This is a companion piece to Robert D. Priest’s article ‘Culture War: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’ recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 100.
Most of the people you meet in the November 1990 issue of the American music magazine Spin seem like they belong there – Axl Rose, Jon Bon Jovi, the Geto Boys – and then you come across the long-dead German polymath Rudolf Virchow. A giant of nineteenth-century science, Virchow was good at naming things. We owe him the words for leukaemia, embolism, and thrombosis. In the eyes of Jefferson Morley, the author of Spin’s article on ‘The Cultural Civil War in America’, Virchow had coined another useful term: Kulturkampf. This originally described the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s campaign against the Catholic Church in the 1870s. Virchow not only approved of this but thought it was part of a broader struggle for the future of civilisation. Morley saw a direct analogy to the contemporary United States, where the conflict was so pervasive, you could even hear it in hits like Papa Don’t Preach, which had divided contemporary Americans. ‘Madonna’s tale of a woman who chooses neither to have an abortion nor to listen to her father’s moralizing is a song from the Kulturkampf’ he wrote.
It is easy to forget the fact that those who first popularised the term ‘culture war’ to describe the convulsions of late twentieth-century American cultural politics did so in such explicit dialogue with nineteenth-century German history. As Andrew Hartman has shown in his history of the American culture wars, analogies to the Kulturkampf circulated widely among conservatives in the postwar decades. They typically saw themselves as victims: Catholics to the Bismarck of the post-sixties left. In 1991, the book which did most to popularise the concept of culture war – James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America – openly acknowledged that it had roots in the comparison. In fighting over schoolrooms in the 1870s, ‘German Protestants and Catholics were battling over the moral character of the nation’; so were the conservatives and progressives of the 1990s.
Did these observers remember something we have forgotten? Once Virchow had put the word Kulturkampf out into the world in 1873, it took on many layers of meaning. It was a struggle for culture, for civilisation, a duel between competing conceptions of the nation. But before and beneath all that it was a set of state actions. Through a series of laws, passed by elected bodies, the German and especially Prussian governments had tried to puncture the Catholic Church’s authority. They increased surveillance of the church’s activities and appointments, and restricted its role in state-backed institutions. By the same token, Catholic resistance involved not merely cultural mobilisation but also campaigns of civil disobedience and, critically, voting. The Kulturkampf was about many things, but it was ultimately about power.
That much is clear from what is usually considered the first legislative shot fired in the Kulturkampf: the Pulpit Law of 1871. This made it a crime for priests to discuss political affairs in ways that ‘endanger the public peace’, including notably at church services: a transparent attempt to suppress the church’s capacity to influence its followers’ political choices. New laws over the following years sought to diminish not only the institutional power of the church but also its clergy’s capacity to shape young people’s minds through education. The state’s ability to enforce Kulturkampf legislation was uneven and acts of open dissent were common. Some high-profile clerical opponents of the Kulturkampf were imprisoned under the Pulpit Law, like Archbishop Ledóchowski, who particularly opposed the Germanisation of Polish schools, and Ketteler of Mainz, the so-called Workers’ Bishop, who publicly condemned Bismarck’s legislation to a group of thousands of pilgrims. The severity of the onslaught prompted a broader assertion of Catholic political independence in the form of voting for the Centre Party. This pro-Catholic party’s foundation had ironically been one of the spurs of Bismarck’s campaign; it surged in the 1874 elections and within a few years became the largest party in the Reichstag.
The Kulturkampf was certainly much more than a policy debate. In a landmark book, Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser looked at the late nineteenth century through the lens of the late twentieth and saw a European social and cultural conflict fought through mass-circulation media, satirical illustrations, public demonstrations and pilgrimages, subscription campaigns, and acts of allegiance and resistance in the course of everyday life. Its belligerents included many organisations and institutions beyond political parties and churches, including sectarian clubs that could count well over a million members by the outbreak of the First World War. Manuel Borutta called the Kulturkampf a clash of ‘competing cultural imperialisms’, in other words a fight between opposed systems of understanding the world. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the fights which took place in German culture existed on a continuum that extended through battles at the ballot box and down to physical confrontations such as those between the police and protestors. When activists declared war on the enemy, described themselves as armies capturing terrain, and compared legislation to explosives, their implication was clear. These were all interconnected elements of a wider struggle over the configuration of power and authority in German society.
Returning to Spin magazine, it was no accident that Morley wrote his incitement to fight back against the ‘right-wing Kulturkampf’ under the shadow of George H. W. Bush’s Republican administration. He saw an intimate connection between efforts to constrict the parameters of a normative American ‘way of life’ through cultural interventions and the government’s economic and military projects. The White House’s actions converged with those of activist groups and cultural outriders like the syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan – who, two years later at the Republican National Convention, would famously broadcast his diagnosis of ‘cultural war’ live on primetime television.
Today, some discuss culture wars as if they take place on a parallel plane to other political struggles. One accusation is that they are just a distraction tactic that disingenuous actors – by which they normally mean: their opponents – use to disguise their true ends. The most nihilistic observers frame them as an endless cycle of algorithmic outrage that exists for its own sake, a kind of forever war that feeds on itself. Of course, some clashes are more significant than others – not every social media pile-on is important – but historians have known for a long time now that the intersection of culture and politics is far too complex to be cleaved apart. For the term culture war to mean something useful, it must be able to recognise what is at stake in the struggle. The contexts of the 1870s, 1990s, and 2020s are very different but at least one thing has not changed: people who fight wars are trying to win them.