Knowledge and nationalism in Imperial Germany: A cultural history of the Association of Saint Charles Borromeo, 1890--1914.

摘要

In the Imperial era (1871--1918), lay associations structured the confessional experience of German Catholics in the midst of great social change and political ferment. While much attention has focused on how these associations lent form to a Catholic sub-culture, little has been paid to the accommodations they negotiated between traditional faith and a rapidly modernizing society. One of the largest and most influential of these organizations was the Verein vom heifgen Karl Borromaus, which was founded in 1844. Devoted to the spread of "good" literature among Catholic readers, the Borromausverein had achieved a membership of over 260,000 by 1914, and it ran some 4,600 libraries and reading rooms. By advocating Catholic exposure to the great works of German culture and promoting the habits of mind associated with the German tradition of self-cultivation or Bildung, the Borromausverein drew an important segment of the Catholic lower-middle class into an ethos of nationalism and intellectual expansion.; My dissertation presents the first cultural study of the Borromausverein in the Imperial era. It investigates the Association's success in imparting Bildung to lower-middle-class Catholics---despite the roots of this concept in secular philosophy and Protestant piety. I examine how this organization, which sought initially to defend the boundaries of the Catholic subculture, had loosened these boundaries by the beginning of the twentieth century and sanctioned broad cultural consumption among its members.; The main sources of my research are institutional papers, reports from local chapters of the Borromausverein, documents from related organizations, Catholic and Protestant journals, and contemporary pamphlet literature. In order to set the reading history of the Borromausverein 's members in its broader contexts, the study exploits a variety of personal declarations of cultural tastes---secret and published observations of reading trends by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, statistics on book choices in both Catholic and non-Catholic communities, purchasing records of librarians throughout Germany, and accounts of home libraries. Methodologically, this dissertation investigates the nexus among religion, knowledge, and respectability in modern German culture, combining social analysis, intellectual history, and discourse interpretation.