On January 18, 1871, King Wilhelm I of Prussia was crowned German Emperor. This event seemingly ended debate over the “German Question”—how to define the German nation and unite the disparate German states—by unifying Germany under Prussian-Protestant hegemony and excluding Catholic Austria from the new Reich. This “kleindeutsch” solution to the German Question effected political unification but left intact the longstanding confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants. Because confessional identity and difference were pivotal to how contemporary Germans imagined a nation, the meaning of German national identity remained contested even after unification. But the formation of German national identity during this period was never neutral—confessional alterity and antagonism was used to imagine confessionally exclusive notions of German national identity.

The establishment of a “kleindeutsch” German Empire under Prussian auspices, the anti-Catholic policies of the Kulturkampf, and the 1883 Luther anniversaries were all stages in a process that conflated Protestantism with German national identity and marginalized German Catholics from early Wilhelmine society, culture, and politics. Scholars have studied this confessionalization of the German national idea, or how German Protestants appealed to religious identities and differences to construct a confessionally exclusive German national idea.Footnote ¹ But by concentrating on religious alterity and antagonism, historians of the confessionalization of the national idea have neglected to ask how efforts to heal the confessional divide might have colored ideas of the German nation.

In fact, little research at all has been conducted on the relationship of Christian ecumenism to nineteenth-century German nationalism. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century German proponents of church unity maintained that the German nation could never be properly unified until the confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants was healed. Nineteenth-century German ecumenism was not just a means of reuniting the separated confessions—it was also a means of imagining German national unity and identity.

This leaves open a historiographical niche—one I refer to as the inter-confessionalization or ecumenization of the German national idea—that this paper seeks to fill. In particular, I examine how Ut Omnes Unum—an ecumenical group of German Catholics and Protestants—challenged the conflation of Protestantism and German national identity during the Wilhelmine era and instead proposed an inter-confessional notion of German national identity that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. Their efforts underline the inextricable links among religion, theology, and political culture in Wilhelmine Germany. The Ut Omnes Unum group also complements the historiography of German nationalism by suggesting that Wilhelmine-era Germans appealed not only to categories of difference, but also to notions of unity, when reflecting on what it meant to be German. As such, Ut Omnes Unum points to an alternative history of German nationalism—a German national idea based on identification with, rather than the marginalization of, a confessional “Other.”

I. The Confessionalization of the German National Idea

Each stage of the process of German unification had underscored the persistent relationship between the confessional divide and the German national idea. In July 1866, Prussia won a decisive victory against Austria at the battle of Königgrätz. This victory effectively ended the Austro-Prussian War and established Prussia's hegemony over German-speaking Europe. German nationalists bragged that Königgrätz represented a confessional victory for Protestantism over Catholicism and redemption for Protestant Germany's terrible losses in the Thirty Years War.Footnote ² The Prussian victory at Königgrätz also precipitated the dissolution of the German Confederation, an alliance of states that had included Austria and held Germany together since the 1815 Congress of Vienna. In its place, an alliance of overwhelmingly Protestant northern German states was established in 1867. This “North German Confederation” was dominated by Prussia and excluded Catholic Austria and the southern German states of Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, and Württemberg. And it would become a powerful constituent of the German Empire that was established in 1871.

The old German Confederation had kept the confessional peace during an era of increasing religious integration by issuing and enforcing ecclesiastical policies from the federal level that protected religious minorities. But the North German Confederation stipulated that ecclesiastical policies would be set by individual states rather than by the Confederation itself. Fearing the constituent governments of the overwhelmingly Protestant North German Confederation would restrict the rights of German Catholics in those states where they were minorities, Catholic politicians requested that religious freedom be included in the new constitution of the confederation. But Protestant liberals in the North German parliament vetoed this request and pointed to it as an act of Catholic disloyalty.Footnote ³ The establishment of the North German Confederation not only represented a realignment of the confessional demography of Germany—it also pointed to the increasingly Protestant inflection of the nascent German nation.

The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the subsequent unification of Germany exacerbated confessional tensions between Catholics and Protestants. During the war, German Protestant sermons—whose themes were frequently anti-Catholic—referred to German Protestants as God's chosen people and the French (read: Catholics) as deserving of defeat and humiliation.Footnote ⁴ Further marrying Protestantism and German national identity, Protestant congregations celebrated the emperor's birthday and the anniversary of the Battle of Sedan (1870) as religious holidays while German Catholics did not.Footnote ⁵ The formation of the German national idea—still in negotiation—continued to turn on confessional difference.

Even after unification in 1871 the German Question still lingered due to the persistence of the confessional divide. Politically unified, the German nation remained split by the confessional divide. And answers to the lingering German Question were increasingly confessionalized in a manner that associated the meaning of being German with Protestantism. The Prussian court pastor Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909) recognized the new German Empire as a distinctively Protestant empire and claimed to see the hand of God at work in 1517 and again in 1871.Footnote ⁶ The Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung—an orthodox Lutheran journal—triumphantly proclaimed that the epoch of German history that had begun with the Reformation in October 1517 had come to a God-ordained fulfillment with the establishment of the German Empire.Footnote ⁷ And the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) regarded the Franco-Prussian War as a final victory for German Protestantism over German Catholicism. This rhetoric, which imagined German unification as the fulfillment of a process begun during the Reformation, not only underscores the conflation of Protestantism with the German national idea, but also points to a “nationalization of the confessional idea.” As the historian Gérald Chaix has pointed out, Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation functioned as “foundational events, multifaceted usable historical realities and conflict-afflicted sites of memory.”Footnote ⁸ The use and abuse of these sites were never confessionally, nor politically, neutral. Instead of standing alone as religious sites of memory, Germany's foundational confessional figures and traditions—namely Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation—would be nationalized in the service of a Protestant-German idea of the nation.

Even after the war and the successful establishment of the German Empire, German Protestant pastors and German nationalists spoke of the need for a final victory of Germany over France. The total subjection of German Catholics—who represented the “inner Paris” and the “France within Germany”—was conceived to be a condition for this final victory.Footnote ⁹ By virtue of their confessional difference, German Catholics were imagined as Germany's internal foreigners and increasingly marginalized from German society and politics as enemies of the new Reich.

The lack of German confessional homogeneity provoked different responses from German liberal nationalists and German Catholics. German liberals and cultural Protestants responded to the lack of German internal cohesion by passing the Kulturkampf legislation. This legislation was intended to compel the integration of Catholics into normative (read: Protestant) German society and culture. It included the dissolution of the Catholic Office at the Prussian Culture Ministry, the closure of Catholic seminaries and assumption of clerical training by the German state, the abolition of religious orders (most famously the Jesuits), the prohibition of Catholic religious education in state schools, the compulsory introduction of civil marriage, the confiscation of church property, and the arrest and exile of thousands of Catholic clergy who opposed these policies. The Kulturkampf represented an internal war waged by the German state against “enemies of the Reich”—as German Catholics were known—to compel the religious homogenization of the German nation and to maintain its tentative unity. But instead of narrowing the confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants, the Kulturkampf only widened it.

In response to the Kulturkampf legislation, Catholic distrust of the German state increased and German Catholics withdrew into confessionally segregated milieux—social organizations, devotional societies, the Catholic press, and the political Catholicism of the Center Party.Footnote ¹⁰ These institutions became the main vehicles of the Catholic milieu and served to reinforce Catholic identity and difference by encouraging a shared Catholic worldview. The German sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius first proposed the idea of the Catholic milieu as a German Catholic social environment or subculture that formed as a response to the increasing power of anti-clerical German liberals and the resulting marginalization of Catholics from nineteenth-century German society and politics.Footnote ¹¹ But these milieux also had the effect of isolating German Catholics into social and confessional “ghettos” that restricted their participation in wider German society and politics.Footnote ¹²

Wilhelmine German Catholics seemed trapped in a double bind between processes that questioned their status as constituents of the German nation and a Catholic milieu that perpetuated their isolation from German society. But there was in fact a third way between the Protestant marginalization of German Catholics and the Catholic withdrawal into a confessionally segregated and socially isolated milieu. This third way—represented by an irenical group of German Catholics and Protestants known as Ut Omnes Unum—suggested the possibility of an ecumenization of the German national idea or an inter-confessional notion of German national identity.

II. Ut Omnes Unum and the German National Idea

The Ut Omnes Unum group consisted of German Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity dedicated to confessional unity and the realization of a German national idea that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. The group had its origins in devotional societies established by the Lutheran noblewoman Julie von Massow (1825–1901). The initiator and patroness of Ut Omnes Unum was born in 1825 to the von Behrs, an old Pomeranian noble family. In 1852 she married Wilhelm von Massow (1802–1867), a conservative member of the Prussian Upper House and himself from a Lutheran and Pomeranian noble family. The couple's acquaintances included the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the legal thinker Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861), and Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). In addition to these prominent figures, Julie and her husband maintained close ties with the Prussian jurist Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach (1795–1877), the Protestant historian Heinrich Leo (1799–1878), and the conservative politician and Lutheran convert from Judaism, Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861). Gerlach and Leo had participated in an 1860 meeting of conservative Catholics and Protestants in Erfurt who envisioned church unity as an association of pious German Catholics and Protestants united to defend Germany against atheism, liberalism, and revolution.Footnote ¹³ During the early 1860s the Massows lived in Berlin, where, inspired by the Erfurt Conference, Julie established an informal devotional society in which she, her husband, and a handful of Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran friends prayed together for an end to the schism between the Christian confessions.

After her husband's death in 1867, Massow moved to Dresden where she assumed the education of her nephew. In Dresden she began to host new meetings of conservative and irenical Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity at her home. This Dresden circle became a celebrated locus of conservative opposition to Bismarck and the Kulturkampf. The leader of the Catholic Center Party, Ludwig Windthorst (1812–1891), quipped that if Massow's new salon had been located in Berlin it would have been the “center of the Center Party.”Footnote ¹⁴ The ultramontane Catholic press showered accolades on the Dresden circle for its opposition to the Kulturkampf, if not for its irenical tendencies.Footnote ¹⁵ And the group's efforts in support of church unity won approval from the irenical Bishop of Mainz, Wilhelm Emmanuel Freiherr von Ketteler (1811–1877), who himself had encouraged prayer as a means of healing the German confessional divide.

In addition to attracting both ecumenical and ultramontane Catholics who were opposed to the Kulturkampf, Ut Omnes Unum won support from arch-conservative Protestants opposed to Bismarck's policies of militarism and nationalism. Perhaps the most notable Protestant patron of Massow's salon was Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach. Indeed, Gerlach was typical of the ultra-conservative Protestants attracted to Ut Omnes Unum. A staunch opponent of a kleindeutsch German Empire, Gerlach famously cut ties with his old friend Otto von Bismarck and other moderate conservatives after the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War.Footnote ¹⁶ But he later supported Ut Omnes Unum and their inter-confessional vision of German national unity. In fact, his dying words—“I wanted nothing more than to witness the unity of the church”—would serve as the motto and were printed on the masthead of the Ut Omnes Unum journal.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus in spite of the confessional differences of the attendees, the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Ahrendts (1820–1897) recalled meetings of the Ut Omnes Unum group in Julie von Massow's Dresden home as:

In response to the anti-Catholic legislation of the Kulturkampf and the recognition that an ultimate resolution of the German Question would require bridging the confessional divide, in 1879 Catholic and Protestant members of Massow's Dresden circle established a journal dedicated to promoting “understanding and union” between the separated confessions. The founders proposed the title Ut Omnes Unum: “that all may be one.” The title—a reference to John 17:21—reflected their ecumenical commitments as well as their hopes for an inter-confessional German nation. The journal's founders conceived that the attendees of Julie von Massow's devotional societies and Dresden salon would provide the audience for their ideas.Footnote ¹⁹ Massow herself continued to preside over meetings of the Dresden circle and was active in the publication of the journal. An informal tally of regular contributors to Ut Omnes Unum indicates twice as many Catholics as evangelicals, although evangelical contributors were more often clergymen and Catholic contributors laypersons. The journal also solicited and printed letters from orthodox Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed for their thoughts on the possibilities and limits of church unity.

A recurring theme of Ut Omnes Unum was the notion that the German confessional divide had hindered the unification of the German nation for centuries, and that it would continue to inhibit real unity even after 1871. In an early article one anonymous contributor to the journal identified the separation of the confessions as a perpetual sin of Christianity and one that demanded absolution. This sin was especially lamentable for the German nation because in Germany the confessional divide had become the manifest expression of German identity and difference. Despite the political unification of Germany the author claimed that the German people remained internally divided. It was thus an obligation of every earnest German Christian, of all German patriots, the Catholic and Protestant clergy, and German princes and statesmen to work toward overcoming the confessional divide for the welfare of the German people and the cause of peace throughout the German Empire.Footnote ²⁰

The Westphalian Catholic priest and regular attendee of Massow's Dresden salon Adolf Röttscher (1829–1896) underscored this point and reminded readers of the journal that Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation had contributed to the centrifugal forces already at work in sixteenth-century Germany.Footnote ²¹ Since then, Röttscher claimed that foreign and domestic powers had exploited divisions between German Catholics and Protestants in order to render Germany weak and to gain power for themselves.Footnote ²² Like the rhetoric employed by Protestant nationalists during the Franco-Prussian War, Röttscher invoked memories of Luther and the Reformation to inflect his own notion of the German national idea. But Röttscher's nationalization of these confessional memories saw 1871 not as the fulfillment of 1517 but instead the primary factor in Germany's incomplete unification.

The Silesian Catholic priest Carl Seltmann (1842–1911)—a contributor and editor to the journal from 1879 to 1886—also regarded the confessional divide in more than religious terms: as a “lamentable misfortune of our fatherland and our people.”Footnote ²³ Seltmann disdained Germans whom he believed were guilty of exploiting the confessional divide in order to further their own agendas. Indeed, he accused Bismarck, German liberal nationalists, and those cultural Protestants who supported the exclusion of Catholics from German social and political life as traitors to the German fatherland and the true cause of German unity.Footnote ²⁴

If church unity was conceived as a prerequisite for German national unity, the question begged was, how should the churches be united? Indeed, members of the Ut Omnes Unum group sometimes disagreed on how best to unite the confessions. Church unity of course meant different things to different figures and the concept could be amorphous.Footnote ²⁵ From its inception the Ut Omnes Unum journal was conceived as a forum that might encourage simple rapprochement between the faiths—mutual understanding, cooperation, and peace—in support of the ultimate goal of a full reunion of the separated confessions.

Other members of the group sought to realize church unity by minimizing differences in liturgy and theology between Catholics and Protestants and by emphasizing shared beliefs. Carl Seltmann and the Lutheran Church administrator Hermann Opitz (1828–1909) recognized a basis for this notion of church unity in Article VII of the 1530 Augsburg Confession. Article VII defined the Church as the congregation of the faithful and stipulated that the only requirements for unity were preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments to the faithful. In fact, despite its origins as a Lutheran statement of faith, Seltmann and Opitz read the whole of the Augsburg Confession as an irenical document.Footnote ²⁶

To illustrate the inter-confessional possibilities of the Augsburg Confession, Seltmann appealed to St. Augustine's ecumenical dictum: in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.Footnote ²⁷ Seltmann argued that with regard to those necessary beliefs Catholics and Protestants were in fact united—the Roman Confutation (1530) had affirmed several articles of the Augsburg Confession, including those articles addressing Catholic beliefs about the Trinity, original sin, the episcopal office, baptism, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and the freedom of the will. With regard to those disputed beliefs, Seltmann was optimistic that German Catholics and Protestants could peacefully resolve their differences through dialogue.Footnote ²⁸ And in all other matters where agreement was not essential or could not be reached, Catholics and Protestants should exercise charity and love toward one another.

Julie von Massow and Adolf Röttscher's plan for realizing church unity consisted in inviting German Protestants to “return” to the Catholic Mother Church that had been splintered by the Reformation.Footnote ²⁹ But however these figures imagined German church unity they universally agreed that a reunion of the separated confessions was a prerequisite for any authentic form of German national unity.

The conception of an inter-confessional German nation that was espoused by Ut Omnes Unum represented an alternative to the Protestant notion of the German national idea that had been expressed by liberal nationalists and cultural Protestants and embodied by Königgrätz, Germany's kleindeutsch unification, and the Kulturkampf. This ecumenization of the national idea suggested a notion of German national identity that was confessionally inclusive rather than exclusive and acknowledged German Catholics as constituents of the German nation. But the Ut Omnes Unum groups’ vision of an inter-confessional German nation would stand in contrast to the strong conflation of Protestantism and the German national idea articulated at the 1883 anniversaries of Martin Luther's birth.

III. Triumph and Tragedy: The Luther Anniversaries of 1883

German Protestants and liberal nationalists gave the Prussian victory at Königgrätz, the kleindeutsch unification of the German Empire, and the Kulturkampf, a Protestant inflection that wrote German Catholics out of the narrative of German unification. Another site at which the German national idea was articulated and fiercely debated—and the confessional inflection of that idea most apparent—was the 1883 anniversaries of Martin Luther's birth date.

These anniversaries, which the historian Thomas A. Brady recognized as a “belated birthday party for the new German Reich,”Footnote ³⁰ were sites of memory at which the Protestant celebrants explicitly conflated Protestantism with German national identity. Indeed, the anniversaries were accompanied by highly politicized commemorations of Luther and the Reformation and represented the culmination of the Protestant confessionalization of the German national idea and the symbolic marginalization of German Catholics in Wilhelmine Germany.

Responses to the Protestant-cum-nationalist inflection of the 1883 anniversaries predictably broke along confessional lines. Protestant Germany—including orthodox Lutherans and Cultural Protestants—triumphantly celebrated the memory of Luther as a Protestant-German national hero. German Catholics abstained from the festivities and mourned the anniversary as a day of sorrows that recalled the German confessional divide. The Ut Omnes Unum group expressed solidarity with German Catholics and rejected the instrumentalization of the anniversaries for nationalist purposes. But the group also proposed ways that German Protestants might celebrate the anniversaries without exciting confessional tensions and widening the confessional divide.

Orthodox Lutherans and Cultural Protestants who participated in the 1883 anniversaries celebrated Luther as both a Protestant confessional and German national hero. Orthodox remembered a Luther who was father of the Evangelical Church, herald of a pure Lutheran confession, the new patron saint of Germany, and a thirteenth apostle.Footnote ³¹

Luther was more often remembered as a German national hero than a religious figure at the 1883 anniversaries. German nationalists and Cultural Protestants celebrated him as the quintessential German man, liberator of the German conscience, author of every significant German intellectual and social achievement, and no less than the creator of a new ideal of humanity and as the initiator of modernity. German liberals invoked a Luther who was a hero of freedom, an idol of progress, an intellectual hero, and a fierce opponent of clerical tutelage.Footnote ³² Luther was held in the same esteem as German national heroes past and present—from Arminius to Otto von Bismarck—and recognized as the embodiment of Germanness and a foil against foreign (read: Catholic) influence.Footnote ³³

The German evangelical press strongly affirmed this memory of Luther as a German-Protestant national hero. The conservative Neue preußische Zeitung recalled Luther as a pious and noble German national hero, the founder of a new German language, archetype of German domestic life, and a “German man without equal.”Footnote ³⁴ The liberal Protestantische Kirchenzeitung für das evangelische Deutschland reminded its readers that Luther had standardized and perfected the German language through his translation of the Bible, invented the genre of German literature, and was the benefactor of intellectual Protestantism and its tenets of freedom of conscience and research.Footnote ³⁵ Not only was Luther a German national hero in the eyes of the Kirchenzeitung, he was in fact the author of every significant intellectual and cultural development in German history since the sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁶ Both journals—the conservative Neue preußische Zeitung and the liberal Protestantische Kirchenzeitung—conceived modern German society and culture as normatively Lutheran and saw Catholics as excluded from Luther's cultural beneficence to the German nation. The process of fashioning a German national hero might cut across political boundaries but it remained confessionally exclusive.

The Protestantische Kirchenzeitung für das evangelische Deutschland also suggested that the anniversaries should be celebrated with the purpose of strengthening German Protestant consciousness as a defense against Roman tendencies to interfere in German affairs and against Catholic inclinations to convert German Protestants.Footnote ³⁷ Echoing sentiments from the early Kulturkampf era and channeling contemporary anti-ultramontanism, the journal claimed that the strength of Rome was historically predicated on Germany's fragmentation and weakness. The Kirchenzeitung also lauded Luther for arousing national pride, of which the most recent fruit was the new German Reich. According to the Kirchenzeitung Luther was the greatest representative of German Protestantism and the new German nation because he himself had acted as a bulwark against Roman Catholic interference in German society and politics.Footnote ³⁸ But if the establishment of a German Empire were the culmination of a long process of the exclusion of Roman influence, how could German Catholics conceive of themselves as constituents of the new German nation?

Perhaps the most belligerent anti-Catholic expression of a political-national memory of Martin Luther came from the Prussian nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke. In his 1883 essay “Luther and the German Nation,” Treitschke maintained that the Luther anniversaries were for German Protestants and that German Catholics had no place there.Footnote ³⁹ Treitschke derided Catholics as foreign to German society and claimed to pity them for being unable to comprehend Luther's significance for and contributions to the German nation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Because German Catholics could not share the sense of German-Protestant national consciousness that Luther had originally inspired, Treitschke identified Catholics as decidedly non-German. Like the Jews, who Treitschke would later infamously regard as Germany's “misfortune,” German Catholics remained fundamentally alien to Germany.

Treitschke also remembered Luther as the first champion of a German national identity and solidarity. It was Luther who had initially stirred the feelings of German national pride and had liberated Germany from the yoke of an oppressive foreign influence. The “kleindeutsch” unification of the German nation in 1871 had been the ultimate realization of this act. Indeed, Treitschke claimed that Luther's “political” liberation of German Christianity from Roman authority represented a more powerful and enduring act than his reformation of the church.Footnote ⁴¹ For Treitschke the origins of German nationalism and the contemporary German nation lie with the Protestant Reformation and with Luther. German history began with Luther, and the establishment of a Protestant-kleindeutsch empire represented the culmination of this history. This confessionally exclusive narrative of German unification—one that began in 1517 and concluded in 1871—explicitly conflated Protestantism with German national identity, perpetuated the confessional divide, and further marginalized Catholics from German political culture.

The memory of Martin Luther was “nationalized” at the 1883 anniversaries and Luther and German Protestantism were further conflated with German national identity. But this particular “nationalization of a confessional memory” was problematic. On its own, the de-confessionalization and nationalization of Luther suggests the possibility of universal access to his memory and tradition. But the construction of Luther as a “German National Hero” at the 1883 anniversaries was coupled with the conflation of Protestantism and German national identity that had been underway since 1866. The construction of a German national hero in these terms would result in a confessionally exclusive Protestant hero. So the culmination of this process of the identification of Protestantism with German identity—which the 1883 anniversaries represented—rendered Luther still more inaccessible to German Catholics and thus further alienated them from the mnemonic and political culture of the German Empire.

The politicization of Luther's memory at the 1883 anniversaries owes to several factors. By 1883 the Kulturkampf was winding down to an unsatisfactory end for German liberals and Cultural Protestants. The anniversaries in general, and the politicization of Luther's memory in particular, represented a way for German Protestants and liberals to revitalize their dying cause—a way of renewing the process of confessional homogenization, social marginalization, and political exclusion of German Catholics that the Kulturkampf was ultimately unsuccessful at realizing.Footnote ⁴² This, along with the recent appearance of fierce Catholic polemics, such as the Catholic historian Johannes Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (1878–1894), precipitated the call from Protestant culture warriors for a final and conclusive defensive war against Catholicism.

Unlike their Protestant counterparts who recalled Luther as a German national hero and cultural benefactor, contemporary German Catholics remembered Luther as a tragic figure who had disrupted the cultural vitality of the late Middle Ages and as a schismatic who had violated German confessional and national unity.Footnote ⁴³ The ultramontane faction within the Catholic Church recognized the 1883 Luther anniversaries as a continuation of the policies of the Kulturkampf and as a “call to arms” against German Catholicism.Footnote ⁴⁴ This sentiment was widely shared among German Catholics, who regarded the conflation of Protestantism and German national identity at the 1883 anniversaries as an occasion for sorrow and mourning.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Ut Omnes Unum group exhibited a dual response to these anniversaries. On the one hand, the group's Catholic members reacted like most confessional Catholics to the polemics—they recognized the political-nationalist commemoration of Luther's memory as a celebration of the confessional divide and antagonistic to German Catholics’ identity both as Christians and as German citizens. But instead of merely attacking the anniversaries as hostile to German Catholicism, Ut Omnes Unum would suggest how the anniversaries might be celebrated without alienating Catholics. The group would also propose what they conceived as an inter-confessional symbol of German unity and identity—St. Boniface (ca. 672–754)—as a substitute for the nationalized memory of Martin Luther commemorated at the 1883 anniversaries.

The Ut Omnes Unum group worried that the conflation of Protestantism with German national identity would inflame passions against German Catholics and further hinder efforts to overcome the confessional, and by extension, national divide. An anonymous Catholic contributor to the journal noted that some of the sermons delivered at the anniversaries had perpetuated old prejudices against the Church, the Pope, indulgences, idolatry, Mary, and the saints. But, the contributor pointed out, friendly Protestants and the Church itself had refuted these old prejudices. This contributor also claimed that Catholics were excluded from the festivals,Footnote ⁴⁶ that the festival sermons actively encouraged hatred of Rome and Roman Catholics, and that celebrants commemorated the Reformation while forgetting the confessional strife and painful division that it had engendered.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the repetition of these old prejudices and the uncritical commemoration of Luther and the Reformation only antagonized Catholics and exaggerated confessional divisions between Germans. This strife would render the memory of Luther—despite efforts to refashion him into a German national hero—still more inaccessible to German Catholics.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus the contributor wondered how German Catholics could be expected to identify with a German national hero at whose anniversaries they were antagonized and their Church attacked.

Another anonymous commentator suggested that the anniversaries had their origins, at least to some extent, in an effort to obscure the failure of the Kulturkampf to nullify Catholic participation in German social and political life. But this commentator claimed that the move to marginalize German Catholics in 1883 would be as futile as the Kulturkampf. Indeed, the commentator argued that Protestant organizers of the 1883 anniversaries recognized the devotion and fidelity that German Catholics had shown toward their church throughout the Kulturkampf, and hoped to reproduce and reawaken such piety in German Protestants, whose faith had been reduced to political and cultural platitudes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead of serving as a foil against authentic German culture, Protestant organizers of the local festivals implied—at least according to this commentator—that German Catholics were in fact a model of German popular devotion.

For their part, Ut Omnes Unum conceded that it was only natural for German Lutherans to want to commemorate the founder of their denomination. It acknowledged that the 1883 Luther anniversaries were celebrations at which German Protestants would commemorate Luther's contributions to the German nation and inspire national pride in German Protestants. The Ut Omnes Unum group found some of the commemorations of Luther's contributions to German society and culture acceptable. In fact, the journal acknowledged that Luther was one of the most influential men in German history and that he had done great things for the German people.Footnote ⁵⁰ But Ut Omnes Unum implored celebrants of the anniversaries to find a way to express their national pride without showing resentment or hostility toward German Catholics.Footnote ⁵¹ Ut Omnes Unum sought to proscribe nationalist memories of Luther that were exclusive to German Protestants and that marginalized German Catholics.

According to Ut Omnes Unum, the German Reformation had ultimately led to the separation of the churches and confessional division of the German nation. This had left devastating religious wars and suffering in its wake.Footnote ⁵² In celebrating Luther's contributions to German society and culture, German Protestants had only too gladly forgotten these painful memories of the bitter consequences of the Reformation. A Protestant associate of Julie von Massow hoped that the Luther anniversaries might serve as a forum where German Catholics and Protestants could revisit the histories and traditions of Luther and the Reformation in common. Catholics and Protestants would discuss how each remembered and commemorated Luther and the Reformation and then discuss the persistent positive and negative influences Luther and the Reformation had on the German churches and the German nation—all with an eye toward moving beyond polemics and into more fruitful dialogue about how best to unite the confessions.Footnote ⁵³ Ut Omnes Unum maintained that these memories had to be confronted by German Protestants in order for Luther's memorialization as an authentic German national hero—that is, an inter-confessional national hero accessible to both Catholics and Protestants—to be complete.Footnote ⁵⁴ Until then Ut Omnes Unum would appeal to a German national tradition that they believed might unite Germans across the confessional divide—the memory of St. Boniface.

The commemoration of St. Boniface—“Apostle to the Germans”—was another contested site of memory between German Protestants and the Ut Omnes Unum group at the 1883 Luther anniversaries. The Protestant celebrants of the 1883 anniversaries envisioned Luther as the culmination of Boniface's ministry. Luther, they claimed, had rightfully inherited the title of “Apostle of the Germans” from St. Boniface. For the Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, the 1883 anniversaries strongly evoked memories of Luther's relationship to St. Boniface. According to the Kirchenzeitung, St. Boniface had brought Christianity to Germany, but Luther had reformed it. Boniface had planted the cross in the German ground, but Luther planted it in the German heart. And while Boniface had been patron saint of the medieval Reich, Luther would be patron saint of the second German Empire—a Protestant empire.Footnote ⁵⁵ By associating Luther with St. Boniface, the Kirchenzeitung gave this pre-Reformation and pre-confessional figure of German Christian unity a Protestant inflection. Coupled with the wider conflation of Luther, Protestantism, and German national identity at the anniversaries, the Kirchenzeitung's move represented another Protestant nationalization of a confessional idea. German Catholics were again caught in a double bind—Luther was inaccessible as a German national hero but now St. Boniface, too, was being refashioned as a German Christian prelude to Luther.

However, members of the Ut Omnes Unum circle found in St. Boniface the possibility of an inter-confessional German national hero. The circle appealed to memories of Boniface as a national-ecumenical symbol of a united German Christianity and confessionally united German nation. Carl Seltmann recalled that anytime he stopped to pray at the tomb of St. Boniface in Fulda—an important pilgrimage site for ecumenical German Christians—he thought immediately of the German confessional divide. So long as the German nation remained divided, he claimed, Boniface could not rest peacefully.Footnote ⁵⁶ Julie von Massow also recognized the tomb of St. Boniface as a site of memory around which both German Catholics and German Protestants might work and pray for the reunion of the separated confessions.Footnote ⁵⁷

A month before the start of the 1883 Luther anniversaries, Massow travelled from Dresden to Fulda to pray at the grave of St. Boniface for an end to the confessional strife that had divided German Christianity and the German nation since the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Massow's November 10, 1883, diary entry reveals that she looked on what she called the “swindle” of the Dresden Luther anniversaries with great discomfort. Instead of using the anniversaries as an opportunity to foster rapprochement between German Catholics and Protestants, the Protestant-cum-nationalist inflection of the festivals had in fact celebrated the confessional divide and German national disunity. During the anniversaries, Massow remained at Fulda where she fervently prayed for the ideal that she claimed that St. Boniface represented: ut omnes unum sint—that all may be one.Footnote ⁵⁹

In 1883 Julie von Massow endowed a mass at the tomb of St. Boniface “ad tollendum schism”—to lift the schism between the churches. German Catholics and Protestants in Fulda celebrated these masses together, and so united, Massow argued, would contribute to the dissolution of that “lamentable, sinful, and fearfully unnatural separation” between the confessions that had singularly contributed to the disunity of the German nation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Massow's campaign to unite German Christians would ultimately prove unsuccessful, but it did not go unnoticed. In 1887 Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) himself lauded Massow and Ut Omnes Unum for their ecumenical efforts and had a commemorative medallion produced in their honor. The medallion was struck with the inscription “Ut Omnes Unum” on one side and an engraving of St. Boniface with the title “One Nation, One Faith” on the other.Footnote ⁶¹ Massow would eventually bridge the confessional divide in her own person—realizing her notion of church unity as a Protestant return to a Catholic Mother Church—by converting to Catholicism in 1885.

After her conversion Massow continued to work toward healing the German confessional divide. She was also instrumental in defending the Ut Omnes Unum group from being co-opted by ultramontane Catholics, who had always maintained ambivalence about the group—on the one hand, they admired Ut Omnes Unum for its opposition to the Kulturkampf, but on the other, they were less than enthused with the group's willingness to accommodate non-Catholics. When Carl Seltmann stepped down as editor of the Ut Omnes Unum journal in 1886, the ultramontane Catholic priest Joseph Dell (1831–1893) took over. Under Dell's editorship, the tenor of the articles and editorials became more proselytizing and increasingly hostile toward non-Catholics. Dell, whose own hero was the fiercely ultramontane publicist Joseph Görres (1776–1848), conceived of ecumenism as a means of surreptitiously converting Protestants to Roman Catholicism. Predictably, many of the journal's Lutheran and Reformed contributors severed ties with Ut Omnes Unum at this point.Footnote ⁶² In response to the new direction of journal, Julie von Massow founded a competing journal called the Friedensblätter (1886) that retained the bona fide ecumenism of the early Ut Omnes Unum group and ran until her death. Meetings of the Ut Omnes Unum circle ceased after Massow's death in 1901, but epigones of the group continued her campaigns for church unity.

IV. Conclusion

The existence of a Catholic-dominated social and religious organization, which together with like-minded German Protestants actively contested the marginalization of German Catholics, points to the group's historical significance. Ut Omnes Unum constituted an ecumenical religious community that neither accepted the idea that their (inter)confessional identities were incompatible with being German, nor withdrew into the Catholic milieu. Perhaps most importantly the group maintained that German unity could never be achieved until the confessional question was properly addressed and until both confessions were recognized as integral parts of the German nation.

While their ultimate goal of a reunion of the separated confessions was never fully realized, members of the Ut Omnes Unum circle embodied an inter-confessional notion of the German national idea. Indeed, members of the Ut Omnes Unum group and contributors to the journal lived this ideal through their participation in a group that recognized German Catholics and Protestants alike as constituents of the German nation. Their ecumenism was not a zero-sum game, and Ut Omnes Unum never maintained that there must be a full reunion of the Catholic and evangelical confessions or nothing at all. On the way toward their ultimate goal of a final reunion of the churches and accommodation of German Catholics to the Empire, Ut Omnes Unum and other nineteenth-century German ecumenists recognized understanding, mutual respect, and peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants as minor successes and desideratum that were indeed preconditions for that final reunion of the separated confessions and the political resolution of the confessional question in Germany.

To be sure, the confessional divide was intrinsic to how nineteenth-century Germans imagined a nation. But so far historians have only considered how confessional alterity, rather than unity, has informed the German national idea. In fact, in a recent essay George S. Williamson remarked that “any analysis of modern German religious history must start from the fact of Germany's confessional divide.”Footnote ⁶³ However, in light of Ut Omnes Unum and other ecumenical groups we may ask, is it necessary that an analysis of modern German history must end with the confessional divide? Historians of Germany are naturally concerned with the confessional divide because the Reformation confession had arguably served as the most salient expression of German identity and difference.

Yet this is precisely why the histories of ecumenism in nineteenth-century Germany are noteworthy. These histories represent efforts to bridge the confessional and social divides that had long separated Germans. For these ecumenists to imagine a reunion of the separated confessions was to imagine a unified German nation. In light of these ecumenical figures, perhaps it might be useful to revisit those social and political histories of Germany that are predicated on the ostensible strength of the confessional divide so as to complement the histories of the confessionalization of the German national idea with the ecumenization of that idea.

For their part the ecumenical Ut Omnes Unum group represented an assertion of German Catholic identity, an opposition to the Kulturkampf, and an alternative to its homogenous and confessionally exclusive vision of German national unity and identity all at once. The group pointed to the possibility of an inter-confessional, rather than confessionally exclusive, history of the political culture of German nationalism in early Wilhelmine Germany. As such, Ut Omnes Unum represents an alternative history of German nationalism—one that imagined a German nation through a reunion of the separated confessions rather than on the basis of iron and blood.