The new spirit of Germany

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The new spirit of Germany


Nicholas Boyle

If Benedict XVI’s nationality offers a signpost to his papacy, it points firmly down the road of ecumenism and collegiality, both part of a rich tradition lost under Bismarck and Hitler and rediscovered in his youth


ONE ADVANTAGE of our having a German Pope is that the British may at last begin to get a better understanding of Germany. They may even advance to the level of knowledge that was commonplace in England between the lifetime of Prince Albert and the outbreak of the First World War.

Thanks to Britain’s long and contorted struggle to recognise its changed place in the world, the British image of Germany has for decades been fixated on the years of its own Imperial Endkampf with Germany, from 1939 to 1945. It was therefore entirely predictable that on the news of the election of Benedict XVI the British tabloids should have seized on his membership of the Hitlerjugend in order to characterise the new Pope. But Pope Benedict’s nationality offers much more significant pointers than this to the potential character of his papacy, and its possible strengths and weaknesses.

The first thing the British may be surprised to learn from this election is how Catholic a country Germany is, and not just the Bavaria that provided the rural and small-town folk-religion in which Joseph Ratzinger grew up. The Germany in which he spent his entire clerical career until his translation to Rome (much of it in teaching posts at major universities outside Bavaria) was the Western zone of occupation and the Bonn republic, dominated for 14 crucially formative years by the Rhineland Catholic Konrad Adenauer. It was the first state bearing the name of Germany to be a majority Catholic country and that historically exceptional position perhaps accounts for what may prove the most fruitful, and sensitive, growing-point for the new papacy – its relations with Protestantism, especially Lutheranism.

For nearly 200 years until 1945, Catholics who wanted to think of themselves as German – rather than as having some more local or regional allegiance – had to accept a position of cultural inferiority. The high culture of the nation that Bismarck united under Calvinist Prussia – its literature and philosophy, its historiography and theology – had been almost entirely created by its ruling class of Protestant bureaucrats. (Music was a rather complicated exception, since so much of it had Austrian, rather than specifically German, roots.) In the universities (the institutional backbone of German culture, with a national significance they have never possessed in England), Catholic faculties of theology or philosophy were the poor relation of their Protestant equivalents and regarded as academically not quite up to snuff. Martin Heidegger, born a generation earlier into Black Forest rather than Bavarian Catholicism, might have followed from his seminary the same course as the young Ratzinger. But in the aftermath of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Church the air of the second-rate, rightly or wrongly, still hung about Catholic institutions, and ambition in the end meant more to the young Heidegger than faith. By going over to a nominal Lutheranism, he secured a position at the heart of the intellectual establishment of the Weimar Republic.

The future Pope was saved from any such temptation by the cataclysm of 1945, by the defeat and division of Germany which formed the context for his period of clerical training. Not only was Catholicism numerically dominant in the Federal Republic – while the overwhelming Protestantism of East Germany was of little consequence beside Communism and established atheism – but the moral and intellectual authority of the Catholic Church was also enhanced, both by its ability to appeal to a record of resistance, even if not particularly effective resistance, to the Nazi regime, and by the bankruptcy of the central cultural tradition of the national bureaucracy. In a continuous process of secularisation lasting over a century and a half, the ruling bureaucrats had moved away from their original Protestant faith into idealism, cultural nationalism, and, ultimately, nihilistic worship of the state. Catholic exclusion from that process was now revealed as the advantage some had always believed it to be. In the universities of the new Germany many of the old assumptions about the role of professors within the institutions, and of the institutions in the national life, continued unchanged from the nineteenth century. But in one respect they were fundamentally different: there was now a parity of esteem between Catholic and Protestant intellectual traditions. The relations, going beyond geniality into mutual respect and friendship, that the young Professor Ratzinger was able to establish with his Protestant colleagues in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, must now be the grounds for hoping that Benedict XVI means business when he says he expects concrete progress in ecumenical relations.

The deep historical roots of its federal structure are another feature of Germany that British people often have difficulty in grasping. The homogenising totalitarianism of the Nazi period and the GDR was profoundly alien to the national tradition. Even under Bismarck and in the Weimar Republic, the outlines of the old structure of the Holy Roman Empire, defunct since 1806, could still be discerned. It was a Germany in which a jumble of secular and ecclesiastical states, free cities and sovereign principalities, enclaves and exclaves, Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, coexisted and proudly maintained their local independence, rights, and privileges. Ratzinger himself has noted with regret the passing of many of these traditions of local freedom in the name first of Enlightenment, then of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Reform, and finally of national unity. Bavaria is notorious for its maintenance of its autonomy within the Federation, but its rights are not fundamentally different from those of the other constituent states. Should Pope Benedict surprise us with a rediscovery of the Second Vatican Council’s concern for collegiality and subsidiarity, he will have the resources of a long German tradition to call on.

German federalism has also played a significant role in an area of political thinking in which the Pope has already signalled a powerful interest. The years of his intellectual and academic maturation were also the years in which the Catholic nations of Western Europe came together to construct the European Economic Community, a project greeted with particular enthusiasm in Germany. Its principal inspiration was the need to prevent any repetition of the catastrophe visited on the continent by a Germany dominated by the nationalist, and so usually anti-Catholic, thinking of its centralising bureaucracy. British assumptions that Germans look to a European identity because they are embarrassed about their own touch only a part of the truth. Catholic Germany has always been European in its perspectives, and we hear a German as well as a Catholic voice in the words of the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1979: “Supranational political, economic and legal institutions are necessary, though these cannot have the aim of building up a super-nation, but on the contrary should restore to Europe’s individual regions in a strengthened form their own character and importance. Regional, national, and supranational institutions should interact in such a way that centralism and particularism are equally excluded.”

If ecumenism, federalism, and Europeanism are features of the German inheritance that could facilitate Pope Benedict’s universal ministry, there are however others that may make his role as global pastor more difficult. Above all there is the absence of a foundation for any instinctive understanding of the commercial, industrial, and financial world, the circle of investment, employment, production, and consumption, which determines the billions of lives to which the Vatican Council sought to address its message of joy and hope. Germany is currently the third largest economy in the world, and it has achieved that position through extraordinary efforts made during the years when Professor, and then Archbishop, Ratzinger was based within it. But for 200 years Germany has had the greatest difficulty in integrating moneymaking, and the world of industrial work, into its understanding of itself, or of society in general. Even Marx and Engels preferred to analyse England. German literary, philosophical and theological culture lay in the hands of the bureaucracy, and especially of the universities, rather than of private individuals, commercial undertakings, or private associations (such as unestablished churches). Rather than emerging from the needs of the people, it therefore remained detached from, and even hostile to, the activities by which most of the population were making a living, especially as these became more difficult to fit into the categories of the pre-industrial world in which the bureaucracy had its origin. Nineteenth-century (and to a great extent twentieth-century) Germany failed to create the realistic novel of modern life that was one of the great glories of English and French culture of the period (and which was treated with contempt by Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the Pope’s preferred guides to theological aesthetics).

In this respect Catholic professors in Germany were no better off than Protestant, not at any rate once they had been admitted on equal terms into the elite. Perhaps, though, Pope Benedict XVI will be given the grace to grasp in pastoral love a world that cannot be encompassed by the experiences of Joseph Ratzinger’s upbringing. No one who has their own memories of pre-industrial Catholicism (from Ireland perhaps) will fail to be moved by Ratzinger’s recollections of the Corpus Christi processions of his childhood, the self-expression of a unified, God-directed community. But in the world to which Benedict has to minister – and that includes Bavaria itself – Bavaria is not Corpus Christi processions, nor even villagers in lederhosen drinking beer, but the B in BMW, and Munich is simply the home of the European Patents Office. The principle on which the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith discharged his responsibilities – that the privileged theological elite were there to protect the simple faithful, not to bewilder them – made excellent sense as a response to the terrible compromises with the secular state into which the liberal Protestantism of the German bureaucrats gradually declined, or Heidegger’s desertion of his post, or the dependence of embattled Catholicism in the days of the Kulturkampf on the rugged fidelity of its pastors.

But were those the right models by which to understand the perplexities of life within a global economy that transcends state structures, and a global transport and information network that allows cultures to interact with little mediation through political or any other institutions? In his enthusiastic embrace of the world media as the instrument of his mission, John Paul II practised a far more radical pastoral aggiornamento than his Prefect would countenance in theology. Indeed the comments of the peritus Ratzinger on the development of the Second Vatican Council became more jaundiced as the modern capitalist world with which German bureaucratic culture had never been able to establish a modus vivendi came more closely into focus. His virtual rejection of Gaudium et Spes foreshadowed his later revulsion from the turbulence of 1968, in which he was unable to hear the last cry of pain of the old authoritarian and statist thought patterns as they crumbled before the incoming tide of the post-war world economy.

The name Benedict seems to have been chosen as an act of deliberate ambiguity. Maybe it reflects the acceptance of modernisation and the engagement with the task of peacemaking of Benedict XV. Maybe it reflects Alasdair MacIntyre’s call for a new Benedict to construct monastic fortresses in which civilisation can survive the new Dark Ages. Or maybe again it reflects the new Pope’s reported taste for the allegorical novels of Hermann Hesse. Not, I would guess, however, the travesty of modernity in the drug-dreams of Steppenwolf, but Hesse’s parables of the relation between the contemplative and the active lives, especially The Glass Bead Game. The hero of that novel, Joseph by name, is the perfectly balanced organisation man who rises to become head of the quasi-Benedictine community of Castalia, the survival of which in a hostile world is made possible only by miracles of intelligence, diplomacy, and self-discipline. But at the height of his career he falls victim to the temptation to taste life in the world outside Castalia and meets death instead. We may assume that Benedict XVI will avoid any similar mistake. But it would be good to think that he might want to take the risk.

Nicholas Boyle is professor of German literary and intellectual history, University of Cambridge, and author of Goethe: the poet and the age, volumes one and two, published by Oxford University Press, and Who are we now? published by T & T Clark.