Anthony J. Steinhoff

Religion as Urban Culture A View from Strasbourg, 1870-1914

Drawing on evidence from late-nineteenth-century Strasbourg, the article argues that urban culture in imperial Germany had an important religious component, even at the high point of nineteenth-century urbanization. Churches, parishes, and religious groups were active participants in many types of urban cultural life. They helped broaden and diversify the city’s municipal life; they contributed actively to shaping urban associational and press culture. Moreover, religious symbols were still being produced and propagated in powerful ways in the great city. This occurrednot only throughthe construction of church buildings and bell towers but also through obligatory religious education in public schools.

Nineteenth-century urbanization as sacred process: insights from German Strasbourg.

This article examines a crucial site for modernity’s encounter with religion during the long nineteenth century, albeit one largely ignored both by religious and urban historians: the modern big city. Drawing on evidence from Strasbourg, which joined the ranks of Germany’s big cities soon after the Franco-Prussian War, it points out first, that urbanization had a significant urban dimension. It altered the absolute and relative size of the city’s faith communities, affected the confessional composition of urban neighborhoods, and prompted faith communities to mark additional parts of the urban landscape as sacred. Second, while urban growth—both demographic and physical—frequently challenged traditional understandings of religious community, it also facilitated the construction of new understandings of piety and community, especially via voluntary organizations and the religious media. Thereby, urbanization emerged as a key force behind sacralization in city and countryside as the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth began.

Christianity and the creation of Germany

Shortly after the proclamation of the Second German empire in 1871, the future Prussian court preacher Adolf Stoecker rejoiced, remarking: ‘The holy, Protestant empire of the German nation is now completed.’ This statement exemplifies the important, if often overlooked, contribution that Christianity made to the construction of modern Germany. The phrase itself recalls the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ that perished in 1806 and demonstrates the ongoing resonance of the imperial idea for conceptualising the nation throughout the nineteenth century. But by substituting the word ‘Protestant’ ( evangelisch ) for the word ‘Roman’, Stoecker also asserted that creating this new Germany was not simply a matter of ‘blood and iron’ or even of establishing acceptable constitutional relationships among the member states. In a very fundamental way it entailed resolving a question left open since the Reformation: what kind of Christian nation would Germany be? Christianity exercised a telling influence on the creation of modern Germany. After 1815 confessional pluralism existed in most of the major German states, compelling each one to develop new legal and social policies to deal with the reality of religious co-existence. The redrawing of state boundaries also necessitated alterations in ecclesiastical organisation and the clarification of church–state relations. Such measures were intended to promote interconfessional peace, but as religious revivals renewed a sense of confessional particularity among Catholics and Protestants, state policies increasingly touched off dissent and socio-political conflict. By mid-century, the heightened sense of confessional difference had constructed a minefield for German politicians that affected domestic politics, church–state relations and, above all, public discussions of the ‘German question’.