The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany

Abstract

In the 1970s and'80s, scholars of religion in Central Europe would habitually claim that this topic was overlooked in histories of the modern era. On the one hand, prevailing paradigms of secularization and modernization seemed to squeeze out religion as a serious topic for analysis. On the other, old-fashioned institutional church histories, often apologetic in character, did not make religion seem like a very promising or exciting area for social and cultural historians. How things have changed. Now, confessional identity and religious culture are at the very heart of our understanding of modern Germany (and Austria). The work of Thomas Nipperdey, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, David Blackbourn, Helmut Walser Smith, Wolfgang Altgeld, and Jonathan Sperber, among many others, has revolutionized scholarship on Germany in particular and Central Europe in general. At present, it is hard to imagine serious discussions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without some treatment of confessional issues. Many scholars would go much further and place religion and religious issues at the heart of political and intellectual developments in the modern era. Róisín Healy clearly falls into this latter camp. Her recent study, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany, builds upon some of the perspectives and conclusions offered by recent scholarship and mines new ground in its portrayal of “Anti-Jesuitism” as a political and intellectual movement in Imperial Germany.