Christian Schmidtmann. Katholische Studierende 1945-1973: Ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2005. 535 S. EUR 69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-72873-9.

Reviewed by Martin Menke (Department of History, Rivier College)
Published on H-German (September, 2007)

The Democratization of German Catholicism?

The volume under review is a revised version of Christian Schmidtmann's dissertation. It fills a gap in the research of postwar German Catholicism while at the same time confirming scholarly trends established by Mark Edward Ruff in The Wayward Flock (2005) and other scholars of postwar German Catholicism.

In the introduction, Schmidtmann explains that his work is not a "coherent, stringent narrative of Catholic students and their organizations, but a postmodern analysis of a constructed reality" (p. 15). Katholische Studierende is not a typical organizational history--although there is much of that in this work--but rather an analysis of the way in which German Catholic university students defined their relationship with their faith, their social organizations, and their church hierarchy. The work itself is free of explicitly postmodern analyses; indeed, in the body of the work, Schmidtmann does not address the "constructed" nature of reality. Instead, he offers an excellent analysis of the ways in which German Catholic university students took ownership of their faith in ways the Church hierarchy found difficult to accept. When the Church, by means of the Second Vatican Council caught up, so to speak, with the students, they were already moving on to a new understanding of their faith that almost made the Church seem irrelevant.

The volume is divided into four larger sections and numerous chapters and sub-chapters. The first three sections are arranged chronologically, while the chapters and sub-headings are arranged thematically or by groups of students. Schmidtmann examines students organized in the Catholic student fraternities, who made up the majority of all organized Catholic students, and then students in other organizations, as well as women as a special category of Catholic student.

Schmidtmann notes that the share of Catholic students formally organized in fraternities or other groups never was more than a third of all registered Catholic university students. In this regard, the book's title is a little misleading, since Schmidtmann leaves more than half of all Catholic students unconsidered. In part, this is caused by the author's reliance on the records of the Katholische Deutsche Studenteneinigung (KDSE), the umbrella group of Catholic student groups in Germany, in the historical archives of the Cologne archdiocese. Still, one would have liked to have learned more about the majority of Catholic students and their attitudes towards ecclesiastical and civic roles as well as towards student life and academic preparation.

Schmidtmann notes the crucial role the Catholic Church played in the immediate postwar years at the local level. As the universities resumed classes, Catholic chaplains often provided both material and spiritual support to a generation seeking new values and goals. Quickly, however, a development began in the student body that Schmidtmann, without explicitly acknowledging it, sees coming to its fulfillment in the radicalization of the Catholic student movement in the late sixties and early seventies. Catholic students no longer considered mass attendance and participation in exclusively milieu-driven activities sufficient or even necessary markers of their Catholic identity. In the wake of National Socialism, living a Christian life meant bringing Christ into one's everyday life and work. As Schmidtmann himself puts it, Catholic students did not seek a restoration of a pre-national socialist order, but rather something qualitatively new (pp. 43-45). Although recognizing that the postwar generation desired a qualitatively different Catholicism is not a new scholarly insight, Schmidtmann's research shows how this desire for Catholicism in and of the world extended to Germany's future Catholic elites.

Indeed, Schmidtmann's more original contribution is to demonstrate the difficulties younger German Catholics faced in their dealings with the older generations in preparing for future leadership in economic, political, and social life. The older generation included the Catholic hierarchy, whose efforts to control Catholic student groups lasted almost thirty years, until the bishops gave up their attempts in the early seventies. Schmidtmann shows younger Catholics who joined the student fraternities reshaped these according to their own values, often to the dismay of the fraternities' alumni. For example, in the early fifties, when university rectors banned uniformed fraternity members from marching in university processions for fear of resurrecting nationalist attitudes that fraternities had demonstrated in the twenties, the students insisted on wearing their colors as equal members in a tolerant, pluralistic society (p. 129).

Schmidtmann traces carefully how, during the later fifties and throughout the sixties, Catholic student groups began to struggle with the same conflicts that their fellow students faced: confronting the Holocaust, the Cold War, and so on. Catholic students, however, increasingly questioned the KDSE's alignment with the Christian Democrats, much to the hierarchy's dismay. By the early sixties, KDSE functionaries rejected grassroots requests for open dialogue about the political roles of Catholic students in the modern world. Functionaries, even lay ones, blamed the students for declining participation in Catholic student group activities. This attitude was particular noticeable in activities aimed at female students, for whom the dominant message that a Catholic woman should prioritize her role as wife and mother over her academic prospects became irrelevant, if not off-putting. Students increasingly went their own way, organizing their own groups that relied on the hierarchy only for considerable financial support.

By the late sixties, Catholic student groups in Germany were fully in the throes of the early excitement surrounding the implementation of the reforms introduced at the Second Vatican Council. Sermons on Marxism were the least of the bishops' concerns. By the early seventies, the bishops decided to withdraw their financial support from the student groups, which led to the demise of many of them.

At this point, Schmidtmann unfortunately leaves the reader without a fully developed analytical conclusion. Instead, the reader is offered the fourth section of the work, in which Schmidtmann presents the results of his interviews with members of Catholic student groups from the period in question. It would have been useful had the analysis of these sources been integrated better into the main body of the work, rather than left as a separate section. Furthermore, Schmidtmann notes much of the relevant literature in the footnotes and in his extensive bibliography, but one wishes that he might have engaged the scholarly context more directly. One wonders what Protestant student groups were doing during the same time and about the same issues. Furthermore, as mentioned above, one wished that at least some statistical data had been included about the activities of those Catholic students who were not formally members of Catholic student organizations.

All in all, however, Schmidtmann has offered an important contribution to our understanding of postwar Catholicism and the transition of German Catholicism to the supposed age of the laity. The Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Germany's leading Catholic historical research organization, is to be commended for its increasing focus on postwar Catholicism and its movement beyond strictly institutional church history.

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Citation: Martin Menke. Review of Schmidtmann, Christian, Katholische Studierende 1945-1973: Ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13601

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