Amongthe more durable tenets of postwar West German historiography was the widespread conviction that Catholicism and Nazism were, at some most basic level, mutually exclusive entities. While a flood of critical studies in the 1960s began to erode this conviction at least around the edges — as scholars subjected to greater scrutiny the actual responses of Catholic opinion leaders, the German episcopate, and the Vatican to the Nazi regime — the image of a fundamental, albeit not quite perfect, incompatibility between Catholicism and Nazism has remained essentially intact to the present day. The durability of this image has been due to some degree to the steady stream of primarily apologetic monographs produced by a large and energetic Catholic scholarly community in Germany, whose works have stressed the heroic oppositional stance and victimhood of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich.

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This paper examines the dissemination of radical nationalist and racist ideas among Catholics within the early Nazi movement in Munich. While the relationship between the Nazi regime and the Catholic faith was often antagonistic after 1933, a close examination of the earliest years of the Nazi movement reveals a different picture. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War and within the specific context of Munich and its overwhelmingly Catholic environs, early Nazi activists attempted to resacralize political life, synthesizing radical völkisch nationalism with reformist, “modern” conceptions of Catholic faith and identity. In so doing, they often built on ideas that circulated in Catholic circles before the First World War, particularly within the Reform Catholic movement in Munich. By examining depictions of nation and race among three important Catholic groups—reform-oriented priests, publicists, and university students—this paper strives not only to shed light on the conditions under which the Nazi movement was able to survive its tumultuous infancy, but also to offer brief broader reflections on the interplay between nationalism, racism, and religious identity. The article ultimately suggests it was specifically the malleability and conceptual imprecision of those terms that often enhanced their ability to penetrate and circulate effectively within religious communities.

How can the educated and, above all, men be preserved for the living faith? How can one prevent the Church from becoming a Church for women and children only?' With these words the Catholic historian Philipp Funk identified one of the central challenges facing Catholics in Germany on the eve of the First World War. 1 Funk had begun his career as a journalist in pre-war Munich and, importantly, served for several years as the leading spokesman for the Krausgesellschaft, a Munich-based Catholic cultural association whose stated organizational goals emphasized the 'deepening of religious life and the fostering of a personal and manly (persönlichen und männlichen) Christianity'. 2 Typical of this emphasis was an unapologetically bombastic manifesto entitled 'More Manliness!' (Mehr Männlichkeit!) that appeared in May 1914 in the group's official organ. Lamenting the alleged preponderance of emotion and sentimentality within the Church and the resultant fact that 'Catholic religious life is at present completely tailored to womanly souls', the article issued an appeal for 'stronger and more manly priests' and closed with a clarion call to Catholics throughout Germany: 'Religion belongs in the hands of men, not women and children!' 3 The Catholic Church in Germany was in deep trouble, the argument ran, and its only salvation lay, in effect, in a massive injection of testosterone. But what was it that moved Funk and his colleagues in the Krausgesellschaft to such hyperbolic language? What larger images and imperatives were driving their religio-cultural activism on the eve of the First World War? And, perhaps more importantly, when referring to the pressing need for more Männlichkeit within German Catholicism, what definitions of masculine identity did these activists envision? european history quarterly 