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Catholicism and the Great War
Advisory Editors
David Blight, Yale University
Richard Bosworth, University of Western Australia
Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Carol Gluck, Columbia University
Benedict Kiernan, Yale University
Antoine Prost, Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Robert Wohl, University of California, Los Angeles
In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of
two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict,
and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of
this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history
by cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social
and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship
in European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day.
This is book 42 in the series, and a full list of titles in the series can be found at:
www.cambridge.org/modernwarfare
Catholicism and the Great War
Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and
Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922
Patrick J. Houlihan
University of Chicago
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107035140
C Patrick J. Houlihan 2015
“The war is being conducted not only with guns and cannons
but also with weapons of piety and prayer.”
– Sven Hedin, Ein Volk in Waffen (Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, 1915), 461
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Catholicism on the eve of the Great War in Germany
and Austria-Hungary 20
2 Theology and catastrophe 50
3 The limits of religious authority: military chaplaincy
and the bounds of clericalism 78
4 Faith in the trenches: Catholic battlefield piety during
the Great War 117
5 The unquiet homefront 153
6 A voice in the wilderness: the papacy 186
7 Memory, mourning, and the Catholic way of war 215
Conclusion 254
Sources 266
Index 285
vii
Figures
SOURCES
Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart), Ktn. 214.
Lipusch, Viktor, ed. Österreich-Ungarns katholische Militärseelsorge im Weltkriege.
Vienna: Verlag für Militär- und Fachliteratur Amon Franz Göth, 1938.
Rudl, Siegmund. Kriegsvaterunser: Andenken an den Weltkrieg für alle Mitkämpfer
und ihre Angehörigen. Prague: Bonifatia Verlag, 1917.
viii
Acknowledgments
This book benefited from the support of many people and institutions,
and it is a pleasure to thank them in print. I only regret that I will not
be able to name all the people involved and inevitably will have to stop
writing at some point, for which I apologize.
This project began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago, and I
had a stellar committee. John W. Boyer, my dissertation chair, offered an
inspiring model of a scholar/teacher/administrator, always making time
for me amid his myriad other responsibilities. Michael Geyer and Leora
Auslander were incredible dissertation committee members and attentive
readers. As a whole and as individuals, this committee constantly gave
advice that challenged and improved my scholarship on all levels. Words
cannot fully express how grateful I am for such a wonderful dissertation
committee.
Jay Winter, whose work has deeply influenced my own and many others
in Great War studies, took an early interest in my project and has offered
supportive feedback throughout the process. Michael Watson, Executive
Publisher at Cambridge University Press, and the Press support staff
worked with a combination of patience and efficiency that reflects the
high standards of academic publishing. In particular, copy editor Tim
West saved me from multiple stylistic and grammatical infelicities. Two
anonymous referees for the Press offered incredibly helpful criticisms that
vastly improved the draft. Among the numerous colleagues to whom I
sent parts of the manuscript, Roger Chickering and Benjamin Ziemann
offered particularly superlative feedback. I alone bear responsibility for
any errors of fact or interpretation that remain.
The research for this project has been supported by grants and fellow-
ships from the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, and the
American Philosophical Society. Without the financial support of orga-
nizations like these, this book would not exist, and I am truly grateful. I
also thank the Office of Career Advancement, and its Executive Director,
Meredith Daw, for allowing me opportunities to complete the research
and writing of the book.
ix
x Acknowledgments
PJH
Chicago USA
July 28, 2014
Note on the text
xii
Abbreviations
xiii
Introduction
1 The exchange between the cardinals is recounted in Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers:
The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 457. For the official documents on the conclave, see
Anon., Acta Apostolicae Sedis: Commentarium Officiale (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis,
1909–), 6:473–500.
1
2 Catholicism and the Great War
2 For an excellent overview, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
3 Hew Strachan, “Epilogue,” in The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On, ed. Jay Winter
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 185–98; Jay Winter, “Approaching the
History of the Great War: A User’s Guide,” in Winter, The Legacy of the Great War, 1–17,
esp. 6–7.
4 For a superlative historiographical overview, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great
War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
Introduction 3
The First World War had a Catholic dimension that has not received
attention as a pan-European phenomenon, especially for the losing pow-
ers of Central and Eastern Europe. Aside from high-level diplomacy and
research on the radical right-wing fringe, very few studies of the Great
War view Germany and Austria-Hungary together as related but distinct
entities.5 Although religiosity is difficult to quantify, even the sheer empir-
ical data on nominal religious affiliation suggest the need to examine a
Catholic experience of the war: according to one set of figures from 1920,
those nominally identified as Catholics made up 194.83 million of a total
European population of 353.57 million people, or 55.10%. The regional
data are even more pronounced, especially viewed in terms of Protestant–
Catholic differences. In Central Europe, Catholics made up 59.99 mil-
lion out of a total of 114.90 million people, or 52.21%, while Protestants
made up 44.90 million, or 39.08%. Regional disparities in Eastern and
Southern Europe, long-neglected areas of First World War studies, are
more lopsided. In Eastern Europe, Catholics represented 12.93 million
out of 43.08 million total inhabitants, or 30.01%, whereas Protestants
made up 3.61 million, or 8.38%. In Southern Europe, Catholics formed
66.28 million out of a total of 75.41 million, or an overwhelming 87.89%,
whereas Protestants numbered around 168 000, or a mere 0.22%.6
Why, then, does one find this neglect of a major component of belief
during a transformative global event? As Michael Snape has argued, the
Christian history of the First World War remains understudied because
of a narrow national or denominational focus;7 the present book aims
to correct this for the losing powers. There is also the issue of the war’s
cultural legacy, in large part dominated by representations of avant garde
modernism. Many cultural histories of the war argue that the domi-
nant master-narrative of its cultural legacy is, in the pointed words of
Modris Eksteins, the emergence of “orgiastic-nihilistic irony,” with
5 The neglect of comparative studies of the losing powers is striking, especially in com-
parison to works about Britain and France. For a pioneering countervailing work, see
Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (Lon-
don: Arnold, 1997). An important recent transnational study of counter-revolutionary
movements in Central Europe is Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-
Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great
War,” Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008): 175–209.
6 These statistics are taken from Gabriel Adriányi, ed., History of the Church, vol. 10: The
Church in the Modern Age (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 5–6. Figures originally taken
from H. A. Krose, ed. Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland, vol. 7, 1930–1
(Cologne, 1931), 263.
7 Michael Snape, “The Great War,” in World Christianities, c.1914–c.2000, ed. Hugh
McLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 131–50. For brief prelim-
inary studies that indicate a historiographic shift is imminent, see Martin Greschat, Der
Erste Weltkrieg und die Christenheit. Ein globaler Überblick (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014).
4 Catholicism and the Great War
8 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), xiv–xvi. For a seminal work about the Great War as a
foundational moment in the emergence of literary modernism, see Paul Fussell, The
Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
9 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
10 See, for example, the essays in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., European Culture
in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
11 Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, trans.
Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
12 In addition to Annette Becker’s War and Faith, see Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the
Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010), and Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and
the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London: Routledge, 2005). For a
work that blends analysis of the USA and the UK, see Richard Schweitzer, The Cross
and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
13 Adrian Gregory and Annette Becker, “Religious Sites and Practices,” in Capital Cities
at War: Paris, London, Berlin, vol. 2: A Cultural History, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis
Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 383–427.
Introduction 5
14 Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German
and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 234;
see esp. pp. 92–100.
15 Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade
(New York: HarperOne, 2014).
16 Adrian Gregory, “Beliefs and Religion,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War,
ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3:418–44; quote from
443.
17 George S. Williamson, “A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the
Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany,” Church History 75, no. 1 (2006):
139–56.
6 Catholicism and the Great War
18 Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf,
2007).
19 For a recent statement of the “war cultures” approach to religion, see Annette Becker,
“Faith, Ideologies, and the ‘Cultures of War,’” in A Companion to World War I, ed.
John Horne (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 234–47. For the “war cultures”
approach more generally, see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18:
Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill and Wang,
2002).
20 For a recent review article that expertly outlines debates about the twentieth-century
transformation of the Catholic milieu in Central Europe, ultimately arguing for the
milieu’s analytical viability in terms of “lived religion,” see Michael E. O’Sullivan, “From
Catholic Milieu to Lived Religion: The Social and Cultural History of Modern Ger-
man Catholicism,” History Compass 7, no. 3 (2009): 837–61. Earlier foundational state-
ments include Münster Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, “Katholiken zwischen
Tradition und Moderne: Das katholische Milieu als Forschungsaufgabe,” Westfälische
Forschungen 43 (1993): 588–654, 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.
21 Olaf Blaschke, “Die Kolonialisierung der Laienwelt: Priester als Milieumanager und die
Kanäle klerikaler Kuratel,” in Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten, Krisen, ed.
Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1996), 93–135.
22 Christian Rak, Krieg, Nation und Konfession: die Erfahrung des deutsch-französischen
Krieges von 1870/71 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2004).
Introduction 7
23 Wilhelm Achleitner, Gott im Krieg: Die Theologie der österreichischen Bischöfe in den Hirten-
briefen zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997); Karl Hammer, Deutsche
Kriegstheologie, 1870–1918 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974); Heinrich
Missalla, “Gott mit uns”: Die deutsche katholische Kriegspredigt, 1914–1918 (Munich:
Kösel Verlag, 1968); Wilhelm Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918 in der evangelischen
Kirche Deutschlands (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967).
24 Heinz Hürten, “Die katholische Kirche im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Der erste Weltkrieg:
Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1994),
725–35; Richard van Dülmen, “Der deutsche Katholizismus und der Erste Weltkrieg,”
Francia 2 (1974): 347–76. More recently, see Martin Lätzel, Die katholische Kirche
im Ersten Weltkrieg. Zwischen Nationalismus und Friedenswillen (Regensburg: Friedrich
Pustet, 2014).
25 For an overview of military chaplaincy in both the Habsburg and the Hohenzollern
monarchies, see Patrick J. Houlihan, “Clergy in the Trenches: Catholic Military Chap-
lains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War” (Ph.D. disserta-
tion, University of Chicago, 2011). See also Claudia Ham, “Von den Anfängen der
Militärseelsorge bis zur Liquidierung des Apostolischen Feldvikariates im Jahr 1918,”
in Zwischen Himmel und Erde: Militärseelsorge in Österreich, ed. Roman-Hans Gröger
(Graz: Styria Verlag, 2001), 13–98; Arnold Vogt, Religion im Militär: Seelsorge zwis-
chen Kriegsverherrlichung und Humanität: Eine militär-geschichtliche Studie (Frankfurt
a.M.: Peter Lang, 1984); and Benjamin Ziemann, “Katholische Religiosität und die
Bewältigung des Krieges: Soldaten und Militärseelsorger in der deutschen Armee,
1914–1918,” in Volksreligiosität und Kriegserleben, ed. Friedhelm Boll (Münster: Lit,
1997), 116–36.The published diaries of chaplains, with valuable scholarly commen-
tary, are also an excellent source. See Frank Betker and Almut Kriele, eds., Pro fide
et patria! Die Kriegstagebücher von Ludwig Berg 1914/18: Katholischer Feldgeistlicher im
Grossen Hauptquartier Kaiser Wilhelms II (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), and Hans-Josef
Wollasch, ed., Militärseelsorge im Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Kriegstagebuch des katholischen
Feldgeistlichen Benedict Kreutz (Mainz: Matthias Grünewelt Verlag, 1987).
8 Catholicism and the Great War
31 Christine Beil, Thomas Fliege, Monique Scheer et al., “Populare Religiosität und
Kriegserfahrungen,” Theologische Quartalsschrift 182, no. 4 (2002): 298–320; Gottfried
Korff, ed., Alliierte im Himmel: Populare Religiosität und Kriegserfahrung (Tübingen:
Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2006).
32 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979).
10 Catholicism and the Great War
of personal piety, especially after it became apparent that the war was
lost. Institutional prescriptions of the Catholic faith formed important
orientation points for believers. Whenever possible, however, this work
stresses the lived reality of individual experiences of transcendence. It
places emphasis on pastoral forms of theology and religious practice,
showing the popular reception of ideas, the transmission to action of
the faithful, and the autonomous modes of spirituality that developed
against Church guidelines. Thus, this work highlights both Church and
state authorities’ instrumentalization of faith and individual lay believers’
assertion of their faith as a form of personal identity and experience.
Methodology
Impossible to articulate fully for one person, and even more so for mil-
lions of believers in two empires, a focus on religion and everyday life
will inevitably fall short of an adequate representation of personal reli-
giosity. Nevertheless, one should clarify some of the guiding methods. In
studying religious phenomena, where does one draw the line for classi-
fying something as a religious experience? Scholars of religious studies
will continue to debate whether the existence of a concept of “religion”
makes sense.33 In order not to get bogged down in endless wrangling
over this issue, this book has been generous in classifying according to
an ideal-type characteristic of Catholicism defined by both scholars and
believers. Nevertheless, in order to better represent cultural flow and
personal agency, it also incorporates a model of concentric, overlapping
circles of commitment.34 At the center of the circle lie the doctrine and
dogma of the Catholic Church seated in Rome under the authority of
the Pope, but the direction of commitment to that center has two-way
movement: both centripetal and centrifugal.
This study focuses on Catholicism specifically, although other religions
and confessions will be discussed throughout. Occasionally, in order to
compare and contrast forms of Christianity, the book discusses Protes-
tant spirituality in particular. There are obvious areas of overlap: for
instance, in loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm II as the highest state authority in
Imperial Germany. In some cases, the book has used Protestant archival
material, and one may wonder at the scholarly legitimacy of including
33 For excellent discussion of these issues, see Robert A. Orsi, ed., The Cambridge Com-
panion to Religious Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
34 John Taylor, “The Future of Christianity,” in The Oxford History of Christianity, ed. John
McManners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 644–83. See also David B. Bar-
rett, George Thomas Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia:
A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd edn., 2 vols.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Introduction 11
this. For example, in Chapter 5, it discusses Red Cross sisters and the
historigraphically neglected experiences of women and children. In these
cases, Christian material was selected as the most clear empirical exam-
ple of a larger point that exclusively Catholic sources do not adequately
address. For instance, Red Cross nurse Hilda Galles, a Christian of
uncertain denomination, provided a vivid and immediate contrast of dif-
fering representations of war experience: a laconic, dutiful letter to her
parents and her personal diary entries written at the same time, the latter
of which record a hospital world of hellish chaos and depression. These
two documents highlight important points of difference between per-
sonal subjectivity and semi-public images of war: factors crucial to the
varieties of religious experience and gendered representations of duty.
Perhaps most offensive to scholars and some religious believers will be
this book’s claims that Catholicism provided an extra measure of comfort
beyond Protestantism during the Great War. On one level, these criti-
cisms are correct: there are no quantifiable benchmarks to demonstrate
something like this with a social scientific degree of numerical accuracy.
On another level appropriate to religious studies, however, argumentation
must be qualitatively suggestive rather than quantitatively conclusive, and
this book does not pronounce infallible judgments ex cathedra; rather, it
posts theses for disputation.
There is a qualitative difference that this book insists upon: firmly
rooted in historical theology between Christian denominations, wartime
Catholicism’s emphasis on belief and practice, or faith and works, sim-
ply provided more ways in which Catholic believers could understand
and potentially shape their own beliefs. This was especially relevant for
increasingly atomized national or imperial communities as the collec-
tive sacrifice that began in 1914 became increasingly hopeless by 1918.
Particularly for the losing powers of Central Europe, the Protestant jus-
tification by individual faith alone, especially when the war seemed lost,
did not allow religious believers additional ways in which to understand
the chaos of war that made communal sense outside of national defeat
and frustration. As religion became tangled with nationhood in German
history, the consequences of defeat in 1918 were especially traumatiz-
ing for the Protestant collective imaginary that had, the year before,
celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Reformation begun by Martin
Luther in 1517. By contrast, Catholic spirituality emphasized such mat-
ters as intercessory saint culture, the tangibility of devotional objects,
and a universal Church community beyond the nation – and these were
modes of faith that proved comforting during collective imperial defeat
for the Central Powers.
Instead of stressing religion’s ecumenical similarity, which prejudices
analysis toward the nation-state, this book stresses religious differences.
12 Catholicism and the Great War
37 Gary B. Cohen, “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in
the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” Central European History 40 (2007): 241–78;
Jonathan Kwan, “Nationalism and All That: Reassessing the Habsburg Monarchy and
Its Legacy,” European History Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2011): 88–108. For a pioneering work
of “national indifference,” see Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the
Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2008).
14 Catholicism and the Great War
national consciousness mattered, but this was not the only source of
loyalty.38
This book keeps the power relations of national sacrifice firmly in
mind, while also representing multiple layers of religious affiliation above
and below the nation: a universalistic Church, regional affiliations, fam-
ily relations, and personal identities – all of which were unified by
a centripetal–centrifugal relation to the Church of Rome. Politically
speaking, the most represented contingent in this study remains a pan-
Germanic version of Catholicism, in which German-speaking ethnic-
ity played a large part. However, the book contextualizes pan-German
Catholicism within other layers of Central European identities.
The comparison of Germany and Austria-Hungary also focuses on
the losing powers for reasons of historiographic strategy. One could, for
instance, make intriguing comparative studies between Catholic “win-
ners” and “losers” during the war: France and Austria-Hungary or Italy
and Austria-Hungary. However, the focus on Germany and Austria-
Hungary allows a transnational focus on Catholicism that is both sim-
ilar and different. It problematizes a pan-Germanic Central European
Catholicism, while also relating to the emerging nationality question for
Central and Eastern Europe. Most importantly, it allows a pointed his-
toriographic engagement with narratives of disenchantment and loss,
which is especially paramount in studies of the First World War’s cultural
legacy. The dominant narratives of the war’s cultural history represent
well the story of secularization and literary modernism. This, however,
has created a negative teleology. Focusing on the experiences of the losing
powers allows engagement with the metanarratives of secularization and
modernism, pointing the way toward a Church history of Central Europe
that goes beyond the words of bishops toward the beliefs and actions of
individual Catholics. It shows that religious believers, even from the los-
ing powers, had formative life experiences that have not been sufficiently
represented in the Great War’s cultural history.
How does one represent a religious experience, either one’s own or,
especially, someone else’s? There is, at the outset, a fundamental problem
of subjectivity: the inability to “peer into hearts,” as the Protestant the-
ologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has put it.39 There is also the problem of
evidence. As Annette Becker, one of the foremost historians of religion in
38 Gerd Krumeich and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., “Gott mit uns”: Nation, Religion, und
Gewalt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000).
39 Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “‘Dechristianisierung.’ Zur Problemgeschichte eines kul-
turpolitischen Topos,” in Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im
neuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1997), 66.
Introduction 15
France during the Great War, has written, “Traditional religious services
and spiritualism, prayers and amulets, the suffering of Christ and the
intercession of the saints, ordinary piety and extraordinary revelations
all contributed to the religion of wartime. Yet it is hard to reconstitute
prayers, fears, and suffering when they leave few archival traces.”40 Per-
haps more than other historical questions, religiosity is a problem that
tends toward an unreachable limit. Yet the attempt must be made, given
the sources at hand.
This is a religious history that gives an impressionistic portrait. For
those who seek a quantitatively grounded social scientific history of reli-
gion, this book will be especially unsatisfactory: for the most part, it does
not chase after representation of religion by measuring statistics such
as official communion reception and burial records (even when such
records exist), with a few pointed exceptions. Existing statistical data
on religious personnel, even for an institution with such deep bureau-
cratic ties as Catholic military chaplaincy in Germany, are often non-
comprehensive and plagued with uncertainty.41 As a statistical portrait,
the “evidence” will be problematic, in some cases relying on one per-
son’s retrospective account of what he or she thought, sometimes written
down years afterward. Nevertheless, supporting evidence for the book’s
argument draws on multiple archival sources across Europe, represent-
ing other voices marginalized in the historiography of the Great War.
This book has surveyed existing archives in an unprecedented breadth
and depth for its subject matter, including ecclesiastical, federal, state,
and local archives across Central Europe, including Vatican City. Build-
ing on previous histories of military religion in Central Europe, this
work particularly incorporates sources from Catholic areas of Germany,
including Bavaria and the Rhineland, as well as the records of the Austro-
Hungarian monarchy centralized in Vienna. This archival detail helps to
demonstrate that previously marginalized “epiphenomena” of religious
belief were, in fact, pan-European phenomena of utmost importance to
how masses of people understood and experienced the war.
Whenever possible, this study seeks the perspectives of the history
of everyday life of ordinary believers. Although the pope, bishops, and
prominent clerics are an important part of the story, this book strives
to give voice to the lay believers, especially women and children. It
42 Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of
Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 4 (2006): 132–49.
43 Richard P. McBrien, The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism (New York: HarperOne,
2008), 354.
Introduction 17
the history of the war, but their religious worldviews have not received
adequate attention. The notion of religion as a “lived condition” firmly
anchors religious inquiry in a history of everyday life, and this historio-
graphical field has seen marked advances applied to the study of Central
Europe during the Great War. Recent works have focused on the break-
down of social relations in capital cities, emphasizing the importance
of material conditions, especially food supplies. Maureen Healy’s path-
breaking work on the collapse of Imperial Vienna, Vienna and the Fall
of the Habsburg Empire, shows that women and children became political
actors with grievances against the state, and that the imperial patriarchy
lost its authority when people realized that the government could not pro-
vide food for its citizens.44 Similarly, with a staggering amount of empir-
ical detail, Roger Chickering’s urban history of Freiburg, The Great War
and Urban Life in Germany, is a pioneering attempt to give a “total history”
of “total war” using massive documentation to portray the experiences of
a single city. As Chickering freely admits, such histories of everyday life
are very good at capturing the “structural and material changes that the
war occasioned” but struggle “to accommodate the many different ways
in which urban residents made their own war – how they understood,
interpreted, or otherwise ‘constructed’ the war’s meaning as they dealt
with its mounting burdens.”45 Urban histories showing the socio-political
breakdown of the state are a vital component of the war, although one
cannot assume that wartime cities were inherent engines of seculariza-
tion. In contrast, this work is an attempt to recover the religious actions
and spiritual worldviews of masses of ordinary Catholic believers across
Central Europe. Thus, this book historically problematizes the religious
emotions of everyday life,46 articulating transnational Catholic beliefs in
imperial frameworks of the losing powers.
Regarding the structure of the book, Chapter 1 gives a sketch of
Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary. While providing a por-
trayal of religious life in the pre-1914 world, it outlines the structural
factors of Catholicism as a minority religion in Germany and a majority
religion in Austria-Hungary. Chapter 2 takes up the question of theologi-
cal worldviews, beginning with the infamous war theology of bishops and
44 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life
in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
45 Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7.
46 For approaches to the burgeoning subfield of the history of religious emotions in Central
Europe, see Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, and Monique Scheer, “Feeling and Faith:
Religious Emotions in German History,” German History 32, no. 3 (2014): 343–52.
More generally, see Nicole Eustace et al., “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of
Emotions,”The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1487–531.
18 Catholicism and the Great War
Where the Rôle of the Sexes is reversed—Polygamy and how it is brought about
—Coloration and Courtship—Instinctive Actions—The Importance of Landed
Possessions—The Meaning of “Display”—The Springs of “Behaviour”—A New
Light on the Wild-duck—The “Display” of the Great-crested Grebe—Some
Neglected Factors.
The significance of the varied behaviour of birds—more especially of
the males—during the period of reproductive activity must now be
more minutely analysed. But before this analysis can be profitably
begun, it will be necessary to recall the fact that there are several
cases known wherein the rôle of the sexes is largely reversed.
Herein the females do the “courting,” and fight one another as rivals
for the males; while the males perform the duties of incubation and
brooding, and feeding the young. This is really very remarkable, and
demands more attention than it has yet received.
What factors have brought about this curious reversal? In any search
for an explanation it must be borne in mind that in all such cases
polyandry is the rule, and in all such cases the female is larger and
more vividly coloured than the male. Here, then, we have exactly the
opposite to what obtains in cases of polygamy. What is the reason
for this preponderance of males? Why is it that when the males are
in excess of the females the latter should be the more brilliantly
coloured and the more amorous? These questions at present are
unanswerable. When polygamy obtains it seems always to be
assumed that it is explained by the excessive pugnacity of the males,
which, after fierce contests for the mastery, take forcible possession
of as many females as may be captured and held in durance; the
same argument seems never to have been applied when polyandry
obtains. There can be no doubt but that it applies in neither case.
When polygamy obtains, as we have already pointed out, the
females are not seized and captured by the males, they are not
victims of a lecherous lord. On the contrary, they seek the males,
and the intensity of the desire to satisfy their natural cravings
extinguishes any feeling of jealousy.
The same interpretation must obtain where the numerical values of
the sexes is reversed. Failure to appreciate this accounts for one of
the many futile suggestions made for the suppression of the rabbit
plague in Australia, which was that large hauls of these pests should
be made by netting, and that the females should be slain and the
males released. This, it was held, would lead to the speedy reduction
of the latter, which would kill one another in their fights for the
remaining females. The plan was impracticable, but the suggestion
demonstrated the prevalent belief as to the attitude of the male in
this respect. Had it been well founded, surely polyandrous species,
whether of birds or beasts, would never have existed; for, by the
reduction of the males, monogamy would speedily have been
restored. How, then, are we to explain polyandry? How are we to
explain the fact, as it seems to be the fact, that the excess of males
has brought about such a complete reversal in behaviour—the
males, instead of the females, requiring the aphrodisiac? The
solution of this problem probably lies with the physiologist. We now
know that the problem of sex does not rest merely in the complete
development of the primary sexual organs; we know that fertile
unions do not depend merely on the act of pairing, but on the
functional activity of those ancillary glands already referred to. And it
may well be that some change in the character of the secretions has
not only altered the numerical values of the sexes, but reversed the
normal rôle of coloration and behaviour. That is to say, neither
polygamy nor polyandry among the lower animals, at any rate, has
been brought about or is maintained by the excessive death-rate
due to combats for possession of mates, but must be explained as
demonstrating inherent changes in the germ-plasm, disturbing the
relative proportions of the sexes and correlated with a profound
transformation, not only in the behaviour of the sexes during the
period of reproductive activity, but also in their physical
characteristics.
The action of the primary sexual glands and of the ancillary glands
has, then, to be allowed for in all attempts to interpret behaviour in
sexual matters. No less so must this be the case in regard to the
development of coloration and other forms of ornament, and the
genesis of weapons of offence. But at present we are, in this
direction, dealing with an unknown quantity. The recognition of this,
however, should not deter us from attempting to solve the riddle of
sex from the phenomena which have so far been surveyed.
To-day the interpretation which holds the field is Darwin’s theory of
“Sexual Selection.” But this was framed rather to account for the
existence of conspicuous secondary sexual characters—the antlers of
Deer, the train of the Peacock, and so on; it did not take cognizance
of the unarmed, and the soberly-clad individuals. But whatever
shortcomings we may discover, real or imaginary, in this theory, we
must never forget that he had not only to analyse and present his
facts, but he had first to collect them. This, in his case, was a more
laborious task than most people seem to suppose. Our criticisms to-
day are based, not so much on the revelations of new facts, as on
the harvests of his gleaning. Yet when all is said and done, the
theory of “Sexual Selection” remains, though perhaps in a new
setting.
To attempt to epitomize this theory is to essay a very difficult task.
But, in a condensed form, it may be said to be a theory which
accounts for the development of secondary sexual characters, on the
one hand through the agency of conquest by battle, whereby rival
males strive for the possession of one or more females, who have no
choice in the matter, or who may deliberately elect to follow the
victor: and on the other by display of conspicuous ornamentation, or
of more or less grotesque antics, or of some form of music, using
this term in a very wide sense. Wherever display is the agent,
however, its purpose seems to be to win the affections of the female
to whom such attentions are addressed. She is supposed to elect to
mate with the finest performers of a number of suitors. In this way,
it is assumed, the intensity of the display, whatever its nature, has
been gradually increased.
Wallace strongly opposed this, contending that it assumed too much,
that it assumed a common and uniform standard of perfection
shared by all the females concerned in the selection, which is indeed
assuming too much. But his own theory was no more satisfactory.
Indeed it was very much less so, for he contended that these various
exaggerations of colour and form are to be regarded simply as
evidences of a superabundant vitality, though there is no evidence
that “superabundant vitality,” if it exists, is a transmissible character.
The revised version of the Sexual Selection theory advanced in these
pages is largely inspired by the work of Mr. H. Eliot Howard who, in
his Monograph on the British Warblers, has not only added very
materially to our knowledge of the life-histories of these birds,
during the reproductive period, but has also done much—both in the
direction of destructive, and constructive criticism, of generally
accepted conceptions on this head—to set us on the right track for
further research.
A study of his work leaves one with the conviction that, while these
birds exhibit what we may call a nascent intelligence, their actions,
on the whole, may be described as instinctive, or congenitally
definite. That is to say, they follow one another in definite sequence.
Hence we must regard each new phase in the chain of events
appertaining to the reproductive cycle, as following one another in a
definite sequence, so that any break therein throws the orderly
performance of the necessary acts out of gear. There is no
realization of what reproduction means, no deliberate striving to
achieve that end. Each new phase brings its own set of associations
and sets a new train of actions in motion, which are performed
mechanically. For instance, these Warblers, like hosts of other
species under similar circumstances, are scrupulously careful to
remove the fæces of their young from the nest; thereby preserving it
in a sanitary condition. It is certain that any neglect to do this would
speedily end in the death of the young. This act is “instinctive”; it is
not performed because the parents have evolved any views on
sanitation, and any strain in whom this instinct was defective would
speedily become eliminated. Mr. Howard has demonstrated the
mechanical character of this sanitary measure by placing leaves in
nests of young. The parents, having fed their offspring, at once
seized upon the leaf and commenced to dispose of it after their
usual fashion, first by trying to swallow it and then by carrying it
away. They did not, evidently, realize the difference between the
texture of the leaf and the milk-white, jelly-like envelope which
always encloses the fæcal matter of the nestling. We shall probably
never know how this most vitally important instinct came into being;
nor can we hope to discover what chain of happenings begot the
instinct, which each parent displays, to gently stimulate the cloacal
lips of their offspring in order to induce the discharge of the fæces
when this does not immediately follow the stimulus of swallowing
food.
We cannot credit these birds with notions on the importance of the
regular discharge of the evacuations. Equally mysterious is the
development of the envelope enclosing the fæcal matter. This is
jelly-like in substance, and of considerable thickness, and is enclosed
within a very delicate skin or pellicle, enabling one to lift the whole
in the fingers without soiling them. How and where it is formed
should not long evade discovery. But how it has come to be is
another matter. We can, at any rate, vaguely account for responses
of the organism to internal stimuli reacting directly on the individual,
but here is an elaborate mechanism evolved in response to extra-
personal needs: and which cannot be regarded as of exactly the
same configuration as the instinct to feed the young.
A return must be made to the nature of the early phases in the
procession of the reproductive instincts. Mr. Howard’s study of the
Warblers seems to show conclusively that these first manifest
themselves in an overmastering desire to seize upon territory large
enough to ensure an abundance of food for the offspring that are
yet to be. To this end the males arrive from their far-distant winter
quarters at least a week in advance of the females. Since each
returns approximately to the scene of last year’s nursery, the arrivals
are fairly distributed at the first; but nevertheless this distribution
inevitably brings a conflict of interests between one or more males,
perchance young birds about to start in life, and having therefore no
definite objective. But whatever the reason, the competition is there.
The strongest male remains in possession, and immediately
commences to express the ecstasy of feeling which possesses him in
continuous outbursts of song. Such, doubtless, answer to the
bellowing of the male stag. They advertise the presence of a male to
the female, who, as she arrives, would seem to be already stirred by
the rising storm of sexual desire, for having once discovered a male
in possession of the all-necessary site for the nest, and the equally
necessary domain, each settles down to conjugal bliss: within
twenty-four hours the task of building has begun. There is evidently
here no sexual selection in Darwin’s sense: no choice from among a
number of males of the individual which most excites desire within
her; but the mating of the most mettlesome, most virile males has
been determined before her arrival and by a double sieve. In the
first place, the duller-witted birds fail to secure suitable territory, and
in the second, the territory, having been taken, must be held by
force, so that only the strongest males remain to mate when the
females eventually arrive. So far as one can see, selection is less
exacting in the case of the females, which apparently need do little
more than respond to the advances of the males.
Plate 22.
With the advent of the females the amorous instincts of the male
speedily gather force; but for their satisfaction it is imperative that
the female should be possessed by a like desire. To provoke this, for
it is essential to the well-being of the race that offspring should be
produced as early as possible, some form of aphrodisiac seems to be
necessary. This fact has never been properly realized, though it is
implied in Darwin’s theory of “Sexual Selection.” Here, however, it
was used to account for the evolution of resplendent coloration,
eccentric postures, and dances which, it was assumed, enabled or
induced the female to choose the most mettlesome males. What
obtained among sombre-clad species, appears to have excited no
curiosity among the students of the evolution theory. Hence it comes
somewhat as a surprise to find that the soberly-clad Warblers
behave exactly as though they too wore coats of many colours. After
what has been said in the last chapter on this head it will be
unnecessary to describe these displays among the Warblers in detail,
more especially as my friend Mr. Howard has kindly allowed me to
use some of the illustrations from his book. These show convincingly
enough that the wings and tail are made to play the same part as
though they bore all the hues of the rainbow. To bring this fact home
compare the figures of some of these small birds clad in sober russet
and black with that of the Sun Bittern (Eurypyga helias) in like
mood, whose wings and tail when spread, and only then, display
bands of vivid chestnut-red, contrasting with bands of black, on a
background of grey and buff, variegated with delicate mottlings and
vermiculations of black and brown, and streaks of white. In the case
of the Warblers, it is to be remarked, the male, in these ecstatic
moods, will commonly hold a leaf, or a piece of stick, in his beak, as
if suggesting the work of nest-building and its delightful sequence.
This, or its equivalent, is a common phase, for the Great Crested
Grebe, for example, in these paroxysms will dive and bring up weed,
the nest material of the species, as an offering to his mate, or as a
stimulant to her yet slumbering passion.
It seems clear, then, that the evolution of colour is not the stimulant
to display, for this is present where conspicuous colours are wanting.
Yet it can readily be understood how the association of ideas in
regard to colour and display arose, for there are cases where this
interpretation seems inevitable. Such are afforded by certain sea-
birds like the Kittiwake, Guillemot, Fulmar and Cormorant, wherein
the inside of the mouth is of a lurid orange-red in the case of the
first-mentioned, and of flaming gamboge yellow in that of the
others. During moments of sexual ecstasy the mouth is widely
opened, as if to charm the beholder with its gaudy hue. Both sexes
have the same colouring, and both behave alike. But it is doubtful
whether either is conscious that its own mouth is like that exposed
to its gaze: the action is sympathetic. No doubt it may play its part
in stimulating desire, but we cannot contend from this that it has
been evolved by sexual selection, that is to say, that the hues have
undergone a process of gradual intensification owing to the
deliberate rejection of the less gaily-coloured suitors. The tendency
to develop colour in the mouth would appear to be latent in all birds.
Plate 23.
Plate 24.
Plate 25.
From a drawing by H. Grönvold.
A MALE-SAVI’S WARBLER
—in one of his “courtship” attitudes. Note the leaf held in the beak.
Face page 152.
Plate 26.
Photo copyright by D. Seth-Smith.
ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE KAGU’S “DISPLAY.”
Herein two birds are seen facing one another with the great head-
crest fully erected. While in this mood these birds will strut up and
down with mincing gait and drooping wings. This is a posture
commonly assumed during momentary excitement, whereas the
posture shown in plate 24 is apparently only assumed during
moments of sexual excitement.
[Face page 154.
Instances of such impotency on the part of either sex are wanting,
and we can only speculate as to how such cases would be met.
Would a female who had chanced to settle in the territory of a male
whose sexual impulses carried him no further than seizing territory
remain with him throughout the mating season, held by an
imperfectly roused, ill-defined, sexual instinct? Or, eventually
becoming mate-hungry, and failing to stimulate him to perform his
part, would she desert him and seek another mate? On the other
hand, would a male, failing to arouse response in the female he had
secured, drive her away and supplant her?
In other words, are we then justified in postulating differential
effects in regard to display: a minimum of intensity to ensure
mating? A display of some sort is essential. It may be feeble as
compared with that of another species—that of the Sparrow, for
instance, compared with that of the Peacock—but it must be
sufficiently good of its kind to effect its purpose, which is to “hustle”
up the production of offspring. A phlegmatic but virile male, or a too
feeble performer, is almost as certainly doomed to extinction as an
impotent male; for his offspring will probably be eliminated by the
adverse conditions of existence to which their late appearance
exposed them. Where a female settles down with a male which does
not attain to the standard of display characteristic of his race, it is
conceivable she may sooner or later seek a mate elsewhere,
deserting the phlegmatic bird as if under the impression that she
had made the mistake of settling down with one of her own sex.
There is no need that the female should have to “select” the best
performer of a number of males displaying at the same time and
place as a number of rivals.
Finally, the ornamental crests and frills, and the vivid hues which so
many birds display have not arisen, as is generally supposed, as a
direct result of the selection, by the females, of the most vividly
coloured, or ornamented, from among a number of suitors
presenting varying degrees of intensity in ornamentation. Such “frills
and furbelows” are to be regarded as “expression points” of internal
variations in the germ-plasm, which have been free to develop along
their own lines because they have not proved in disharmony with the
conditions of the birds’ environment. Their development is to be
traced to the stimulating action of the “hormones” which control
both pigmentation and structure, as is shown by the fact that both
are modified by any interference with the glands in question. Such
ornamental features then are the concomitants not the results of
Sexual selection.
The development of ornament, whether of colour or structure, may
be taken then as an index of specialization, and as one of the many
manifestations of that variation which is going on in every part of
every living organism.
So long as the continued increments in the development of these
characters do not hamper their possessors in the struggle for
existence, they are free to go on developing. Sexual selection, other
things being equal, operates by according the greatest number of
descendants to the most amorous, and not necessarily to those of
the brightest hues.
Plate 27.
Photos copyright, G. Herring.
SOME STRANGE ACCOMPANIMENTS OF
COURTSHIP.
THE WHITE-HEADED BELL-BIRD.
This species is remarkable for the enormous,
erectile wattles which arise from the base of
the beak of the male at the courting season.
THE UMBRELLA-BIRD.
The crest which adorns the crown of the head
has many counterparts, but the long-feather
clad wattle which depends from the fore-part
of the breast is unique.
Plate 28.
SKULL OF THE AMERICAN WHITE BEAKED PELICAN.
The beak of this bird develops at each breeding season an irregular
horny plate which falls off at the end of this period, It is difficult to
regard this as a sexual “ornament,” yet it comes under this
category.
But Sexual selection does not begin, and end, with the evolution of
frills and furbelows. “Behaviour” counts for more than is generally
supposed. This is as specific as “structure,” that is to say, it is as
constant for each species as is its coloration, and it is also as
variable. That Evolution may be determined by variation in
behaviour, no less than through structural variations, is a possibility
which has received but little consideration at the hands of students
of Evolution.
The singular history of the Australian Bower-birds lends additional
support to this view, and at the same time provides an additional
argument against the generally accepted opinion that bright colours
have been evolved by reason of the preference shown by the
females for the most vividly coloured of their suitors. For while the
males affect all the tricks and turns which are the common
accompaniment of courtship, they, in addition, introduce very
extraordinary features in the shape of “bowers” cunningly
constructed and often gaily decorated, as will be seen presently.
Eight of the total number of species of this group exhibit this
behaviour, and while they differ very conspicuously in coloration
among themselves, they agree very closely in the type of the bower
they build. If the coloration is determined by the female, then in this
they display very different standards, and if they do select, each
according to the standard of the species, then we must suppose that
they also must exercise a choice in regard to the character of the
bower, the favoured male being the best builder. But why, in this