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With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.
“This volume reveals the vibrancy of debates around religion, the gendered character of secularism, and the pivotal role of missionaries in defining the limits of the orthodox, all of which were informed by transnational contexts.” • Central European History
“The volume offers a range of very useful answers to the difficult question of how to conceptualize and study the relationship between the religious and the secular in the German Empire. It takes the role of politics and the state seriously, but illustrates the myriad ways in which non-state actors were central to the process of redefining the secular in relation to the religious. It resists easy progress narratives of a gradual transition from a benighted state of religiosity towards an enlightened, secular one, and successfully historicizes a number of instances of the ‘constant making and unmaking of the religious and the secular’ in Germany and beyond.” • European History Quarterly
“With its strong lineup of contributors, this book adds valuable insights into the under-researched topic of what is meant by the secular, and also conveys the many ways in which the secular and the religious were intertwined in the German imperial context.” • Rebecca Bennette, Middlebury College
“Habermas addresses an important and often neglected aspect of German – and indeed European – history. The high quality of the scholarship will make this a significant contribution to the field.” • Professor Matthew Jefferies, University of Manchester
Introduction: Negotiating the Religious and the Secular in Modern German History
Rebekka Habermas
PART I: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR: SCIENTIFIC DEBATES
Chapter 1. A Secular Age? The ‘Modern World’ and the Beginnings of the Sociology of Religion
Wolfgang Knöbl
Chapter 2. The Silence on the Land: Ancient Israel versus Modern Palestine in Scientific Theology
Paul Michael Kurtz
PART II: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR: PUBLIC DEBATES
Chapter 3. What Means to Be ‘Secular’ in the German Kaiserreich? An Intervention
Lucian Hölscher
Chapter 4. Secularism in the Long Nineteenth Century between the Global and the Local
Rebekka Habermas
PART III: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR: NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES
Chapter 5. Retrieving Tradition? The Secular-Religious Ambiguity in Nineteenth Century German-Jewish Anarchism
Carolin Kosuch
Chapter 6. Catholic Women as Global Actors of the Religious and the Secular
Relinde Meiwes
Chapter 7. Negotiating the Fundamentals? German Missions and the Experience of the Contact Zone, 1850–1918
Richard Hölzl and Karolin Wetjen
Index