtschaft, ed. Patrick Boarman (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955), 29; Berthold Kunze, “Wirtschafts- ethik und Wirtschaftsordnung,” ibid., 37, 47. 99. Joseph Höffner, Wirtschaftsethik und Monopole im fünfzehnten und sechzehnten Jahrhun- dert (Jena: Fischer, 1941), 162, 65.

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Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles 39 called, simply, “Scholasticism and the Market Economy.” He tried to show that, despite decades of interpretation to the contrary, canonical scholastics were wholly in favor of the market economy. They had, he claimed, a “decisive objection to planned economies,” by which they meant “total power of bureau- cracy, dictatorship of the public authorities and the concomitant endangering of human freedom.” He published an article with a similar theme in Ordo, the neoliberal house journal, in 1953, and a few years later gave an address to the BKU called “Neoliberalism and Christian Social Teaching,” stressing the sal- utary, antimonopolistic tendencies of the two systems.100 The work of Schreiber and Höffner, rooted in Catholic political economy, informed the governing strategies of the CDU just as fully as those of Pesch had animated the Center Party in the Weimar period. The CDU was far more powerful than the Center Party had been, though, and the principles of Catholic political economy were largely uncontested, even by the socialists. This constellation of continuities and transformations between Weimar and the Cold War helps explain the near-universal Catholic consensus behind the new republic, so conspicuously lacking in the last years of Weimar, and so utterly central to the new CDU, which accomplished the unimaginable feat of shepherding Germany’s vast and unruly right wing into a center-right, coalition party. The Wirtschaftswunder it oversaw truly was an economy of miracles, which becomes clear only once we learn to see religion as a form of political economy. Of course, Catholic political economy does not provide the skeleton key to the West German state or its capitalist reconstruction: Catho- lics were forced to compromise with Protestants, socialists, and occupying authorities. Nonetheless, the evidence is clear that Catholics in Germany, and specifically in the Rhineland, crafted a wide-ranging economic and social theory in the 1920s and that this had enormous repercussions on the shape of the West German state and economy after World War II. The implications of this story extend beyond Germany, suggesting new ways to think about religion in modern societies. By now, the secularization hypothesis has been widely rejected, at least in its strongest forms: it is no longer widely believed that modernization necessarily entails secularization in any robust sense, and religiosity has shown striking resilience and adaptability to modern social, economic, and political formations (even in Germany, the standard “secularization” story is likely overblown, given the

100. Joseph Höffner, “Marktwirtschaft und Scholastik,” Rheinischer Merkur, April 30, 1949; Höffner, “Der Wettbewerb in der Scholastik,” Ordo 5 (1953): 181–202; Joseph Höffner, “Neoliberal- ismus und christliche Soziallehre,” in Ökonomischer Humanismus: Neoliberale Theorie, soziale Marktwirtschaft und christliche Soziallehre (Cologne: Bachem, 1960), 20–22.

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explosion of religious pluralism and the continuing centrality of Caritas and other Catholic organizations).101 To argue otherwise is to beat a dead horse. The task now is to understand precisely how religion interacted with the specific forms that power takes in modern, capitalist societies: not simply how religious voters or discourses are mobilized but, at a deeper level, how theology insinuates itself into the apparently most secular discourses of modern governance. While Hannah Arendt theorized a sacred genealogy for the concept of sovereignty, she neglected to think, as Agamben and others have done, about the hidden theological inheritance of “society” and “economy.” If we look for religion only in the symbology of headscarves and anthems, we will miss the ways in which the religious element operates in the apparently agnos- tic operations of the bureaucracies and social sciences that, behind the Sturm und Drang of everyday politics, constitute and govern the social.

101. For the most recent survey, see Thomas Großbölting, Der verlorene Himmel: Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2013).

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