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This conceptual historical investigation of Adolf Hitler's use and understanding of the term worldview (Weltanschauung) revisits the debate over the relationship of religion and National Socialism. The tendency of most studies of Hitler's worldview to focus on the genealogy of his beliefs correlates to an anachronistic definition of worldview. By contrast, this article reveals that Hitler's own usage of the term worldview was decisively shaped by German culture wars that preceded his entrance into politics in 1919. The article shows how the varying Nazi religious policies, from supporting 'positive Christianity' during the Weimar Republic to suppressing elements within the churches once taking power, continued to be framed by the dynamics of the culture wars.

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought that in many ways has replaced the theory of secularization. According to postcolonial scholars, neither the theory nor the practice of secularization was politically neutral. They define secularism as the set of discourses, policies, and constitutional arrangements whereby modern states and liberal elites have sought to unify nations and divide colonial populations. This definition is quite different from the original meaning of secularism, as an immanent scientific worldview linked to anticlericalism. Anthropologist Talal Asad has connected nineteenth-century worldview secularism to twenty-first century political secularism through a genealogical account that stresses continuities of liberal hegemony. This essay challenges this account. It argues that liberal elites did not merely subsume worldview secularism in their drive for state secularization. Using the tools of conceptual history, the essay shows that one reason that "secularization" only achieved its contemporary meaning in Germany after 1945 was that radical freethinkers and other anticlerical secularists had previously resisted liberal hegemony. The essay concludes by offering an agenda for research into the discontinuous history of these two types of secularism.

"Exploring the culture and worldview of socialist secularism and its impact on German history, this book reveals the educational efforts of red secularists to transmit to workers their humanistic-materialistic worldview and their crucial role in the political struggles over religion which fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933"--

"Exploring the culture and worldview of socialist secularism and its impact on German history, this book reveals the educational efforts of red secularists to transmit to workers their humanistic-materialistic worldview and their crucial role in the political struggles over religion which fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933"--

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform

AbstractThis article shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany's most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of religion in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the "pure" council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and Bolshevik party rule.

This conceptual historical investigation of Adolf Hitler's use of the term 'worldview' ( Weltanschauung) opens new perspectives on the debate over the relationship of religion and National Socialism. Most studies of Hitler's worldview have focused on the genealogy of his beliefs, an approach that has led to an anachronistic understanding of worldview. By contrast, this article reveals that Hitler's own usage of the term 'worldview' was decisively shaped by the German culture wars that preceded his entrance into politics in 1919. The article shows how the varying Nazi religious policies, from supporting 'positive Christianity' during the Weimar Republic to suppressing elements within the churches once taking power, continued to be framed by the dynamics of the culture wars.

This essay examines the interplay of politics, science and theology in the debates over 'Protestant freedom' that took place in mid-nineteenth century Germany. It begins by tracing how rival factions of conservative, liberal, and radical clergy sought to mobilize the tradition of 'Protestant Freedom' during the period of ferment preceding the Revolution of 1848. The essay then turns to the 1860s to explore how church liberals argued for the compatibility of natural science and Protestantism. The final section picks up debates among radicals, who, on the eve of German unification in 1870, were divided over the question of whether the conscience, as defined in the Lutheran tradition, was compatible with scientific naturalism.

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History on 'Europe's interwar Kulturkampf' explores the religious dimensions of the deep conflicts that characterized the interbellum. The heightened sense of contingency, the partisan violence, and the political polarization have led observers to call this period an 'age of anxiety', an 'age of catastrophe', 'a second thirty years war', even a 'world civil war of ideologies'.1 Introducing the term 'culture war' into this crowded field of catchphrases is meant as a useful provocation. It inserts religion into the analysis of the clash of modern worldviews, which have hitherto been viewed largely from the perspective of political ideology. Furthermore, it prompts comparisons with other 'culture wars', in particular the nineteenth-century clashes over the public role of the Catholic Church, during which the term Kulturkampf was originally coined. The aim of this article is to sketch out the dimensions of such a comparison, drawing on some of the key findings of the contributors to this special issue. Finally, it asks what bearing these investigations of the interwar Kulturkampf could have on our understanding of the course of twentieth-century European history as a whole.

This article contends that Christian anxieties over secularism played a significant role in the political crisis at the end of the Weimar Republic. Although these anxieties flared when German Communists began to imitate elements of the Soviet antireligious campaigns after 1929, their roots lay in a struggle with secularist movements stretching back to the nineteenth-century "culture war" (Kulturkampf). Catholic and Protestant counter-mobilizations of 1930 to 1933 generated theologico-political concepts and calls for state intervention that fed into the mounting political crisis. The Briining government managed to curb excesses, but its inability to completely halt anticlericalism allowed nationalist opponents to capitalize on the new Kulturkampf. The article concludes by demonstrating how the NSDAP managed to portray itself as a non-confessional champion of Christian interests.

When asked to provide his own "solution to the Jewish Question" for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner responded, "I do not know how to give an answer to your question, because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every location." While untypical for its time, Mauthner's viewpoint is shared by many scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of "Jewish Questions" proliferated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the purported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and antinomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative antisemitism, they have examined the role of the "Jewish Question" in other political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elaboration of the state, civil society, and the nation. Cast in ambivalent roles at once powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something historians have referred to as the "emancipation contract." Generally speaking, it was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the "Jewish Question" not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a framework through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.

This chapter argues that the role of religion in the political and social dynamics of the Weimar Republic was determined by two axes of confessional conflict. Alongside the Catholic–Protestant antagonism, there were also significant tensions between secularism and Christianity. Both axes contributed to the formation of different social milieus during the Kaiserreich and supported their continued articulation during the Weimar Republic. The chapter explores developments within the milieus, such as the significant growth and radicalization of freethought within the socialist and communist parties, as well as the shifting relationships between them, which created a fractured and complex set of political struggles, compromises, and alliances. The republic was bookended by efforts to overcome confessional divides in Germany through revolutionary means, on the one hand through the aborted attempt to fully secularize the German state in 1918 and, on the other, the campaign by the National Socialists to win Christian support by calling for 'positive Christianity' to heal Germany's confessional divide by unifying Protestants and Catholics and destroying secularism.